Civic and Multicultural Education in Minority Settings

Meira Levinson

My aim is to complete the first draft of a book on civic and multicultural education in minority settings. It is structured as a set of interrelated essays, each of which uses an example from my experience teaching in urban, predominantly minority public schools as a foil for discussing a significant issue in political theory and education policy. The first half of the book focuses on civic education, arguing that the contrast between minority and non-minority students’ experiences, identities, and social and cultural status has implications both for civic pedagogy in minority settings in particular, and for civic membership, legitimacy, and stability in general. In one essay, I will discuss the need for multiple civic narratives within any society, and examine the implications of plural (and potentially partially incompatible) civic narratives for civic stability and civic education. A second, related essay will argue that members of majority and minority groups need different sets of skills to be successful in liberal democracies, especially in deliberative democratic settings, and discuss the implications of this for civic education in minority settings as well as for the legitimacy of deliberative democracy more generally. A third essay will address the relationship between personal identity and civic identity, taking into particular account the influence of minority parents’ oral transmission of history to their children on students’ construction of their own identities. Finally, I will broaden the conception of “minority” beyond race in order to consider the implications of class, religion, immigration status, and other factors for civic pedagogy, membership, legitimacy, and stability. The second half of the book will transition from civic to multicultural education by examining the place of both in state standards in the US and national curricula in Britain, France, Japan, and other countries. I will analyze the implications of embedding civic and multicultural education in literature and/or history curricula, of separating them out as an independent area of study, and of embedding them in the structure and practices of the school as an institution. A second essay will present a taxonomy of multicultural education, emphasizing the wide variety of purposes that it might serve and hence the wide range of (in some cases contradictory) forms it might take. This will be followed by an essay that specifically considers the normative, pedagogical, and institutional aspects of multicultural education in all-minority settings, with minority status measured by race, economic status, immigration status, and religion. The book will conclude with an essay that addresses the benefits and obstacles for civic and multicultural education of teaching in segregated versus integrated schools.

About Meira Levinson

Meira Levinson has taught middle school students for the past six years in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools. She is also an active political theorist and philosopher of education, writing primarily about issues in liberal political education and public policy. Levinson earned her doctorate in politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University, in 1997. In addition to her book, The Demands of Liberal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), which recently came out in paperback, she has published a number of articles in journals and edited books. She also regularly presents her work at conferences and seminars. In addition to her Spencer Fellowship, which she will use in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2004, Levinson was recently appointed a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for the 2003 calendar year. She was also selected by the Program on Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University to be their Young Scholar next spring. She plans to use these opportunities to write, present, and edit a book manuscript on civic and multicultural education in minority settings.