Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives

The dynamic duo of James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks join forces to provide college and university students with a helpful resource in their textbook entitled Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, ISBN 9780470483282. Directed at future and present educators, this text presents direction on honing teaching strategies to become effective in diverse classrooms. The inclusion of articles from the leading experts in the field guides students to an understanding of the concepts, paradigms, and explanations necessary to meet the needs of culturally, racially and language diverse classrooms. Helpful features of this text include statistical tables, figures, and charts which portray the most current research and information in the educational realm. One member of this writing team is that of James A. Banks. He currently serves as Russell F. Stark University Professor and Director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Banks has also served as past President of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and is a member of the National Academy of Education. The second contributor to the work on Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives is Cherry A. McGee Banks. She currently serves as professor of education at the University of Washington, Bothell. Banks is a seasoned writer, co-authoring a textbook entitled Teaching Strategies for the Social Studies: Decision-Making and Citizen Action as well as authoring the book Improving Multicultural Education: Lessons From the Intergroup Education Movement. The authors do a wonderful job of organizing the concepts and strategies of this book across six sections and 17 chapters. Coverage of topics include race, class, gender, and disability in the classroom, social class and educational equality, gender bias, teaching about women of color, educational equality for students of color, school inclusion and multicultural issues in special education, as well as school reform.