ABSTRACT
Immigration, assimilation and inclusion constitute a pathway that immigrants have historically followed as they moved from the margins of society to the mainstream. For a brief period during the fi rst half of the 20th century intercultural educators worked to create a new pathway framed by cultural pluralism. This was a diffi cult task because in the early 1900s European immigration was frequently associated with class confl ict, poverty, crime and social disorder (Fairchild, 1926; Higham, 1972; Olneck, 1995). Intercultural educators tried to reduce intergroup tensions by creating a positive image of immigrants, thereby calming the fears and misconceptions of mainstream Americans about immigrants. They also worked to improve educational opportunities for immigrants and their children by incorporating ethnic history and cultural content into the school curriculum. Their efforts, however, did not represent a complete rejection of assimilation. They embraced a weak form of assimilation and took the position that it wasn’t necessary or helpful for immigrants to completely shed their culture. Ethnic cultural was seen as a bridge to a transformed American culture-one that incorporated elements of immigrant culture. Leonard Covello captured that sentiment when he said that Americans could learn from and be “enriched by the cultural heritage of all the world without sacrifi cing any degree of that which is essentially American” (Covello, 1939, p. 11). This chapter describes three major initiatives that were developed by intercultural educators to reduce intergroup tensions and incorporate ethnic content into the curriculum: the Service Bureau for Education in Human Relations, the Springfi eld Plan and the Intergroup Education in Cooperating Schools Project.
