Educating the Multicultural Gaze through Leisure
Abstract
In conversations about education, multiculturalism is commonly understood as a celebration of cultures and of people the world over. To this end, many educators and pre-service teachers believe that the need for multicultural education is satisfied through epistemic practices and acknowledgment of certain holidays and cultural practices in their classrooms. While this understanding is not incorrect, it is only one of the many questions to which multiculturalism may respond. Moreover, this understanding falls short of a more fundamental need to rethink the ethical implications that are at stake whenever we educate with a multicultural view. This paper focuses on the need to guide educators into forming robust ethical ideas in education that invites them to think about their duties and responsibilities to the world in general and to individual students in particular. I will argue that teacher education programs must allow for future educators to seriously consider the current needs of our times and how education can shift from mere implementation of requirements to purposeful and meaningful transformative practices. This end can be achieved, I will argue, through an understanding of the role of leisure in education
Keywords:
multiculturalism, teacher education programs, leisure, ethics, pre-service teachersReferences
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Biographical Note
Givanni M. Ildefonso-Sánchez, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Language Acquisition at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she teaches Foundations of American Education. Her work focuses on what the ancients called otium: the time and freedom from overt action that allows people to think about the world and their reasons for being. This research lends itself as an occasion to examine the value of otium (leisure) in order to recover its original educational significance and to derive crucial implications for the theory and practice of teaching.gildefonso@lagcc.cuny.edu