More theoretical than practical but vital for educators and particularly valuable for those entering the profession.
A debut book elaborates on the fundamental ideas at play in the growing field of multicultural education, specifically at the college level.
In this work, Spiteri (Social Policy and Social Work/Univ. of York) surveys the studies that lay out the theoretical groundwork for this cross-disciplinary endeavor. Overall, this project reads like an academic literature review, whereby the author summarizes or quotes applicable studies in the text and then lists them at the end of each chapter so that readers can conduct additional research based on their own interests. Spiteri aligns himself with the major shift in pedagogy toward a student-centered approach rather than the traditional teacher-centered mode, cleverly referred to here as “talk and chalk.” He recommends moving away from the lecture-based courses that are delivered in front of a large group of passive students who are expected to absorb and regurgitate the information uncritically. Instead, he asserts that university educators need to ensure “that the students can use their own cultural frames of reference in order to understand, explore further, and, if need be, challenge what they are being taught.” At the same time, the author recognizes the challenges facing college faculty members that may impede the best of intentions: heavy workloads, large class sizes, and lack of familiarity with new technologies. While he uses the passive voice too frequently, Spiteri organizes the material very well and produces a smooth flow of argumentation. Notably, in order to provide instructive anecdotes, the author draws on his own experiences as a lecturer at a vocational college in Malta when asylum seekers from Africa were entering the country, along with students visiting or relocating from other European nations. He deftly demonstrates how meaningful classroom interactions can help students examine their own culturally transmitted preconceived notions regarding facets of identity such as race, class, gender, nationality, religion, and sexuality. Given that identity and culture are not monolithic concepts, Spiteri writes optimistically: “Since cultures evolve, people need to evolve. And as people evolve, they transform. Multicultural education makes it more likely that this transformation will take an equity-centered direction. The process is one that is both ongoing and dynamic.”
More theoretical than practical but vital for educators and particularly valuable for those entering the profession.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-51366-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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