Mona had been teaching eighteen years when she enrolled in Multicultural Curriculum Design, and I subsequently visited her classroom. She was a combination fourth-fifth grade teacher in a very diverse, low-income elementary school in which no racial/ethnic group was in the majority, and about one-third of the students were classified as English Language Learners. The mixture of her class was reflective of Mona’s family. “I’m a multicultural United Nations in itself, you know, my dad’s family with eleven kids all going to different cultures, marrying different ethnicities” (April 22, 2004). Mona is ethnically mainly Filipina, with an Iroquois/Black grandfather. Through extensive family intermarriage, she grew up seeing multicultural as normal.

She had worked as an instructional aide before earning her teaching certificate. Over her career, she had taught K-7th grade in several different schools, mostly in another school district. She loves working with low-income students, second language learners, and children of refugee families. She believes strongly in maintaining high academic expectations and preparing her students to think in terms of college. Her own family history is testament to education as a powerful tool of social mobility and teacher expectations as central. At the same time, she is critical of test-driven, one-size-fits-all definitions of academics. Let’s see how she filters her commitments through her science curriculum.

California’s science content standards focus largely on acquisition of facts and basic concepts, with limited hands-on learning. They are written as lists of concepts to “know;” for example, fifth grade students are to “know the Sun, an average star, is the central and largest body in the solar system and is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium” (California Department of Education, 2003, Standard 5.a). Students are also supposed to learn to use the scientific method. Science had just been added to the state’s testing battery, so students will be held accountable for learning the prescribed content.

Mona had several concerns about all of this. First, “the unfortunate reality is that many teachers ‘skip’ teaching Science because they concentrate on Reading and Math and the Writing curriculum;” her fourth and fifth graders were about to be tested over material they had not been taught (September 29, 2003). Second, she was concerned that the test itself would be fact-driven, rather than comprehension-driven. Since many of her students were in the process of learning English, while they were capable of learning basic concepts and ideas, they may not know all of the “facts” or know them in English. Third, Mona believed strongly that elementary students need a foundation that connects concepts with what they already know, rather than an accumulation of disconnected facts. In a previous extended experience with DISTAR, she had learned that second language learners “were just mimicking the words and sentences, and when it came to comprehension they didn’t have a clue about vocabulary, let alone story content” (November 3, 2004). She argued that it is easier for teachers to “teach to the test, thus feeding loads of data and information into students,” but that this is not the same as providing “comprehensible connectors” with students’ prior knowledge that will help them understand and remember new knowledge. She was also concerned that teaching factual knowledge for recall would exclude developing critical thinking (September 29, 2003).

Fourth, Mona valued teaching everything, including science, from a multicultural perspective. Doing that helps her connect concepts with her students; it also helps her raise questions or insights that other teachers might not raise. She told a story to illustrate the power of cultural connections to foster reading:
My grandfather was a Buffalo Soldier. And I had to do a report, and there it was, Buffalo Soldiers! I took a book that I checked out, and took it home to my dad. My dad has only an eighth grade education. My mother said that was the first time she ever saw him read a book in her life. And he read it! And he asked me if he can have it. I ordered it from Borders. And my mom said he keeps that book and it’s the only book he ever read that she ever saw. (April 22, 2004)
Would her father have developed an interest in reading if he had been given culturally relevant books when he was in school, rather than waiting until he was middle-aged? Her family history taught her that family knowledge and academic knowledge can be bridged through culturally diverse stories. As I watched Mona teach about the solar system, I saw her explore how diverse cultural groups have made sense of the solar system through creation stories.

Let us examine Mona’s solar system unit, in relationship to culture, academic expectations and Bloom’s levels of thinking. When I walked into Mona’s classroom, I was struck by its parallels with a college classroom. Her students work from a syllabus; she has eight Internet-wired computers students use for research; her students write reports as Word documents and give presentations illustrated with Power Point; and she teaches them how to take notes on mini-lectures. She emphasizes teaching students to give formal presentations to an audience; one of her fourth graders who at the beginning of the year “wouldn’t even talk” had just given a presentation to the school board. Mona explained, “This is mini-university, . . . I tell them, this is stuff like we do in college. And when we get service learners, student teachers that come to observe me ­ Wow! . . .It blows them away that these guys are doing it” (April 22, 2004). By constructing visible parallels between her fourth-fifth classroom and a college classroom, Mona intentionally tries to demystify college for her students, and help them envision college in their futures.

Mona linked the solar system unit with literature and language arts. While the “big idea” was exploring what makes up the solar system, the unit also explored how different cultural groups, particularly various Native American tribes, have made sense of creation and the relationship between humans and the sky. (She described her planning process as taking an idea and looking at it with a magnifying glass, for depth.) At the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, her solar system curriculum was fairly traditional and tied to the standards; at the upper levels, it was not.

Mona organized students into cooperative groups, with each group assigned a planet. At the knowledge and comprehension level, students were to learn basic information about the whole solar system, and specialize in one planet. Each group was to locate specific factual information on their planet using various books as well as the Internet. Each student also had a chart on which to organize notes they took on the solar system as a whole. I watched as Mona ran through several planets with the class, working with students’ research. For example, she asked the Pluto group to report. A boy stood and read from his group’s research; Mona showed the rest of the students where to take notes on the chart. They went through information such as where the planet is located in the solar system, distance from the sun and diameter. She took them planet by planet, starting with facts students had collected, then elaborating and making sure the class was following specific information about each planet.

She interspersed “planet facts” with thinking questions, such as why it is hot in California in summer but cold in winter, and what the planets might be made of. For thinking questions she gave small groups a minute or so, then called on students. The thinking questions served as application level exercises, in which students were to use concepts they had learned earlier to figure out something about the solar system. For example, she expected students to draw on what they had learned about rocks and states of matter to speculate what planets at various distances from the sun are made of.

 By connecting science with literature and math, Mona prompted students to use concepts and factual knowledge in meaningful ways that involved analysis and synthesis. She had gathered children’s books from the library that told stories about the planets from multiple cultural groups’ perspectives. (Working with the school librarian, she had the students do a scavenger hunt in the library for books written by diverse cultural groups about the planets.) For example, students read Earth Namer (Bernstein & Kobrin, 1974), a story from Bungee Indian tradition in Canada; The Lizard and the Sun (Ada, 1999), a bilingual Mexican American story; and Ahaiyute and Cloud Eater (Hulpach & Zwadsky, 1996), a Zuni story. For language arts, students were to write a report discussing, comparing and contrasting three of these (analysis). For science, they were to write a fictitious creation story of their planet that used factual knowledge about the planet, as well as literary devices of folktales, fairy tales, prophecy, fables, legends, or folklore in the books students read for their book analysis paper (synthesis). They were also supposed to embed their planet within a fictitious solar system and galaxy, using math instruments they were learning as part of their math curriculum (protractor, compass, ruler) to construct a picture. Planet groups would make a presentation to the class about their planet based on their research and writing; each group could determine how to organize its presentation.

After mini-lecture/discussions on planet facts, planet groups had time to work on their research, their book analysis report, and their presentation. Students were particularly enthusiastic about working on computers. For example, one small group was glued to a website called Nine Planets, which they were using for research. A couple of groups were using Kid Pix Slide Show or Power Point to begin to organize presentation of information about their planet, while Mona showed another group how to use Microsoft Word presentation templates as tools for organizing written work. While most of the students were on computers, others were working at desks on their book analysis report.

As students worked in small groups, I saw a good deal of peer-helping. Students helped each other locate useful websites, figure out how to use Kid Pix or Power Point, and figure out what to write for their book report. While taking notes during Mona’s mini-lecture, students also occasionally helped each other figure out what they should write down, and where. Mona commented, “That’s why I like putting them in groups. Cause they are learning from the others. And they’re helping each other. . . .They all want to be teachers!” (April 22, 2004).

Linking her science and language arts curriculum gave Mona a way to design curriculum that took big ideas into depth, from diverse cultural perspectives, engaging students in learning and thinking across the spectrum of Bloom’s taxonomy. Mona mentioned that earlier, when teaching rocks, she used the same planning strategy: “When we did the rocks, we had [Native American] stories that went with it, about the rocks, and how they picked their territory to live in, the kind of housing they developed according to the environment of the rocks, and the landscaping” (April 22, 2004). In other words, by linking rocks and minerals with Native American stories, the class could explore the relationship between the natural environment and human cultural artifacts such as housing. In this way, she could work with factual material in the science standards, but make that material meaningful by connecting it with concepts familiar to students, and with the reading, writing, research, and presentation skills they were developing in language arts.
 
From C. Sleeter (2005). Un-Standardizing Curriculum. Teachers College Press.