With the end of 2020, we are troubled by the deficit perspectives that permeate our national conversation around students, families, and members of our school and local communities. We see clearly how racism, discrimination, and fear both implicitly and explicitly undergird the discourse of national politics, news media, and social media.
As we start the new year of 2021, we see the central role critical multicultural education can and must play in disrupting and challenging these deficit-based perspectives and the ever-pressing need to move these perspectives to assets-based and strengths-based ways of thinking. The work of all educators in the field of multicultural education and in the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME) is important and very much needed as the U.S. moves positively in a new direction with the inauguration and much-needed national leadership of President-Elect Joseph Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris.
Moving forward in this spirit, contributing authors in this issue of Multicultural Perspectives provide readers of the journal creative and innovative ways of thinking about how to continue to do this important work. These authors help us to think about how to re-frame our work in the field of education toward a holistic orientation focused on culturally relevant education and the intersection between art-making and translanguaging spaces. The authors also move us forward in our work in how to make our classrooms more humanizing and reflective spaces for students and ourselves as their self-reflexive teachers.
Part I: Advancing the Conversation
In “Culturally Relevant Education: Think Local Within a Holistic Orientation,” Pang, Alvarado, Preciado, and Schleicher describe how student bring valuable cultural ways of knowing and worldviews to the classroom. The provide a framework that encourages teachers to Think Local within a holistic orientation so as to create a student-centered and culture-centered education that arises out of student cultural knowledge, life experiences, and belief systems.
Part III: Creating Multicultural Classrooms
In “Inter-Weave: Creating a Translanguaging Space Through Community Art,” Yoon explains how art can contribute to the creation of translanguaging space and how a community program can be a significant site for this collective and creative endeavor. By sharing their own pedagogical approach along with art-based project examples, Yoon explore the intersection between art-making and a translanguaging space and how art constitutes a key part of the translanguaging practice.
In “Critical History Monographs and Intersectionality in Social Studies: A Case From Enslavement,” James-Galloway makes a case for social studies teacher educators to employ in their pedagogy an intersectional perspective. James-Galloway asks social studies teacher educators to consider critical history monographs, specialized book-length studies that center on marginalized perspectives, as pedagogical tools that complement primary sources and illustrates how social studies teacher educators can better prepare their students to teach from an intersectional perspective that more fully humanizes multiply oppressed peoples in U.S. history.
Part IV: Personal Perspectives
In “‘Don’t Be Afraid’: Exploring Methodological Relationships in (Re)searching the Experiences of Immigrant Teachers of Color,” McDevitt revisits research she conducted as a novice researcher on the experiences of immigrant teachers and examines the development of her own reflexive-self as a researcher and an immigrant in and through my methodological relationships with the teachers. She describes the benefits she reaped from becoming a reflexive and vulnerable researcher, having turned my research lens back on herself, and taking responsibility for the kinds of knowledge produced in and through the study.
As we enter a new year, we encourage readers of the journal to continue to consider how they are moving their own work forward in the ways the authors in this issue advocate for in their articles. How are we as educators relentlessly pursuing equity, inclusion, and justice for students and families in our schools and communities and encouraging our colleagues and members of our local and national communities to do the same? How are we consciously and conscientiously re-framing our work in schools every day so as to create more critical, empowering, and transformative learning environments for our students in the ways that these current times urgently demand?