James A. Banks – Citizenship Education and Diversity

This article encouraged me to think about how teachers might become better equipped to foster reflective citizenship in modern pluralistic nation-states. Despite progressive education reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, a mainstream metanarrative (Cherry McGee Banks, 1996) is still pervasive in the curriculum. This official knowledge (Apple) projects and protects the aspirations of white, high-income students as the societal ideal. But students can learn and they can unlearn, Banks says. They can be shown that knowledge construction happens with five types of knowledge: personal/cultural, popular, transformative academic, mainstream academic and school knowledge. Examples of each include (from my own invented examples and from Banks’): animosity between Turks and Greeks taught in the families of each (personal); harmful depictions of certain groups in the media (popular); textbook knowledge of Alberta and Sask that gives almost no content about their histories prior to 1905 (school knowledge); mainstream academic (Turner’s frontier thesis); and transformative academic (evidence that contradicts the accepted view that Canada is tolerant to minorities).

Banks has worked for years to get his students to recognize knowledge construction. It happens when they develop what he calls a “delicate balance” of cultural, national and global identifications. It is delicate work because the terrain is littered with persistent fallacies and not everyone is initially sensitive enough to recognize the power dynamics facing different groups in society. The activities Banks uses include historical readings, discussions, and role-playing events. To this list I would add guest speakers: think about how powerful it is for students in U.S. schools (or schools in Canada where possible) to hear a talk from a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement. This suggestion is consistent with Banks’ emphasis on insider and outsider perspectives.

Banks says pluralistic states are currently grappling with the challenge of balancing diversity and unity in education and the realization that this process starts with teacher education is often left out of the public conversation. He specifically mentions the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia as examples of pluralistic nation-states, but he might as well have named countries in Europe, or countries of South America, Asia, or Africa that have become immigrant destination countries by virtue of having relatively more opportunity or wealth than the countries of origin. But the attention on the Anglo countries – that are self-congratulatory about their relative openness to immigrants – is important and useful. In Canada there is sometimes a sense that we can be “generous” in adding to a population base an abundant overlay of immigrants, as long as we don’t have to fear that the base will ever be anything other than British and white in origin.

In other words: “neutral” (classless and raceless). Being neutral, and supposedly unconcerned with ethnicity, the mainstream is primarily oriented to national concerns. This is all part of the assimilationist fallacy (Apter). It assumes that other groups, as their economic and social status grows, will slowly adopt the national concerns and let go of their narrower group concerns. It is a fallacy because ethnicity and assimilation co-exist in modern societies, Banks says. Both the well-off or relatively disadvantaged ethnic groups may choose to keep ethnic ties for various reasons that are important to them. That should not be viewed as undesirable. The goal of multicultural citizenship education is to allow students to “maintain attachments to their cultural and ethnic communities while at the same time helping them to attain the knowledge and skills needed to participate in the wider civic culture and community.”

The article makes an important contribution in highlighting that mainstream attitudes left unchallenged lead to issues like colorblindness among teachers. The teachers can’t teach what they don’t know, to echo the title of the book by Howard (1999) mentioned in Banks’ article. Much is at stake here. Without an understanding of the ways that identities are constructed by mainstream society, the legacy of organizational injustice and institutionalized discrimination in schools will continue.

One potential limitation of the article is that while it does articulate a clear way forward to talk about race and gender issues in the classroom, its program of remedies to talk about class is less clear. The author does mention that white working class students will tend to distance themselves from their background in order to fit into a middle class mainstream. He begins his article with some references to class. However, by the second last paragraph we have come back to the core issues of “race, culture and ethnicity.” Tellingly, all of his examples (& teaching materials) concern the issue of race, from the perspective of different groups. Perhaps class conflict generally remains more of a blind spot because the veneration of the wealthy is linked to the idea that if you just work hard enough, you can be prosperous, and this notion is something of a bedrock of U.S. citizenship. But for some, that too might just be another fallacy worthwhile to expose.