March 13: Christine Sleeter

Navigating the Cross-Currents of Standards, Textbooks, and Marginality

12:15 pm

Cubberley 114

Dr. Christine Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Professional Studies at California State University Monterey Bay.

Historically marginalized communities have long fought for equitable access to quality education. In the U.S., this has led many such communities to champion high standards for education. When enacted through the neoliberal business-led standards movement, however, standards-based reform has led to standardizing teaching and learning, aligning curriculum with state-adopted curriculum standards and textbooks, and shaping pedagogy to become delivery of skills and content in textbooks. In this talk, I will first present a framework for working with teachers in multicultural education, then based on case studies of teachers, examine strategies that teachers use, as well as supports and barriers they face in enacting multicultural, democratic teaching in the context of the neoliberal standards movement.