Critical Multicultural Education

This volume collects Christine Sleeter’s core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism. Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This dilution has happened for several reasons, including White teachers’ rearticulations of multicultural education as “getting along” or learning to be colorblind and neoliberal reforms that have reduced it to a celebration of cultural diversity while maintaining silence about racism. This volume includes ten of Sleeter’s articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means.

“A deeply researched, contextualized, and nuanced account of multicultural education.”
—H. Richard Milner IV, Vanderbilt University

“This beautiful and intersectional volume needs to be required reading in every school of education.”
—Robin DiAngelo, coauthor of Is Everyone Really Equal?

“This book is an important intervention on the side of racial justice in education”
—Wayne Au, editor, Rethinking Schools