ABSTRACT

This chapter examines cultural diversity in the United States and suggests that responsive multicultural education programs can address many challenges. It explains concepts such as culture, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, and gender, and why understanding these concepts are important when working with children and adolescents from various cultures. The chapter discusses how racism, discrimination, and stereotypes can hurt children and adolescents who are culturally different and how elementary and secondary schools can provide appropriate responses. Culture can be defined in a number of ways, but recent definitions, while worded differently, basically connote similar meanings. Although the term race refers to biological differences among people, it has long been used to differentiate groups of people. The term gender describes masculinity and femininity—the thoughts, feelings, and behavior that identify one as either male or female, or transgendered male or transgendered female. Teachers believe that multicultural education should include people of differing sexual orientation.