Sonia Nieto is a huge supporter of multicultural education, but she states that she is “concerned that they can be sued in simplistic ways that fail to address the tremendous inequities that exist in our schools” (Nieto 234). As educators, we need to work with these types of programs to ensure that they are truly helping improve the inequities in our classes. I completely agree with Nieto that this type of education needs to be firmly related to equal student learning and it needs to be tied in with a deep commitment to social justice and equal resources, not just ethnic tidbits and cultural sensitivity (Nieto 235). We are not improving anything by just being sensitive to what we say and how we act. We need to be knowledgeable about these topics. This is especially important when it comes to the community. We need to be able to know what kind of lives these children are coming from. The teacher from the study done by Dafney Dabach, Ms. Aguliar, is a perfect example of someone who was in touch with her students and her community. She is “keenly away of her students’ citizenship statuses and the community in which she worked” (Dabach 391). This connection caused her students to feel more connected to her, and allowed them a space where they felt comfortable to open up and share their experiences, despite their cultural differences. We should be implementing this kind of …show more content…
Our students deserve to have access to all of the knowledge they could possibly need. The problem is, some of the knowledge that we are giving them, with good intentions, is false and or skewed in a certain direction to make one party look better than another. In the article by Zinn, we see that our knowledge of Columbus and the Native Americans is very skewed. We are only taught what look to be in our favor. This is a problem. As educators, we have the ability to lie and omit facts about the past, but as Zinn states, “outright lying or quiet omissions take the risk of discovery,” (Zinn 8). It is our responsibility to teach our children the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This problem is deeply imbedded in our history and is something that we need to keep a deep understanding of so that we can make sure that we do not make the same mistakes educators in the past