|
Beyond Heroes and Holidays
Excerpts, Reviews and More!
“Beyond Heroes is a toolkit for unpacking years of personal, institutional, and historical baggage and raising hard issues in constructive ways. It shows how the trendy but soft and superficial multiculturalism now prevalent in schools might become more robust and powerful. It moves beyond "celebrating diversity" to understanding why some differences translate into access to privilege and power, while others are a source of discrimination and injustice. With its many practical strategies for creating dialogue and real change in school communities, Beyond Heroes and Holidays left me hopeful that we might yet move to a higher ground of mutual understanding and join in a common struggle for justice in schools and out.” -- --Stan Karp
“Beyond Heroes and Holidays is a find. It offers insight into how the traditional American educational system perpetuates racism in all curricular areas, It provides a rich array of resources, models and strategies for promoting multicultural education. And it can be used by all teachers-new as well as experienced, K-12 as well as university-level. This book is for anyone who has either wondered or been asked, ‘How can I incorporate multicultural education into my classroom?’”-- David Stone (Assistant Professor in Counselor Education at Ohio University) in Democracy and Education
“In Beyond Heroes and Holidays we attempt to expose race and racism as they operate in schools by including lessons that help students, parents, and school staff pay attention to race. For example ‘The Cherokee/Seminole Removal Play’ introduces students to one of the strong alliances formed between Africans and Native Americans in the early 1800s. The lesson “Exclusion- Chinese in 19th Century America” looks at the period of the Gold Rush through the eyes of the often-ignored Chinese immigrants who, contrary to the westward movement of European immigrants, began their journey from the west coast of the United States and moved eastward…Through “The Institutionalization of Racism” students see the concerted system effort required to institutionalize racism in the United States, which included teaching European immigrants to be white… This lesson also makes clear that racism is not “natural” because it requires the force of multiple institutions to establish and maintain it. The analysis of racism conveys hope; if something was constructed, as opposed to being natural, it can be changed.” ---Excerpt from the Introduction
|
