Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of U.S. Curriculum: Communities of Color and Official Knowledge in Education

Within curriculum studies, a “master narrative” has developed into a canon that is predominantly White, male, and associated with institutions of higher education. This canon has systematically neglected communities of color, all of which were engaged in their own critical conversations about the type of education that would best benefit their children. Building upon earlier work that reviewed curriculum texts, this book serves as a much-needed correction to the glaring gaps in U.S. curriculum history. Chapters focus on the curriculum discourses of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos during what has been construed as the “founding” period of curriculum studies, reclaiming their historical legacy and recovering the multicultural history of educational foundations in the United States.

Book Features:

• Challenges the historical foundations of curriculum studies in the United States during the turn of and early decades of the 20th century.
• Illuminates the curriculum conversations, struggles, and contentions of communities of color.
• Highlights curriculum historically as a site at the intersection of colonization, White supremacy, and Americanization in the United States.
• Brings marginalized voices from the community into the conversation around curriculum, typically dominated by university voices.

“Fascinating, innovative, and rigorously researched, this groundbreaking book will change how we think of the field of curriculum”
—Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture, University of Massachusetts

“This is such a timely and necessary volume. Discourses around ‘multicultural education’ often fail to engage the long and significant curriculum history and hard fought efforts that made the feel viable, necessary, and intellectually powerful. This book should be on the shelf of every curriculum scholar.”
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“I urge you to read and ponder this exemplary book and to build on its sense of direction.”
—William H. Schubert, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies from the American Educational Research Association.

Additional ISBNs: 9780807756782, 0807756784, 9780807773932, 080777393X