Dr.Jorge Osterling
George Mason University
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Multicultural Education

 

1. Vision Statement
2. Multicultural Education
3. Equity Education
4. Ethnicity and Race
5. Gender
6. Prejudice & Tolerance
7.
Religion and Public Education
8. Sociocultural Theory

Vision Statement

Mason’s Center for Language and Culture (CLC) provides leadership in promoting educational equity for culturally, linguistically, and ability diverse populations from disenfranchised communities.

The Center is committed to developing research, policy, and model demonstration projects that are concerned with intercultural sensitivity, family and community collaboration, and increased opportunity for students traditionally underrepresented in teaching.

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Multicultural Education

National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)
NAME brings together individuals and groups with an interest in multicultural education from all levels of education, different academic disciplines and from diverse educational institutions and occupations.

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Equity Education

Equity and Diversity -- goENC.com
A valuable resource for educators concerned about creating equitable conditions in which every child can succeed.

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ETHNICITY AND RACE

The History Makers -- Stories of success against the odds of achievement in the face of adversity.
The HistoryMakers is a national 501 (c)(3) non-profit video oral history archive dedicated to preserving African American history as the missing link in American history. Focused on American history, oral history and education in general and more specifically on African American history, education, music, law, the arts, science, technology, media, medicine, entertainment, fashion & beauty, business, the military, politics and sports.

Japanese Internment
For some lesson ideas and lots of links to news stories and pictures from 1942 about the Japanese-American internment, check out KQED's page on the Fillmore - http://www.kqed.org/fillmore

Japanese -- The War Relocation Camps of World War II: When Fear was Stronger than Justice
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into 10 isolated relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The temporary, tar paper-covered barracks, the guard towers, and most of the barbed-wire fences are gone now, but the people who spent years of their lives in the centers will never forget them.

NCRR - Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress
There is a website http://www.ncrr-la.org from a group in L.A. which has a great poster, information about Day of Remembrance Activities in L.A., and a story on a docu-drama about Ralph Lazlo, a Mexican-Irish-American teenager who was the only non-Japanese, non-spouse to be interned. He went to the camps because his friends were being interned. The film is called, "Stand Up for Justice".

Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam -- Palestinians and Jews living in Peace?
  Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al-Salam is an Israeli village located near the West Bank founded more than 25 years ago by a Dominican priest who wanted to show that it was possible for Palestinians and Jews to live in peace as neighbors.
  The village is an intentional village for peace and understanding, comprised equally of Arab/Palestinian and Jewish families who choose to live there and fulfill their beliefs. Their lives and work are a marvelous model for the Middle East - and for all of us.
  See Grace Feuerverger's book: Oasis Of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace In A Jewish-Palestinian Village In Israel (Routledge).

Racial Inequality in Special Education
Harvard University -- Edited by Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield with a foreword by Senator James M. Jeffords,
"The findings of Racial Inequity in Special Education indicate a trend with chilling implications for our education system. The overidentification of minority students in special education and the subsequent isolation, stigmatization, and inferior treatment they receive reconfirms the notion that education in America falls short of offering a level playing field for all. By compiling this body of valuable scholarship, Losen and Orfield have unearthed the contours of the problem as well as promising blueprints for resolving it." —U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah (D-PA) .

Racial Inequity in Special Education -- Executive Summary for Federal Policy Makers
Harvard University's Civil Rights Project. In 1998, approximately 1.5 million minority children were identified as having mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or a specific learning disability. More than 876,000 ofthese were black or Native American. Minority students, specifically black and Native American students, are significantly more likely than white students to be identified as having a disability.

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Gender

Association for Gender Equity Leadership in Education (AGELE)
AGELE's mission is to provide leadership in the identification and infusion of gender equity in all educational programs and processes and within parallel equity concerns including, but not limited to age, disability, ethnicity, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation and socio-economic status.

Martha C. Phelps-Borrowman's links to Gender Equity in Education
A site constructed to promote a heightened awareness of the need for gender equity in education for both girls and boys. Contains hundreds of links to information for everyone who cares about the education of all of our children.

Myra Sadker Advocates for Gender Equity
A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting equity in and behond schools. By working to eliminate gender bias, MSA enhances the academic, pyschological, economic, and physical potential of America's children. MSA includes teachers and parents influenced by Dr. Myra Pollack Sadker (1943-1995) writings and lectures, former students, youth service workers, children of all ages, and citizens from across the nation who are committed to the goal of gender equity

WEEA Equity Resource Center
Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA) Equity Resource Center was established more than 20 years ago to bring support and resources to many exceptional efforts that are improving the education of girls and women in the United States. The WEEA Center is a national project that promotes bias-free education, believing that gender equity works for everyone --for girls and women, men and boys.

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Prejudice & Tolerance

Tolerance.org
Tolerance.org is a Web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization. Additional information about the Law Center and numerous additional education al programs are available at its website, www.splcenter.org.

Understanding Prejudice
Contains more than 2,000 links to prejudice-related resources, as well as searchable databases with hundreds of prejudice researchers and social justice organizations. Although the web site is intended to supplement a
McGraw-Hill anthology entitled Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination, all pages and activities are freely available and can be used with other texts or on their own.

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Religion and Public Education

Adherents.com
Adherents.com is a growing collection of over 41,000 adherent statistics and religious geography citations -- references to published membership/adherent statistics and congregation statistics for over 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, etc.

Association of Religion Data Archives
Includes: (1) Statistical data sets on the general U.S. population, religious groups, religious professionals, and individual denominations (the latter currently Nazarenes); (2) Churches and Church Membership data for states and counties for 1952, 1971, 1980 and 1990. Data may be downloaded in various formats.

Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (book review)
The debate about the role of religion in schools.
By James W. Fraser. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 278 pp.

Religion in the Public Schools: Anti-Defamation League
ADL handbook on proper role of religion in public schools.

Religion in The Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law (1995)
This document reflects efforts by religious and education organizations to find common ground on the issue of religious expression in public schools.

Religion and Public Schools: US Department of Education
U.S. Department of Education site containing guidelines, publications and resources on the topics of religious expression in public schools and faith community support of children's learning.

Religious Tolerance.org
Created by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, includes brief descriptions of sacred texts, beliefs, practices, sects, and symbols. Numerous links to related sites to various religions.

World Christian Encyclopedia
The best statistical source on world religions. Published by the World Evangelization Research Center, this enclyclopedia covers any publicly known religion.

Wordlwide Church Attendance
Percentage of people attending church by country. Results of a worldwide study conducted by University of Michigan researchers based on a World Values Survey. Data appears in press release.

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Sociocultural Theory

Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki in Finland


The cultural-historical theory of activity was initiated a group of revolutionary Russian psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s which included Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), the founder of the school. Vygotsky and his colleagues
A. R. Luria and A. N. Leont'ev formulated a completely new theoretical concept to transcend the situation: the concept of artifact-mediated and object-oriented action (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 40). A human individual never
reacts directly (or merely with inborn reflects) to environment. The relationship between human agent and objects of environment is mediated by cultural means, tools and signs.

International Society for Cultural and Activity Research - ISCAR
ISCAR is an association, whose purpose is the promotion and development of multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical research on societal, cultural and historical dimensions of human practices.

Sociocultural Theory, University of Colorado at Denver
Valuable collection of articles and resources on sociocultural theory (e.g., Albert Bandura, Michael Cole, Lev Vygotsky.

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Copyright © 2009 Jorge Osterling.