BANKS_Citizenship and Diversity

Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 52, No. 1, January/February 2001Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 52, No. 1, January/February 2001

CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND DIVERSITYIMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

James A. BanksUniversity of Washington, Seattle

In the first part of this article, the author argues that teachers should help students to develop a deli-cate balance of cultural, national, and global identifications because of the rich diversity in theUnited States and throughout the world. To help students become effective citizens, teachers need toacquire reflective cultural, national, and global identifications. In the second part of this article, theauthor describes how he tries to help the students in one of his teacher education courses to challengeand critically examine their cultural and national identifications.

Because of the increasing racial, ethnic, cultural,and language diversity in the United States, ef-fective teachers in the new century must helpstudents become reflective citizens in pluralisticdemocratic nation-states. In this article, I arguethat citizenship education needs to bereconceptualized because of the increased sa-lience of diversity issues throughout the world.A new kind of citizenship education, calledmulticultural citizenship, will enable students toacquire a delicate balance of cultural, national,and global identifications and to understand theways in which knowledge is constructed; to be-come knowledge producers; and to participatein civic action to create a more humane nationand world (J. A. Banks, 1997a). Teachers mustdevelop reflective cultural, national, and globalidentifications themselves if they are to help stu-dents become thoughtful, caring, and reflectivecitizens in a multicultural world society.

This article consists of two major parts. In thefirst, I describe the theoretical and conceptualgoals for citizenship education in a pluralisticdemocratic society. In the second, I describehow I implement these goals in one of myteacher education courses. The tone and style ofthe second part of the article are more personal-ized than those of the first part because I de-

scribe how the theory that I have developed isimplemented in my own classroom.

Balancing Diversity and Unity

Most nation-states and societies throughoutthe world are characterized by cultural, ethnic,language, and religious diversity. One of thechallenges to pluralistic democratic nation-states is to provide opportunities for culturaland ethnic groups to maintain components oftheir community cultures while at the sametime constructing a nation-state in whichdiverse groups are structurally included and towhich they feel allegiance. A delicate balance ofunity and diversity should be an essential goalof democratic nation-states.

The challenge of balancing diversity andunity is intensifying as democratic nation-statessuch as the United States, Canada, Australia,and the United Kingdom become more diversi-fied and as racial and ethnic groups within thesenations become involved in cultural and ethnicrevitalization movements. The democratic ide-ologies institutionalized within the major dem-ocratic Western nations and the wide gapbetween these ideals and realities were majorfactors that resulted in the rise of ethnic revital-

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ization movements in nation-states such as theUnited States, Canada, and the United King-dom during the 1960s and 1970s.

These nations share a democratic ideal, amajor tenet of which is that the state should pro-tect human rights and promote equality and thestructural inclusion of diverse groups into thefabric of society. These societies are also charac-terized by widespread inequality and by racial,ethnic, and class stratification. The discrepancybetween democratic ideals and societal realitiesand the rising expectations of structurallyexcluded racial, ethnic, and social-class groupscreated protest and revival movements withinthe Western democratic nations.

THE NEED FOR A NEW CONCEPTIONOF CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Because of growing ethnic, cultural, racial,and religious diversity throughout the world,citizenship education needs to be changed insubstantial ways to prepare students to functioneffectively in the 21st century. Citizens in thenew century need the knowledge, attitudes,and skills required to function in their ethnicand cultural communities and beyond their cul-tural borders and to participate in the construc-tion of a national civic culture that is a moral andjust community that embodies democratic ide-als and values, such as those embodied in theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights. Stu-dents also need to acquire the knowledge andskills needed to become effective citizens in theglobal community.

Citizenship education in the past, in theUnited States as well as in many other nations,embraced an assimilationist ideology. In theUnited States, its aim was to educate students sothey would fit into a mythical Anglo-SaxonProtestant conception of the good citizen.Anglo conformity was the goal of citizenshipeducation. One of its aims was to eradicate thecommunity cultures and languages of studentsfrom diverse ethnic, cultural, racial, and lan-guage groups. One consequence of thisassimilationist conception of citizenship educa-tion was that many students lost their first cul-

tures, languages, and ethnic identities. Somestudents also became alienated from family andcommunity. Another consequence was thatmany students became socially and politicallyalienated within the national civic culture.

Ethnic minorities of color often becamemarginalized in both their community culturesand in the national civic culture because theycould function effectively in neither. When theyacquired the language and culture of the Anglomainstream, they were denied structural inclu-sion and full participation into the civic culturebecause of their racial characteristics.

Citizenship education must be transformedin this new century because of the large influx ofimmigrants who are now settling in nationsthroughout the world, because of the continu-ing existence of institutional racism and dis-crimination throughout the world, and becauseof the widening gap between the rich and thepoor.

The U.S. Census (U.S. Bureau of the Census,1998) projects that 47% of the U.S. populationwill consist of ethnic minorities of color by 2050.The percentage of ethnic minorities in nation-states throughout the world has increased sig-nificantly within the past 30 years. In manyWestern nations, the ethnic minority populationis growing at significantly greater rates than isthe majority population. Institutionalized dis-crimination and racism are manifest by the sig-nificant gaps in the incomes, education, andhealth of minority and majority groups in manynation-states. Ethnic, racial, and religious minor-ities are also the victims of violence in manynation-states.

In the United States, the share of the nationswealth held by the wealthiest households (0.5%)rose sharply in the 1980s after declining for 40years. In 1976, this segment of the populationheld 14% of the nations wealth. In 1983, it held26.9% (Phillips, 1990). In 1997, 12.7% of Ameri-cans, which included a higher percentage ofAfrican Americans and Hispanics (8.6% ofnon-Hispanic Whites, 26.0% of African Ameri-cans, 27.1% of Hispanics), were living in pov-erty (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998).

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Cultural Communities andMulticultural Citizenship

Citizens should be able to maintain attach-ments to their cultural communities as well asparticipate effectively in the shared national cul-ture. Cultural and ethnic communities need tobe respected and given legitimacy not onlybecause they provide safe spaces for ethnic, cul-tural, and language groups on the margins ofsociety, but also because they serve as a con-science for the nation-state. These communitiestake action to force the nation to live up to itsdemocratic ideals when they are most seriouslyviolated. It was the abolitionists and not thefounding fathers in the United States whoargued that freedom and equality should beextended to all Americans. African Americansled the civil rights movement of the 1960s and1970s that forced the United States to eradicateits system of racial apartheid.

Okihiro (1994) points out that people andgroups in the margins have been the conscienceof the United States throughout its history. Theyhave kept the United States committed to itsdemocratic ideals as stated in its founding docu-ments: the Declaration of Independence, theConstitution, and the Bill of Rights. He arguesthat the margins have been the main sites forkeeping democracy and freedom alive in theUnited States. It was the groups in the marginsthat reminded and forced America to live up toits democratic ideals when they were most se-verely tested. Examples include (a) slavery andthe middle passage, (b) Indian removal in the1830s, (c) the internment of Japanese Americansduring World War II, and (d) segregation andapartheid in the South that crumbled during the1960s and 1970s in response to the AfricanAmerican-led civil rights movement. In TheStory of American Freedom, Foner (1998) makesan argument similar to Okihiros:

The authors of the notion of freedom as a universalbirthright, a truly human ideal, were not so much thefounding fathers who created a nation dedicated toliberty but resting in large measure on slavery, butabolitionists . . . and women. (p. xx)

A new kind of citizenship is needed for the21st century, which Kymlicka (1995) callsmulticultural citizenship. It recognizes andlegitimizes the right and need of citizens tomaintain commitments both to their ethnic andcultural communities and to the national civicculture. Only when the national civic culture istransformed in ways that reflect and give voiceto the diverse ethnic, racial, language, and reli-gious communities that constitute it will it beviewed as legitimate by all of its citizens. Onlythen can they develop clarified commitments tothe commonwealth and its ideals.

The Assimilationist Fallacyand Citizenship Education

An assimilationist conception of citizenshipwill not be effective in the 21st century becauseit is based on a serious fal lacy. Theassimilationist assumes that the most effectiveway to reduce strong ethnic boundaries, attach-ments, and affiliations within a nation-state is toprovide marginalized and excluded ethnic andracial groups opportunities to experience equal-ity in the nations social, economic, and politicalinstitutions. As they begin to participate morefully in the mainstream society and institutions,argues the assimilationist, marginalized cul-tural and ethnic groups will focus less on theirspecific concerns and more on national issuesand priorities (Patterson, 1977).

When ethnic groups experience equality,argues the assimilationist, ethnic attachmentsdie of their own weight. The assimilationistviews the ideal society as one in which there areno traces of ethnic or racial attachments. Allgroups will share one dominant national andoverarching culture; people will forsake theirethnic cultures when they are structurallyincluded in the national civic culture andcommunity.

Apter (1977) calls the assimilationist positionthe assimilationist fallacy. This position holdsthat as modernization occurs, ethnic groupsexperience social, political, and economicequality, and commitments to ethnic and com-

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munity attachments weaken and disappear.Ethnicity, argues the assimilationist, promotesdivision, exhumes ethnic conflicts, and leads todivisions within society. It also promotes grouprights over the rights of the individual.

As Apter (1977) keenly observes, the assim-ilationist conception is not so much wrong as itis an incomplete and inadequate explanation ofethnic realities in modernized, pluralistic, anddemocratic nation-states. Ethnicity andassimilationism coexist in modernized demo-cratic nation-states. As Apter suggests, Thetwo tendencies, toward and against [ethnicity],can go on at the same time. Indeed, the moredevelopment and growth that takes place, themore some [ethnic] groupings have to gain bytheir parochialism (p. 65).

Ethnicity and modernity coexist in partbecause of what assimilationists call the patho-logical condition; that is, ethnic groups such asMexicans in the United States and Afro-Caribbeans in the United Kingdom maintainattachments to their ethnic groups and culturesin part because they have been excluded fromfull participation in the social, economic, andpolitical institutions of their nation-states.

However, members of marginalized ethnicgroups, as well as more privileged ethnic andcultural groups such as Greeks and Jews in theUnited States, maintain ethnic affiliations andethnic attachments for more fundamental psy-chological and sociological reasons. Ethnicityhelps them to fulfill some basic psychologicaland sociological needs that the thin culture ofmodernization leaves starving. Apter (1977)comments insightfully on this point:

[Ethnic revival] is a response to the thinning out ofenlightenment culture, the deterioration of which isa part of the process of democratization and plural-ization. . . . Assimilation itself then vitiates the en-lightenment culture. As it does, it leaves what mightbe called a primordial space [italics added], a spacepeople try to fill when they believe they have lostsomething fundamental and try to recreate it. (p. 75)

Multicultural citizenship education allowsstudents to maintain attachments to their cul-tural and ethnic communities while at the sametime helping them to attain the knowledge and

skills needed to participate in the wider civicculture and community.

Helping Students to Develop Cultural,National, and Global Identifications

Citizenship education should help studentsto develop thoughtful and clarified identifica-tions with their cultural communities and theirnation-states. It should also help students todevelop clarified global identifications anddeep understandings of their roles in the worldcommunity (Diaz, Massialas, & Xanthopoulos,1999). Students need to understand how life intheir cultural communities and nations influ-ences other nations and the cogent influencethat international events have on their dailylives. Global education should have as majorgoals helping students to develop understand-ings of the interdependence among nations inthe world today, clarified attitudes toward othernations, and reflective identifications with theworld community.

Developing a DelicateBalance of Identifications

Nonreflective and unexamined culturalattachments may prevent the development of acohesive nation with clearly defined nationalgoals and policies. Although we need to helpstudents to develop reflective and clarified cul-tural identifications, they must also be helped toclarify and strengthen their identifications withtheir nation-states. However, blind nationalismwill prevent students from developing reflec-tive and positive global identifications. Nation-alism and national attachments in most nationsof the world are strong and tenacious. Animportant aim of citizenship education shouldbe to help students develop global identifica-tions and a deep understanding of the need totake action as citizens of the global communityto help solve the worlds difficult globalproblems.

Cultural, national, and global experiencesand identifications are interactive and interre-lated in a dynamic way. Writes Arnove (1999),


There is a dialect at work by which . . . global pro-cesses interact with national and local actors andcontexts to be modified, and in some cases trans-formed. There is a process of give-and-take, an ex-change by which international trends are reshapedto local ends. (pp. 2-3)

Students should develop a delicate balance ofcultural, national, and global identifications(see Figure 1). However, educators often try tohelp students develop strong national identifi-cations by eradicating their ethnic and commu-nity cultures and making students ashamed oftheir families, community beliefs, languages,and behaviors.

I believe that cultural, national, and globalidentifications are developmental in nature,that individuals can attain healthy and reflec-tive national identifications only when theyhave acquired healthy and reflective culturalidentifications, and that individuals candevelop reflective and positive global identifi-cations only after they have realistic, reflective,and positive national identifications (J. A.Banks, 2001). These identifications are dynamicand interactive; they are not discrete.

Individuals can develop a clarified commit-ment to and identification with a nation-stateand the national culture only when they believethat they are a meaningful part of the nation-state and that it acknowledges, reflects, and val-ues their culture and them as individuals. Anation-state that alienates and does not struc-turally include all cultural groups into thenational culture runs the risk of creating alien-ation and causing groups to focus on specificconcerns and issues rather than on the overarch-ing goals and policies of the nation-state.

Multicultural Citizenship Education,Knowledge, and Action

To help students acquire reflective and clari-fied cultural, national, and global identifica-tions, citizenship education must teach them toknow, to care, and to act. As Paulo Freire (1985)points out, students must be taught to read theword and the world. In other words, they mustacquire higher levels of knowledge, understand

the relationship between knowledge andaction, develop a commitment to act to improvethe world, and acquire the skills needed to par-ticipate in civic action. Multicultural citizenstake actions within their communities andnations to make the world more humane. Multi-cultural citizenship education helps studentslearn how to act to change the world.

To become thoughtful and effective citizenactors, students must understand the ways inwhich knowledge is constructed and howknowledge production is related to the locationof knowledge producers in the social, political,and economic contexts of society. Multiculturalcitizenship education must also help students tobecome knowledge producers themselves andto use the knowledge they have acquired andconstructed to take democratic social and civicaction.

I have conceptualized five types of knowl-edge that can help educators to conceptualizeand teach about knowledge construction (J. A.Banks, 1996): (a) personal/cultural knowledge,

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FIGURE 1 Cultural, National, and Global Identifications

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(b) popular knowledge, (c) mainstream aca-demic knowledge, (d) transformative academicknowledge, and (e) school knowledge.Although the categories of this ideal-typetypology can be conceptually distinguished, inreality they overlap and are interrelated in adynamic way. Mainstream academic knowledgeand transformative academic knowledge are brieflydefined below because these concepts are usedin the discussion in the second part of thisarticle.

Mainstream academic knowledge consists ofthe concepts, paradigms, theories, and explana-tions that constitute traditional and establishedknowledge in the behavioral and social sci-ences. An important assumption within main-stream knowledge is that objective truths can beverified through rigorous and objectiveresearch procedures that are uninfluenced byhuman interests, values, and perspectives(Homans, 1967).

Transformative academic knowledge con-sists of the concepts, paradigms, themes, andexplanations that challenge mainstream aca-demic knowledge and that expand the histori-cal and literary canon (J. A. Banks, 1996, 1998;Limerick, 1987). Transformative scholarsassume that knowledge is influenced by per-sonal values, the social context, and factors suchas race, class, and gender. Whereas the primarygoal of mainstream academic knowledge is tobuild theory and explanations, an importantgoal of transformative knowledge is to useknowledge to change society to make it morejust and humane.

The Knowledge Construction Processand Student Identifications

The knowledge construction processdescribes the ways in which teachers help stu-dents to understand, investigate, and determinehow the implicit cultural assumptions, framesof reference, perspectives, and biases within adiscipline influence the ways in which knowl-edge is constructed. When the knowledge con-struction process is implemented in the class-room, teachers help students to understandhow knowledge is created and how it is influ-

enced by the racial, ethnic, social-class, and gen-der positions of individuals and groups.

When students participate in knowledge con-struction, they challenge the mainstream aca-demic metanarrative and construct liberatoryand transformative ways of conceptualizing theU.S. and the world experience. Understandingthe knowledge construction process and partici-pating in it themselves help students to con-struct clarified cultural, national, and globalidentifications and to become knowledgeable,caring, and active citizens in democraticsocieties.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

Helping Teachers to Develop ClarifiedCultural and National Identifications

Teachers need to develop reflective culturaland national identifications if they are to func-tion effectively in diverse classrooms and helpstudents from different cultures and groups toconstruct clarified identifications. Several char-acteristics of U.S. teachers and teacher educa-tion students make it difficult and problematicfor them to develop reflective cultural andnational identifications.

Most of the nations teacher education stu-dents are middle-class White females who havelittle experience with other racial, ethnic, or so-cial-class groups. Even when they come fromworking-class backgrounds, teacher educationstudents tend to distance themselves from theirclass origins and to view themselves as middleclass in values, perspectives, and behaviors.This occurs in part because White students whocome from lower- and working-class communi-ties and cultureslike students of colormustdistance themselves from their primordial cul-tures to experience academic and social successin educational institutions. This is true not onlyin the United States but in other nations, as isepitomized in this statement by a CanadianUkrainian who recalls his school experiences(Diakiw, 1994):

This [school] was not an environment in which I wasable to talk proudly about my heritage. I retreated


and assimilated as fast as I could. I was ashamed ofmy background. I was particularly embarrassedabout my parents. Compared to my friends parents,mine seemed ignorant and crude. . . . I visited in theirhomes but not until the end of grade thirteen did I in-vite any friends to mine. Only then did I realize thatdespite the differences in culture and wealth, myparents were among the best. (p. 54)

When teacher education students from work-ing-class backgrounds distance themselvesfrom their class origins, they become less able toconnect their childhood experiences with thoseof low income and working-class students ofcolor. Consequently, they are less likely to de-velop an empathetic understanding of studentswhose behaviors and values conflict with those ofthe schools mainstream culture (Erickson, 2001).

One of the consequences of the monoculturalexperiences and the privileged racial and classstatus of many White college students in teachereducation programs is their tendency to viewthemselves as noncultural and nonethnicbeings who are colorblind and raceless. Conse-quently, they often view race and culture assomething possessed by outsiders and othersand view themselves as just Americans.These kinds of perceptions and perspectivesoften lead majority group students to ask thesekinds of question during class discussions:Why do we have to focus on race and otherkinds of differences? Why cant we all be justAmericans?

The culturally isolated experiences of most ofmy teacher education students, reinforced bytheir assimilationist high school education andthe popular culture, result in their acceptingwithout question the metanarrative of U.S. his-tory that has dominated the nations curriculumsince the late 1800s. The metanarrative that isinstitutionalized within the nations schools,colleges, and universities is called Americanexceptionalism by historians such as Appleby(1992) and Kammen (1997).

The institutionalized metanarrative concep-tualizes the development of U.S. history as a lin-ear movement of Europeans from the east to thewest coast of the United States, a movement thatwas ordained by God to bring civilization to theWest, which was a wilderness and a frontier.These words connote that the lands on which

the Native Americans lived were uninhabiteduntil the Europeans arrived in the West.

Frederick Jackson Turner (1894/1989), in apaper presented at the 1893 meeting of the Amer-ican Historical Association that was destined tobecome a classic, characterized the frontier asthe meeting point between savagery and civili-zation (p. 3). Turners characterization of theWest epitomizes the metanarrative that is insti-tutionalized in the nations schools, colleges,and universities. However, the establishedmetanarrative, which I call mainstream aca-demic knowledge (J. A. Banks, 1996) and Ap-ple (1993) describes as official knowledge, hasbeen strongly challenged by transformativescholars within the past 30 years (C.A.M. Banks,1996; Limerick, 1987). The use of concepts suchas wilderness, frontier, and westward move-ment are legacies of Turners frontier thesis andthe times in which he lived and worked. CherryMcGee Banks (1996) describes the serious limi-tations of the mainstream metanarrative:

By telling part of the story and leaving other parts ofthe story out, meta-narratives suggest not only thatsome parts of the story dont count, but that someparts dont even exist. The exclusive nature ofmeta-narratives, their canonized place in formalschool curricula, and the extent to which they arewoven into the societal curriculum result inmeta-narratives producing a feeling of well-beingand comfort within mainstream society and their va-lidity rarely being questioned. (p. 49)

The strong and persistent challenge thattransformative scholars of color and womenhave directed toward mainstream academicknowledge since the mid-1960s has resulted insignificant curriculum changes in the nationsschools, colleges, and universities and in text-books. However, despite these substantialchanges, many of the concepts, perspectives, andperiodizations of the mainstream meta- narra-tive are still deeply embedded in the curricu-lum, in textbooks, and in the popular culture.

Helping Teacher Education StudentsRethink Race, Culture, and Ethnicity

To develop clarified cultural and nationalidentifications, teacher education studentsmust be helped to critically analyze and rethink


their notions of race, culture, and ethnicity andto view themselves as cultural and racial beings.They also need to reconstruct race, culture, andethnicity in ways that are inclusive and thatreveal the ways in which these concepts arerelated to the social, economic, and politicalstructures in U.S. society (Nieto, 1999; Omi &Winant, 1994).

Teacher education students need to under-stand, for example, the ways in which the state-ment, I am not ethnic; I am just American,reveals the privileged position of an individualwho is proclaiming his or her own unique cul-ture as American and other cultures as non-American. A statement such as I dont seecolor reveals a privileged position that refusesto legitimize racial identifications that are veryimportant to people of color and that are oftenused to justify inaction and perpetuation of thestatus quo. If educators do not see color andthe ways in which institutionalized racism priv-ileges some groups and disadvantages others,they will be unable to take action to eliminateracial inequality in schools.

In an important ethnographic study of aschool, Schofield (2001) found that teacherswho said they were colorblind suspended Afri-can American males at highly disproportionaterates and failed to integrate content about Afri-can Americans into the curriculum. Color-blindness was used to justify inaction and theperpetuation of institutionalized discrimina-tion within the school. Colorblindness is part ofthe racial text of teacher education which, asCochran-Smith (2000) points out, teachers andteacher educators must unlearn.

In the first course I teach for teacher educa-tion students, I incorporate readings, activities,lectures, and discussions designed to help stu-dents construct new concepts of race, culture,and ethnicity. Most students in the course areWhite women. These activities are designed, inpart, to help the students unlearn racism andto read the racial text of U.S. society and pop-ular culture (Cochran-Smith, 2000). Assign-ments include a personal reflection paper on thebook We Cant Teach What We Dont Know: White

Teachers, Multicultural Schools (Howard, 1999) aswell as a family history project.

In his book, Howard (1999) describes his per-sonal journey as a White person to come to gripswith racial issues and to become an effectiveeducator. He speaks in a personal and engagingway to White teachers. In their reflectionpapers, my students describe their powerfulreactions to Howards book and how it helpsthem to rethink their personal journey related torace and their ideas about race. Howard makesracism explicit for most of my students for thefirst time in their lives.

In their family history project, the studentsare asked not only to provide a brief account oftheir familys historical journey but also to giveexplicit attention to the ways in which race,class, and gender have influenced their familyand personal histories. Although the family his-tory project is a popular assignment, most of thestudents have to struggle to describe ways inwhich race has influenced their family and per-sonal histories because race is largely invisibleto them (McIntosh, 1997). Gender is much morevisible to my women students. More of thefemale than male students are able to relate gen-der to their family and personal stories in mean-ingful ways.

Challenging the Metanarrative

A series of activities in the course is designedto help students examine the U.S.metanarrative, to construct new conceptionsand narratives that describe the development ofU.S. history and culture (which I calltransformative knowledge), and to think of cre-ative and effective ways to teach new concep-tions of the American experience to students.These activities include historical readings, dis-cussions, and role-playing events about U.S.ethnic and racial groups (J. A. Banks, 1997b),with the emphasis on the history of ethnicgroups of color. The perspectives in these histor-ical accounts are primarily those of the groupsbeing studied rather than those of outsiders.

The perspectives of both insiders and outsid-ers are needed to give students a comprehensive


understanding of U.S. history and culture.However, I emphasize the perspectives of insid-ers in this course because my students havebeen exposed to outsider perspectives for mostof their education prior to my course. I alsofocus on insider perspectives because one of themost important goals of the course is to help stu-dents learn how to challenge and critically ana-lyze the mainstream metanarrative they havelearned during their high school and collegeyears.

The historical readings in my course are sup-plemented by videotapes that powerfullydepict the perspectives of ethnic groups of coloron historical and contemporary events. Thesevideotapes include The Shadow of Hate: A Historyof Intolerance in America (Guggenheim, 1995),which chronicles how various groups withinthe United States, including the Irish, Jews, andAfrican Americans, have been victimized bydiscrimination. One of the most trenchantexamples of discrimination in the videotape isthe description of the way Leo Frank, a Jewishnortherner living in Atlanta, became a victim ofanti-Semitism and racial hostility when he wasaccused of murdering a White girl who workedin a pencil factory he co-owned.

The Leo Frank case provides the students anopportunity to understand the ways in whichrace is a social construction, is contextual, andhow the meaning of race has changed histori-cally and continues to change today (Jacobson,1998). Leo Frank was considered Jewish and notWhite in 1915 Atlanta. In a lecture, I provide thestudents an overview of Karen Brodkins (1998)book that describes the process by which Jewsbecame White in America and what the experi-ences of Jews and other White ethnics, such asthe Irish and Italians, reveal about the character-istics of race in the United States.

Brodkin (1998) argues that Jews had to assim-ilate mainstream American behaviors, ideolo-gies, attitudes, and perspectives to becomeWhite. Among the important attitudes they hadto acquire, she argues, were the institutional-ized attitudes and perceptions that mainstreamWhites held toward groups of color. Brodkinargues, as does Toni Morrison (1992), that Whites

defined themselves in opposition to AfricanAmericans, and that this oppositional definitionwas one important way in which disparategroups of White ethnics were able to form a col-lectivity in the United States and to constructthemselves as one cultural and identity group.

Ignatiev (1995) describes the ways in whichthe Irish, like other White ethnic groups,became White by acquiring mainstream Whitevalues and behaviors directed against ethnicgroups of color. My students are always sur-prised to learn how the meaning of race haschanged through time and that the idea thatWhites are one racial group is a rather recenthistorical development.

I use a videotape that deals with a contempo-rary Native American issue to relate historicalevents to current issues and to help the studentsunderstand the ways in which our nations pastand present are connected. In Whose Honor?(Rosenstein, 1997) chronicles the struggle ofCharlene Teters, a Native American graduatestudent, to end the use of a Native Americanchief as a football team mascot at the Universityof Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The team iscalled The Fighting Illini, after Chief Illiniwek.During halftime, a student dresses up as ChiefIlliniwek and dances. Teters considers the chiefand the dance sacrilegious and demeaning toNative Americans. The videotape describes thesocial action taken by Teters to end the tradition,as well as the strong opposition by the board oftrustees and alumni who want to maintain a tra-dition that is deeply beloved by vocal and influ-ential alumni and board members. The peoplewho defend the 70-year-old tradition cannotunderstand how anyone can find it offensive.

In Whose Honor? (Rosenstein, 1997) helps thestudents understand how the construction ofIndian in U.S. society is controlled by main-stream institutions, including the mainstreammedia. Through questioning and discussion, Ihelp the students relate Columbuss construc-tion of the Native people of the Caribbean as In-dians, Cortss construction of the Aztecs assavages, Turners construction of the West as awilderness, and the selection of Chief Illiniwekas a mascot. We discuss the following questions


to uncover ways in which these events are con-nected (J. A. Banks, 2000):

l. Which groups have the power to define and institu-tionalize their conceptions within the schools, col-leges, and universities?

2. What is the relationship between knowledge andpower? Who exercises the most power in this casestudy?

3. Who benefits from the ways in which Native Amer-icans have been and are often defined in U.S. soci-ety? Who loses?

4. How can views of Native Americans be recon-structed in ways that will help empower NativeAmerican groups and create more justice in society?

An Unfinished Journey

My project to help teacher education studentsdevelop reflective cultural and national identifi-cations is a work in progress that has rewards,challenges, unrealized possibilities, conflicts,andat timesfrustrations for my studentsand me. My work on global identifications andissues is incomplete and episodic. Each time Iteach the course, I feel that I do not have enoughtime to deal with cultural and national issues.Global issues remain mostly an unrealized andhoped-for goal. Making links when discussingcultural and national issues is the extent towhich I deal with global issues in the course.

The class is an unfinished journey for the stu-dents and me in several important ways. It is abeginning of what I hope will be a lifelong jour-ney for my students. I realize that one coursewith a transformative goal can have only a lim-ited influence on the knowledge, beliefs, andvalues of students who have been exposed tomainstream knowledge and perspectives formost of their prior education. Students arerequired to take a second multicultural educa-tion course in our teacher education program.Also, other members of the teacher educationfaculty are trying to integrate ethnic, cultural,and racial content into the foundations andmethods courses.

My course is also an unfinished journeybecause I am still trying to figure out how toachieve the delicate balance of showing respectfor my students while at the same time encour-aging them to seriously challenge their deeplyheld beliefs, attitudes, values, and knowledge

claims. I am also trying to conceptualize effec-tive ways to determine the short-term andlong-term effectiveness of the course. The opin-ions of most of my students when the courseends are encouraging. However, I do not knowthe relationship between these opinions and thebehavior of the students when they becometeachers.

When I taught the class in fall 1999, 21 of 25students wrote positive and detailed responsesto the following question on the University ofWashingtons standardized course evaluationform: Was this class intellectually stimulating?Did it stretch your thinking? Yes No Why orwhy not?

However, I worry about the 4 students in thisclass of 25 who merely checked Yes in answer tothe question and made no further comments.The responses of these 4 students evoke thesequestions: What are the meanings of their terseresponses? In what ways might these 4 studentsdiffer from the other students who wrotedetailed comments? Do they need a differentkind of course and a different set of experiences?How will these 4 students, as well as the other 21students, view the experience in my course ayear after they have been teaching? Will thecourse make a difference in the ways in whichthey teach and deal with multicultural content?I was heartened to read in a study reported byLadson-Billings (1999) that some of the studentsin a teacher education program who had beenthe most resistant to the programs emphasison equity and diversity issues feel that it hasbeen most beneficial to them in their teaching(p. 116).

My observations of my students during this10-week course, reading of their reflectionpapers and other papers, listening to their classdiscussions, having conversations with them,and studying their end-of-class course evalua-tions indicate that most of my students attainsome of the important course objectives. Theydevelop an understanding of how knowledgeis constructed, how it relates to power, andhow the mainstream metanarrative privilegessome groups and marginalizes others. Theyalso develop a better understanding of race,culture, and ethnicity and begin the process of


questioning some of their assumptions aboutthese concepts. Perhaps most important, mostof my students begin to view their own culturaland racial journeys from different and more crit-ical perspectives. I believe that these criticalperspectives will help them to develop morereflective cultural, national, and globalidentifications.

Teachers with the knowledge and skills Iteach in my course are better able to interrogatethe assumptions of official school knowledge,less likely to be victimized by knowledge thatprotects hegemony and inequality, and betterable to help students acquire the knowledge andskills needed to take citizen action that willmake the world more just and humane.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Different versions of this article were pre-sented at several conferences as keynoteaddresses in 2000, including the 44th AnnualMeeting of the Comparative and InternationalEducation Society, San Antonio, Texas, March 8to 11; the 20th Anniversary Conference of theIntercultural Education Society, Sophia Univer-sity, Tokyo, Japan, May 26 to 28; and the FifthInternational Conference of the National Coun-cil for the Social Studies, University of Calgary,Canada, June 28 to July 1. I wish to acknowledgethe helpful and thoughtful feedback I receivedfrom the participants at these conferences. I amgrateful to Cherry A. McGee Banks, GenevaGay, Walter C. Parker (colleagues at the Univer-sity of Washington), and Marilyn Cochran-Smith for their thoughtful comments on an ear-lier draft of this article.

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James A. Banks is professor and director of the Centerfor Multicultural Education at the University of Wash-ington, Seattle. A past president of the National Councilfor the Social Studies and the American EducationalResearch Association, he specializes in social studies edu-cation and multicultural education. His most recent booksare Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society andCultural Diversity and Education: Foundations,Curriculum and Teaching (4th ed.).


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