Drew asked: Will multiculturalism ever be embraced beyond simply an ideal; will it ever be a reality?
The reality of multiculturalism within a classroom must be, I think, found along, as many things are, a continuum. I do not think it is a matter of black and white, but a matter of scales of gray. There are some curricula that are more or less multicultural than others, sure. But I do not think there exists some threshold before which they are uni-cultural and beyond which they are multicultural.
That having been said, as James Banks mentioned, multiculturalism has made significant progress in the past couple of decades and there is little reason to think that it will slow. There is still more rhetoric involved than actual practice, I will grant that, but I think it is already being embraced as more than simply an ideal. Multiculturalism has great distances still to go to reach its goal, an educational system that provides equal attention to all demographics. But will multiculturalism ever be a reality, I think it is.
Question: Is there a functional mechanism with which we can judge the multiculturalism of a particular curriculum?
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