Section archive - Multiculturalism & Diversity

This article explores teachers’ perspectives on enacting environmental education (EE) in a multicultural context. In understanding teacher strategies in adapting EE to a multicultural context and teacher views on the obstacles encountered, the authors found that teacher strategies reflected aspects of progressive EE in extending beyond simple knowledge-awareness to emphasizing changes in behavior and nurturing of ownership. The findings revealed that challenges included value clashes, a lack of common lived experiences, and reconciling contradictory educational perspectives and political policies, which often placed teachers in paradoxical positions. The findings suggest moving toward practices of culturally-responsive environmental education (CrEE) that demand more than awareness but include interactive dialogue.

This article provides a deeper understanding of critical mass, a concept that has become central in litigation efforts related to affirmative action admissions policies that seek to further the educational benefits of diversity. The authors demonstrate that the concept of critical mass requires an understanding of the conditions needed for meaningful interactions and participation among students, given the particular institutional context. To highlight this contextual definition of critical mass, they offer the term dynamic diversity and outline four main components of dynamic diversity that institutions can attend to.

This research explores teaching English as a foreign language in the West Bank, Palestine. The study demonstrates the importance of addressing socio-political contexts to make teaching meaningful and to set pedagogical strategies that correspond to the context of the students in teacher preparation programs.

This article evaluates student postsecondary outcomes by race and ethnicity in Texas’s large minority-serving institution (MSI) sector utilizing state administrative data from 1997 to 2008. The authors conclude that Hispanic-serving institutions are particularly critical locations for Hispanics while the non-MSI community colleges emerge as key institutions for Black students, signaling important implications for how historically Black colleges and universities might address recruitment and transfer strategies.