“Everyone Wants a Seat at the Table”: High School English Teachers’ Engagement and Challenges with Multicultural Education
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This thesis explores ten public high school English teachers’ attitudes toward multicultural education and literature. Specifically, the study attempts to discover common points of engagement and challenge for teachers to make greater use of multicultural literature. Data was collected through in-person interviews with English teachers in the Bay Area and Orange County, California. A majority of teachers reported engaging with multicultural education by: being aware of cultural differences among groups of students; including shorter, multicultural texts; and connecting literature to contemporary social and political issues. All teachers reported challenges, which included (from most to least prominent): department politics; the pressure of standardized testing and traditionalized English curriculums; multiculturalism not being prioritized; lack of multicultural knowledge and sensitivity; and funding. The findings suggest that English teachers feel pressured to teach Western literature—having studied those same texts in high school and college. In addition, the findings suggest that if English teachers have a desire to change their reading lists, then they should reach out to similarly-minded colleagues to mobilize change within their English departments. English teachers interested in increasing their multicultural pedagogy should commit time to research multicultural texts and acquire content knowledge about marginalized groups—even if it necessitates that less curriculum time is spent on more traditional texts.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 30, 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ngo, Brian |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | multicultural education |
|---|---|
| Subject | multiculturalism |
| Subject | multicultural literature |
| Subject | high school |
| Subject | English teachers |
| Subject | interviews |
| Subject | attitudes |
| Subject | engagement |
| Subject | challenges |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Ngo, Brian. (2018). “Everyone Wants a Seat at the Table”: High School English Teachers’ Engagement and Challenges with Multicultural Education. Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford CA.
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- Contact
- bngo@stanford.edu
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