Back to NCTM San Diego: Multicultural Issues

This is the summary of a presentation given at the 74th Annual NCTM Meeting, 25-28 April 1996, San Diego, CA.

Middle school teachers in QUASAR project classrooms strive to create a learning environment that emphasizes thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and communication, all features recommended by the NCTM Standards. James Banks, a noted authority on the education of students from culturally diverse backgrounds, argues that quality education for minority students includes five dimensions of multicultural education: content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure. The presentation will focus attention on the extent to which the features of high-quality mathematical tasks as implemented in classrooms are also compatible with the features of instruction advocated as being effective for ethnically diverse populations. The discussion will assist teachers in understanding what mathematics for all students looks like. Examples from QUASAR classrooms will be used to explicate both sets of features. These features can provide a framework for teachers to reflect on their own practice as they strive to enhance their ability to provide high quality mathematics instruction for students from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

Barbara W. Grover (Ohio University, Athens, OH)
Marcia M. Seeley (Allegheny Schools Partnership, Pittsburgh, PA)

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Additional materials on multicultural teaching strategies, provided by Barbara Grover:

• Questions in planning lessons
  A document that will be a part of a handout that lists questions a teacher should consider when planning a lesson, set of lessons or a unit of study that will address the needs of students from diverse populations.
• Cautions
  A set of cautions that teachers should be aware of as they implement some of the recommendations of the standards.
• Multicultural references
  A list of references from a paper that is in progress that addresses the issues of the NCTM presentation.

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