In 1991, as part of a sabbatical leave project and in response to increasing enrollments of Hispanic students at Morton College (MC), a survey was conducted to determine the extent of cultural interference in the learning process, both in the student and in the instructor. The survey sought to check for areas of common concern among educators and…

To prepare students to live in a diverse world, writing teachers must create a non-threatening environment in their classrooms and introduce the issues of race, ethnicity, and class in reading and writing assignments. One assignment that a writing teacher used successfully both in a writing workshop course for less proficient writers and in a…

This monograph provides a first-hand account of the experience of a U.S. family who sponsored a Vietnamese refugee family from 1975-1979. The book, which is comprised of journal entries, proposes to show what it is like to deal with people from an entirely difference culture and to suggest an approach to handling the problems before the…

This guide is for educators who wish to improve existing curricular frameworks for teaching about world cultures. The guide is anchored by six goal statements for student learning: (1) to begin to understand that cultures are complex and are made up of many components (values, behavior, habitat, aesthetics, etc.); (2) to recognize the part…

The valuing of diversity can be taught to others and should be a major part of any school's comprehensive guidance program. In the valuing diversity model ASK, "A" stands for awareness of self and others; "S" stands for sensitivity and skills; and "K" stands for knowledge cultures different from one's own. School…

This volume focuses on cultural differences relevant to all child-care-giving settings, including day care, nursery, and preschool programs. Based on respect for cultural pluralism, this concise supplementary text is designed to increase caregiver sensitivity to different cultural child-care practices and values and to improve communication and…

This study investigated ethnic differences and the effects of racism on the college adjustment of African-American, Asian, and Latino students who attended five undergraduate predominantly Anglo-American colleges. Results indicated that social adjustment was better for Anglos than it was for Asians and Latinos. African-Americans reported the most…

Focusing on the culture of students with disabilities allows teachers to add another real-world dimension to the multi-cultural atmosphere of their classrooms. While Public Law 94-142 (the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) legislates what opportunities must exist for the differently able, volunteer program such as "Kids on the…

To explore the complexities of communication with Asian and Pacific Islander (API) children and their families, this digest describes the overt and covert dimensions of the various API cultures, and discusses API's socioeconomic background and the life experiences that affect their communication behavior. The general ethnic groups in the API…

This document is a report on 16 schools selected as Blue Ribbon Schools for their outstanding programs in geography or history. The report is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the curricular frameworks and guidelines for elementary and secondary schools in geography education. Areas discussed include: (1) current achievement and…

This paper offers a framework for the analysis and evaluation of intervention on children's behalf against which to analyze actions upon their environment. The first section looks at the complex issue of defining suitable child development outcomes for intervention programs, noting that because the concept of childhood varies across cultures and…

This document suggests that even within current fiscal constraints, existing curricular content needs to be as diverse as the nation's students. Issues of multicultural arts education that are discussed include cultural identity and heritage, "loss of memory," and language. The goals of multicultural arts education that were enumerated in Volume…

This booklet gives minority high school and college students information about preparing for a newspaper career. If newspapers are to survive and thrive, they must attract and serve America's increasingly multicultural readership. The booklet includes a discussion of the challenges of diversity and an overview of journalism. A career and salary…

For over 25 years, the Manhattan Country School, a private school for kindergarten through grade 8, has made intense and successful efforts to maintain a racially and ethnically diverse student population and staff, partly through building an awareness of human diversity into its curriculum and instruction. Recent interest in multicultural…

A plenary address to an Australian conference on adult literacy focuses on cultural barriers to numeracy. Mathematics, and therefore numeracy, is considered as part of cultural knowledge. It is noted that over the last decade there has been a growing awareness of the cultural basis of mathematical knowledge and teachers can no longer assume that…