The case of Paul Gorski..
Sampling:
Racial and Gender Identity Development in White Male
Multicultural Educators and Facilitators:
Toward Individual Processes of Self-development
by Paul Gorski
University of Virginia
April 1998
© Copyright by
Paul C. Gorski
All Rights Reserved
May 1998
CHAPTER ONE
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Background
I am a white male multicultural awareness facilitator.
As such, I facilitate activities and discussions focused on
multicultural issues and identifiers including race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class,
ability status, and religion. In these forums, I request
that individuals describe from their personal experience
what it means to be "female," "Jewish," "Latino," or other
identification descriptors. It is through facilitating the
exchange of these experiences and perspectives and
advocating for the introspective process of exploring them
that I work to build an atmosphere conducive to
introspection, self-development, and increased awareness of
a discussion's participants.
9 comments:
Speechless.
This gentleman is a leading light in the multicultural movement. A major textbook publisher has given him a platform.
Personally, I don't understand why it surprises people when crappy writers write crap.
ag,
What caught my attention was the outlandish, narcissistic topic. Who cares how MC facilitators acquire an R&G identity. Is this the expertise needed to teach in ed school? It goes to show you what a joke ed schools are. The thought that these clowns have a near-monopoly on licensure can make you puke.
I don't disagree. I was just struck by the bad, bad writing. It's this pedantic jibberish that, IMHO, precludes paying attention to whatever nebulous content it purports to contain.
It's disgraceful when people who write such pure crap set themselves up as authorities for our kids.
Ed school, by the way, is indeed wasteful. I believe, though, that education does not have a monoply on impractical instruction. I followed a friend through nursing school who now says she has no time to think about any of that stuff, being too busy working, and a lawyer friend of mine says his job has little to do with the preparation he was forced to endure.
When I got my license, I needed 12 credits of education, none of which proved useful. They weren't particularly challenging either. Student teaching can help, with a good mentor. By the time I student taught, I'd already landed a job, and did so while collecting a salary. My AP got credit for being my mentor, and earned a free course at Queens College for doing nothing whatsoever.
I'll say this, not for the first time--Certification doesn't enusre a good teacher, but hiring those who can't attain it, a la NYC, guarantees bad ones. Any native English speaker who fails the LAST test, even once, is no one I'd want teaching my kid.
Real preparation, though, would be very helpful to real teachers.
Maybe you're right. I don't know about certification in other states, but here "alternate certification" invariably means lower standards. I think we need higher standards, to weed out not only those who fail tests, but also writers like the one Instructivist cited.
New York City used to have a Board of Examiners, which administered both oral and written tests, and issued a license above and beyond the state certification. It was required, the tests were challenging, and you really had to know your subject to pass. It's a shame we've gone from the highest standard in the state to the lowest.
I have never been impressed by the intellectual strength of multiculturalists. Intellectually they are equivalent to monkeys throwing crap from trees onto ground dwellers. Because they can get away with it.
All you racist, sexist, homophobes--line up for sensitivity training!
At some point, McGraw-Hill provided Gorski with a platform for his Multicultural Supersite. Now they seem to have scaled back a bit : http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/education/multi_new/
It's pretty outrageous that a major educational publisher would ally itself so closely with the fringe: http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/initial.html
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