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Scholar of Multicultural Education to Speak Wednesday at MU

A professor who has been studying multicultural education for about 40 years will speak at two MU events Wednesday.

The professor, Christine Sleeter, used to be president of the National Association for Multicultural Education and has written more than 140 articles and two novels. Sleeter also created the Master of Arts in Education program at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Multiple people and groups have pushed for increased diversity in the wake of the fall 2015 protests. In MU’s five-year strategic plan, which was approved by the UM System Board of Curators last week, the university plans to increase faculty from underrepresented groups to 15 percent in 2023 from eight percent in 2017.

In an interview Tuesday, Sleeter said everyone can bring something to the table and can work harder to understand diversity more than we currently do.

The responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

Can you describe what multicultural education means?

There isn’t one way of thinking about it. When people ask me what I do, often I describe my work as preparing teachers to teach in culturally, racially, ethnically diverse schools but also with a consciousness, wherever they’re teaching, of living in a diverse society that has historically been structured around race and racism, social class and capitalism, and patriarchy and to learn how to work in classrooms in ways that work toward equity and justice.

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