Paul C. Gorski

Good Intentions Are Not Enough: A Decolonizing Intercultural Education.

Despite unquestionably good intentions on the part of most people who call themselves intercultural educators, most intercultural education practice supports, rather than challenges, dominant hegemony, prevailing social hierarchies, and inequitable distributions of power and privilege. In this essay I describe a philosophy of decolonizing intercultural education – an intercultural education dedicated, first and foremost, to dismantling dominant hegemony, hierarchies, and concentrations of power and control. I argue that attaining such an intercultural education requires not only subtle shifts in practice and personal relationships, but also important shifts of consciousness that prepare us to see and react to the socio‐political contexts that so heavily influence education theory and practice.

Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that Mis-Shape Education Practice and Policy

A rich history of scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which popular stereotypes of disenfranchised communities, including people living in poverty, affect individual biases and preconceptions. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which such stereotypes help frame policy and practice responses regarding social problems, such as the economic “achievement gap.” The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of poverty-based stereotyping in the context of popular discourses regarding the education of poor and low-income students. In doing so, I analyze stereotypes commonly used to locate the problem of the economic “achievement gap” as existing within, rather than as pressing upon, poor and low-income families. I then discuss how these stereotypes have fed deficit ideology and, as a result, misdirected policy and practice responses to gross class inequities in U.S. schools.

Multicultural Education and the Digital Divide: Focus on Race, Language, Socioeconomic Class, Sex, and Disability

The digital divide refers to the gap created by access or lack of access to and the manner of use of technology by members of various social identity groups (Bolt & Crawford, 2000). Its connotation is generally negative, describing the ways in which racism, language discrimination, classism (including but not limited to economic stratification based on educational level and geography), sexism, and discrimination based on disability are exacerbated by technology (Damarin, 2000; Mass Market Paperback, 1999). Especially salient in the context of an increasingly technocentric, capitalistic world economy, the digital divide is the latest challenge in multicultural education’s struggle toward closing the larger gap in equity in access to and outcomes from full participation in democracy among those with different combinations of cultural capital and socioeconomic standing (McLaren, 1997). Still, incorporated and conceptualized within a sound multicultural education framework, the Internet and other educational technology tools can help educators build bridges that cross the same divide that Eurocentric schooling invoked it to establish and recycle (DeVillar, 1986; DeVillar & Faltis, 1987; Gorski, 1999, 2000; Merino, Legarreta, Coughran, & Hoskins, 1990). But to do so, multicultural educators, and multicultural education as a field, must be more active in critically analyzing the Internet as an educational medium and in examining ways educational technology, especially the Internet, serves to further identify social, cultural, educational “haves” and “have-nots.” This is the first article in a seven-part series focusing on the digital divide and critically examining, from a multicultural perspective, the growing employment of and reliance on educational technology in schools and classrooms. This article (a) offers a general statistical analysis of the digital divide with respect to race, language, socioeconomic class, sex, and disability based on studies conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2000a) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA, 2000), among other organizations, whose research explores the great and complex discrepancies in computer and Internet access among various social and cultural identity groups; (b) briefly articulates the significance of this analysis for multicultural education; and (c) provides a series of preliminary suggestions for bridging the digital divide through multicultural education. The next five articles focus exclusively on the digital divide as it relates respectively to race, language, socioeconomic class, sex, and disability. The seventh article summarizes how technology and multicultural education can and should be used in a positively charged, mutually reinforcing manner oriented toward altogether eliminating the digital divide.

Multicultural Education and the Digital Divide: Focus on Race1

(2001). Multicultural Education and the Digital Divide: Focus on Race1. Multicultural Perspectives: Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 15-25.

An Examination of the (In)visibility of Sexual Orientation, Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Other LGBTQ Concerns in U.S. Multicultural Teacher Education Coursework

Heterosexism and homophobia permeate U.S. educational institutions. However, research heretofore has shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and queer (LGBTQ) concerns remain largely invisible in teacher education contexts. In an effort to better understand this phenomenon relative to multicultural education and related courses, we performed a content analysis on 41 syllabi from multicultural education courses taught in the United States with special attention to the extent to which LBGTQ concerns were included or omitted from the course designs. In addition, we examined data from a survey of 80 people who teach multicultural education courses in U.S. teacher credentialing programs to uncover both the likelihood that, and the nature by which, they incorporated LGBTQ concerns into their courses. We found that LGBTQ concerns often are invisible in multicultural teacher education coursework in the United States and that, when these concerns are covered, they generally are addressed in decontextualized ways that mask heteronormativity.

Multicultural Education and the Digital Divide: Focus on Socioeconomic Class Background

In its February 2001 report titled Telecommunications: Characteristics and Choices of Internet Users, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) examined, among other things, the socioeconomic digital divide. While the data in the report painted a clear picture of this divide, the GAO’s summary, called “Results in Brief,” at best minimized and at worst wholly dismissed any critical analysis of the situation:

Instructional, Institutional, and Sociopolitical Challenges of Teaching Multicultural Teacher Education Courses.

Despite growing scholarly attention to multicultural teacher education, most scholarship focuses on teacher education students rather than those who are preparing them to teach multiculturally. This study, a grounded theory exploration of data from a survey (N = 70) of multicultural teacher educators, represents an attempt to shift some of that focus to the challenges faced by those teaching multicultural teacher education courses. Findings support many of the challenges named, but rarely empirically studied, in the literature, including the prevalence of student resistance. However, the findings revealed challenges to existing presumptions, such as evidence that the primary challenge to the implementation of sound multicultural teacher education is not a lack of multicultural sensibility in multicultural teacher educators, but the myriad challenges impeding their abilities to deliver learning experiences that are consistent with their visions for multicultural education. Implications, including those regarding professional and support opportunities available to multicultural teacher educators, are discussed.

Multicultural Education and the Digital Divide: Focus on Disability

Computer and Internet technologies have the potential to help provide people with disabilities access to a myriad of professional, educational, social, and economic resources. In fact, according to research by the National Organization on Disability, the Internet is having a greater impact on the lives of adult Internet users with disabilities than on those of adult Internet users without disabilities. Whereras only 27% of adult Internet users without disabilities indicate that the Internet significantly improves the quality of their lives, 48% of those with disabilities indicated as much. Accordingly, adult Internet users with disabilities spend twice as much time online than those without disabilities (Taylor, 2000). Additionally, adult Internet users with disabilities report that the Internet improves their connections with other people. Forty-four percent believe that the Internet significantly increases the extent to which they felt connected to the world around them, compared with 38% of those without disabilities. Forty-two percent indicate that the Internet significantly increases their ability to reach out to people with similar interests and experiences, compared with only 30% of those without disabilities (Taylor, 2000). Unfortunately, these data do not reflect the discrepancies in rates of computer and Internet access and use between people with and without disabilities. For example, by 2000, 56.7% of people with no disability and 28.4% of people with a disability had Internet access. Meanwhile, by 2000, 51% of people with no disability and 20.9% of people with a disability were using computers on a regular basis (National Telecommunications and Information Administration [NTIA], 2000). So, while computer and Internet technology have proven to be valuable resources for those who have access to them, most people with disabilities do not enjoy this access. Instead, people with disabilities, like people of color (Gorski & Clark, 2001), women (Clark & Gorski, 2002b), speakers of first languages other than English (Gorski & Clark, 2002), and socioeconomically disadvantaged people (Clark & Gorski, 2002a), remain disenfranchised by the digital divide. In this, the sixth article in a seven-part series that examines the divide from a multicultural education framework, we will describe the complexities of the disability divide in the United States, analyze its implications for equity in education and the larger society, and provide strategies for dismantling it.

Self-Efficacy and Multicultural Teacher Education in the United States: The Factors That Influence Who Feels Qualified to be a Multicultural Teacher Educator

A growing body of scholarship in the United States focuses on the “multicultural” dispositions, ideologies, and attitudes that teachers carry from preservice training into classroom practice. However, little attention has been paid to the dispositions, ideologies, and attitudes of multicultural teacher educators—those tasked with preparing teachers to teach multiculturally. This scholarly gap limits understandings of how and by whom this preparation is happening. The purpose of this study, drawing on scholarship about the role of efficacy in educational environments, was to fill part of that void by examining the experiences by which multicultural teacher educators in the United States come to feel qualified to teach multicultural teacher education courses. Results suggested higher efficacy among White and “other race” participants than African American participants and higher efficacy among heterosexual participants than their lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning counterparts. No significant differences across gender or other identities were found. Similarly, no correlation was found between participation in professional conferences, other professional development opportunities, or participation in professional associations and level of efficacy. Implications for the preparation and support of multicultural teacher educators are discussed.

“Frayed All Over:” The Causes and Consequences of Activist Burnout Among Social Justice Education Activists

Despite the growing body of scholarship on burnout among social justice activists who are working on a variety of issues, from labor rights to queer justice, little attention has been paid to burnout among those whose activism focuses on issues of educational justice. To begin to address this omission and understand what supports might help social justice education activists mitigate burnout and sustain their activism, we analyzed interview data from 14 activists focused on activist burnout and its implications on movements for educational justice.. This analysis identified 3 major symptom categories of activist burnout and we gained insights into the culture of martyrdom in social justice education movements. These symptoms and the culture of martyrdom, by negatively impacting the health and sustainability of activists, threaten the efficiency and effectiveness of educational justice movements.