Multicultural Education

The University of Washington’s Banks Center for Educational Justice will host Distinguished Summer Scholar Sandy Grande, a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship, who will teach the course “Black and Indigenous Theories of Education Liberation and Resurgence.”

Grande, the author of “Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought,” is a professor and director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College.

“Education strengthens our people.”

With the help of local elder Arlita Rhoan, this idea was adopted as the motto for the Sapsik'ʷałá Education Program at the University of Oregon (UO). This same idea provided the foundation of a May 2 gathering at the University of Washington to advance the conversation about Native teacher education, understand its challenges and explore opportunities for Native resurgence.

After half a century of work pioneering the field of multicultural education at the University of Washington College of Education, James A. Banks will retire in January.

“I can’t play with you because your skin is brown.”

When Caryn Park (PhD '10) heard one of her preschool students say this to his friend, she felt helpless. She knew what it felt like from her own experience as a child of color in the U.S. and knew that it wasn’t fair to have to feel that.

“I felt like I knew nothing,” Park recalled. “I felt like I had no skills with which to support these children.”

Park calls this her critical incident.

She started the application from Vietnam with only a week before the deadline. She had an outline and just needed to put all the pieces together. Then she hit a roadblock.

How did she exemplify one or more habits of a globally competent individual? How did she, as a teacher, foster global citizenship in a classroom environment?

Jennifer Macias Morris (MIT ‘15) knew she had what the NEA Foundation was looking for in selecting its Global Learning Fellows—she just needed to figure out how to explain it.

A new name, a new director and a new book celebrate the inauguration of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington this October.

In his first year as a teacher in Arizona, University of Washington PhD student Lin Wu struggled to make genuine connections with his Mexican American students.

As a first-generation immigrant from China, Wu had personally experienced the challenges that accompany being accepted by U.S. mainstream culture. Unaware of the historical struggles that Chinese immigrants faced in the U.S., Wu found that he had suddenly become the “other.” It was this othering experience that initially prevented Wu from seeing beyond his own struggles.

For more than a quarter-century, the University of Washington’s Center for Multicultural Education has been a world leader in advancing multicultural education, producing landmark publications and educating a generation of influential scholars in the field.

That impact and the future of the center’s work were featured during its 30th symposium, “Commemorating the Past and Envisioning the Future: Making a Difference for 26 Years,” held on April 27. 

For the past 50 years, the University of Washington has helped lay the foundations for educators worldwide to think deeply about how to empower all students to become productive citizens.

On April 27, this work and the leadership of James A. Banks, Kerry and Linda Killinger Endowed Chair in Diversity Studies, will be celebrated during the UW Center for Multicultural Education’s 30th annual symposium.