Mixed Race Studies

Meeting the Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Schools

Merrill an imprint of Pearson
2003-10-23
256 pages
ISBN-10: 0205376088
ISBN-13:  9780205376087

Francis Wardle
Red Rocks Community College, Colorado

Maria I. Cruz-Janzen, Associate Professor of Multicultural Education
Florida Atlantic University

From one of the premiere experts on the subject comes this “crash course” for teachers on understanding the developmental needs of multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial children.

This book educates teachers through the experiences of children culturally, ethnically, and racially mixed heritage. In doing so, the authors challenge even longtime multicultural experts to broaden how we think and approach multicultural education. Wardle and Cruz-Janzen push the envelope of typical awareness. They are the harbingers of questions and information in a changing climate of race and culture ripe for redress and new ways of thinking, talking, and educating.

Both of these authors bring to this topic a wealth of personal experience and academic scholarship and insight. They courageously embrace new ideas and concepts of race and culture, both nationally and globally, and provide new and exciting ways of thinking, talking, learning and educating.

Features

• Authors encourage the reader to critically think about diverse family constellations and individual racial and ethnic identity.
• Different models of multiracial identity development are reviewed.
• Focus Questions at the beginning of each chapter help give students direction.
• A variety of tools are provided to help students critically examine their own perceptions, and to evaluate materials, curricular approaches, and instructional methods.

Author Bios

Francis Wardle first became involved in issues regarding multiethnic and multiracial children when his four-year-old daughter came to him in tears, after a peer used race as a put down. Since then he has created the Center for the Study of Biracial Children, given presentations on multiethnic and multiracial issues throughout the US and Canada, written extensively on the topic, and been quoted in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and radio stations including NPR. Currently Dr. Wardle teaches at Red Rocks Community College and the University of Phoenix/Colorado Campus, consults for the National Head Start Migrant Program, and writes for a variety of national publications.

Marta I. Cruz-Janzen is Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at Florida Atlantic University. She received a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Denver, a Master of Arts and Master of Education in Human Development from Columbia University Teachers College, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University. Her dissertation, Curriculum and the Self-Concept of Biethnic and Biracial Persons received the University of Denver Phi Delta Kappa 1996-97 Dissertation of the Year Award. Marta has been a bilingual teacher and elementary school principal.

Table of Contents

1. Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Our Schools.
   • Myths and Realities.
   • Chapter Feature: Eva.
   • Diversity in the Classroom.
   • Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.
   • Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Development of Racial and Ethnic Identity.
   • Student Profile.
   • Supporting Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
2. Traditional Approaches.
   • Single Race-Ethnicity Approach.
   • Avoid Diversity by Celebration.
   • Student Profile.
   • Multicultural Education.
   • Group Membership.
   • Getting on the Same Page.
   • Approaches to Multicultural Education.
   • Banks’ Dimensions of Multicultural Education.
   • Banks’ Approaches to Multicultural Education.
   • Reforming Multicultural Education.
3. Historical Developments.
   • Student Profile.
   • Development of a Racial System.
   • Origins of U.S. Racism.
   • Rejection of Racial Mixing.
   • Latinos.
   • Student Profile.
   • Immigration.
   • Racism and Segregation.
   • Desegregation in Education.
4. Categorizing People.
   • Student Voices.
   • Understanding Race, Racism and Categorizing People.
   • Not Quite White: The Arab American Experience.
   • The Ethnic Category.
   • The Race Myth.
   • After the Civil War.
   • How Other Nations Categorize People.
   • The Legacy of Slaves and Slave Owners.
   • Maintaining the Color Line.
   • Today’s Multicultural and Multiethnic Children.
5. Identify Development of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Identity Development.
   • Identity Development Models.
   • Chart Showing the Identity Models.
   • Developmental and Ecological Model of Identity Development.
   • Student Voices.
   • Diagram of the Ecological Components of the Multiethnic/Multiracial Identity Model.
6. Families and Communities.
   • The Multiethnic and Multiracial Family.
   • Myths and Realities.
   • Table of Age-Related Issues for Interracial and Interethnic Families.
   • Raising Healthy, Happy Interracial Children.
   • Different Family Structures.
7. Curricular Approaches.
   • Early Childhood.
   • Student Voices.
   • Late Elementary.
   • Student Voices.
   • How to Evaluate a Textbook/Reading Book for P-12 Programs.
   • Middle School.
   • Student Voices.
   • Multicultural School Activities.
   • High School.
   • Student Voices.
   • Comments About Interracial Marriage and Multiracial Identity by Frederick Douglass and Bob Marley.
   • Hidden Curriculum.
   • Multicultural Model.
   • Anti-Bias and Ecological Model of Multicultural Education.
   • Case Study of the Anti-Bias and Ecological Model.
8. Instructional Strategies.
   • The Impact of Standards on Instruction.
   • The Influence of the Teacher.
   • Student Voices.
   • Materials and Activities Checklist.
   • Biased Instructional Materials.
   • Culturally Authentic Bias.
   • Suggestions for Instructional Techniques.
   • Analysis of a Teaching Unit.
   • Multicultural Music and Dance.
9. Teaching Teachers.
   • The Nature of Public Education.
   • Preparing Future Teachers.
   • Teacher Preparation Programs.
   • Student Voices.
   • Sociopolitical Construction of Multiethnic and Multiracial Persons.
   • What Teachers Must Know and Be Able to Do.
   • Twenty-Five Recommendations for Teacher Education and Educational Leadership Faculty, Pre-Service Teacher Candidates, and Participate in Teacher In-Service.

Recasting Race: women of mixed heritage in further education

Trentham Books
January 2008
160 pages
234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781858564050
ISBN-13: 978 1 85856 405 0

Indra Angeli Dewan
Department of Sociology
University of East London

The mixed race population has shown an unprecedented increase in Britain in the last few years, and mixed race is currently heralded as the UK’s fastest growing ethnic group. Whilst this development has been reflected in the recent rapid growth in mixed race studies, this is the first book which specifically examines the relationship between mixed heritage women and the further education sector.

Drawing on mixed race women’s narratives on identity and further education, this book challenges some of the conceptualisations of race, culture and mixed race identity in contemporary sociological literature, and critically examines government discourses around personhood and equity identifiable in post-compulsory education policy. The data reveal that competing discourses of individualism, essentialism and postmodernism are at work, and that it is necessary to understand the interplay of these discourses in order to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which the women in the study speak about their identities and experiences.

Recasting Race is important reading for those working in the fields of sociology, sociology of education, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies, as well as for those developing and teaching on undergraduate and graduate courses in education, and PGCE and Cert Ed. courses. It discusses some of the implications the research has for feminist politics, and provides a source for future education policy and practice recommendations which take the experiences of mixed race people into account.

“What Are You?” Biracial Children in the Classroom

Childhood Education
Volume 84, Number 4
Summer 2008
pp.230-233
Association for Childhood Education International

Traci P. Baxley, Assistant Professor
College of Education
Florida Atlantic University

Over the last 30 years, biracial individuals have become one of the fastest growing populations in the United States. Despite this rapid growth, these citizens are only slowly beginning to be acknowledged among monoracial groups and in academia.  Because biracial identities “potentially disrupt the white/”of color” dichotomy, and thus call into question the assumptions on which racial inequality is based,” society has a difficult time acknowledging this section of the population.  Biracial heritage can mean mixed parentage of any kind.  This can include, but is not limited to, African American, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American.  “Biracial,” “interracial,” “multiracial,” and “mixed–race” are used interchangeably and are often self-prescribed by individuals and their families.  As this group increases in the general population, teachers are beginning to see more of these children in their classrooms. In this article, the author provides a historical glance at biracial children and offers classroom practices to support these children.  (Contains 35 print resources and 5 online resources.)

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Heritage in Young Adult Literature

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
March 2009
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-8108-5969-6; ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5969-2

Nancy Thalia Reynolds

Mixed-heritage people are one of the fastest-growing groups in the United States, yet culturally they have been largely invisible, especially in young adult literature. Mixed Heritage in Young Adult Literature is a critical exploration of how mixed-heritage characters (those of mixed race, ethnicity, religion, and/or adoption) and real-life people have been portrayed in young adult fiction and nonfiction.

This is the first in-depth, broad-scope critical exploration of this subgenre of multicultural literature. Following an introduction to the topic, author Nancy Thalia Reynolds examines the portrayal of mixed-heritage characters in literary classics by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Zora Neale Hurston—staples of today’s high school English curriculum—along with other important authors. It opens up the discussion of young-adult racial and ethnic identity in literature to recognize—and focus on—those whose heritage straddles boundaries. In this book teachers will find new tools to approach race, ethnicity, and family heritage in literature and in the classroom.  This book also helps librarians find new criteria with which to evaluate young adult fiction and nonfiction with mixed-heritage characters.

Mixed Heritage Children and Young People: Issues and Ways Forward was a conference held in London, England on 2009-04-29 and hosted by the Ethnic Minority Achievement Service Cambridge Education @ Islington.

Featured speakers:

Leon Tikly, Professor
University of  Bristol

Bradley Lincoln
Multiple Heritage Project, Manchester

Featured Presentations:

Making Mixed Race Children Visible in the Education System

Jane Daffé, Senior EMA Consultant
Nottingham City, LA

Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing: A study of ‘Mixed Experiences’
…‘In junior school I remember feeling very popular. I had a large group of friends and we had all been brought up in the same area although our parents may have been from elsewhere. I went to the same high school as a lot of the girls in this group but they all spilt up and joined different groups that already existed within the school e.g. the Jewish girls joined a group of Jewish girls, the black girls joined a group of black girls etc. I wasn’t a ‘member’ of any of these groups and I didn’t want to be’
Dinah Morley

‘I had an attitude like I don’t know what to do I’ll just get on with things…I kind of changed my attitude like I was just saying well I can only be me …and it made things easier in a way’…

Improving the Educational Environment for Mixed Race Children
Professor Leon Tikly
University of Brsitol

Black–White Biracial Students in American Schools: A Review of the Literature

Review of Educational Research
Volume 79, Number 2 (June 2009)
pages 776-804
DOI: 10.3102/0034654309331561

Rhina Fernandes Williams, Assistant Professor of Education
Georgia State University

With increasing numbers of students who identify as Black and White multi-racial and with the persistence of the Black–White test score gap, the necessity for research regarding these students’ educational experiences cannot be understated.  To date, research in this area has been scarce.  The purpose of this review is to synthesize the available literature related to the experiences of multiracial—Black–White biracial in particular—students in American schools and to identify areas in need of further research. This review offers a synthesis of the historical, social, and political context of biracial people, as well as a synthesis of issues relevant to biracial students, namely, psychological adjustment, home and parental influence, and school factors.  Recommendations and implications for further research related to multiracial students and their schooling are offered.

Read or purchase the article here.