Center for Excellence and Equity in Teacher Preparation
Multicultural Courses
Status
Active
Category
Curricular Innovation/Program/Course
Target Audience
Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students
College/Department
Description
Multicultural courses explore cultural, ethnic, or gender related issues. Courses certified to meet the multicultural requirement must meet three of the following criteria:
- Diversity Self-Awareness and Perspective Taking: Students can articulate their own individual identity in relation to key concepts such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language, social class, disability, national origin, and religious affiliation, and can also reflect on how their social position differs from, and impacts, their relationships in diverse environments. In other words, students will learn to locate themselves within larger structures of difference and understand how their own position shapes their identity and/or worldview, as well as how that identity and/or worldview may differ from others.
- Cultural Difference: Students gain in-depth knowledge of the history, lived experience, artistic production, identity and/or worldview of one or more underrepresented groups in the West (i.e., the US, Great Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and/or of a non-Western culture (or cultures). Students can articulate particular aspects and experiences of these cultures as well as how they may be similar to or different than the students’ own.
- Personal and Social Responsibility: Students analyze the ethical, social, and/or environmental consequences of policies, ideologies, or actions on marginalized communities/groups within the US or internationally. Based on this analysis, students identify a range of potential personal and civic responses to these issues. A service learning version of this course may allow students to directly take informed and responsible action to address these challenges.
- Understanding Global Systems: Students gain and apply the tools to think systematically about how institutions, ideologies, rhetorics, and/or cultural representations shape a people’s culture and identity, which may include their role in perpetuating inequality, whether historically or in the present day.