Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 awful May 21, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Hated it. Could not believe I was forced to endure this text for an entire course. Totally insulting and biased.
 Biased! March 25, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
While this book may contain some good information on multicultrual education I find it difficult to get past the bias presented in it. Based on statements like
"A crucial fact in understanding racism is that whites see themselves as superior to persons and groups of color, and as a result exercise their power to prevent people of color from securing the prestige, power, and privilege held by whites."
and
"Whites go through a developmental stages as they develop their racial identity and abandon racism."
The authors seem to presume that all whites are racist, power hungry, pigs. Knowing that such a generalization is patently false how can I trust the content describing peoples of other cultural backgrounds.
Waste of time December 3, 2005
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
While I can't imagine anybody buying this book unless required to for a class, let me warn you away just in case. It's bad. I mean really bad. The writing is completely without any sort of character or flair. It's only point seems to be that white men are all super lucky and they suck. Personal agenda by the authors, perhaps? Anyway, if it is a required text for a class, complain to the instructor. I wish I had.
 wonderful condition September 7, 2005
0 out of 10 found this review helpful
The book was what I had ordered and the condition of the book was perfect. Thanks for the fast delivery.
Very dissapointed April 8, 2003
28 out of 31 found this review helpful
I am an undergrad, and I was ready to compose a lament upon reading this work. I can't imagine why grad students would be exposed to this book, it's not very good. The authors are tackling a very real problem - given the pluralism prevalent in most public (and many private) classrooms, how does an educator go about maneuvring within that classroom to successfully engage and instruct all it's members? Good question. The book attempts to tackle the areas of class, race, gender, exceptionality, religion, language, and age; they want to illuminate the nature of these topics and explore the issues involved in approaching and including them in a multicultural classroom. Unfortunately, even though they divide the various demographics represented in our American pluralistic classrooms well, they rarely get into dealing with this problem very effectively. The prolegomena they have (the first chapter) was supposed to explore what we mean by "culture". They co-opt Goodenough's definition, "a way of perceiving, believing, evaluating, and behaving," and that's, ironically, good enough as a starting point for trying to wrap your mind around these issues. Unfortunately, they immediately endorse a hyper-relativist perspective regarding the legitemacy of various ways of "perceiving, believing, evaluating, and behaving," which doesn't really set them up to grapple with this problem. Basically, they never provide a foundation of unity from which various groups can be included in a pluralistic classroom other than via their notion of democracy, defined through "cultural relativism", "social justice" and "equality". Though they try, there are no satisfactory explanations given to legitemate these ideas. They should have stuck to discussing how educators can effectively teach in classrooms where the students have a variety of worldviews/cultures than dabbling as amateurs in philosophy, anthropology, and politics. This book is, practically speaking, worthless. Because their epistemological, anthropological and political assumptions color _everything_ that they say for the rest of the book, if you're not familiar with these areas, you'll never be able to meaningfully engage with this book, whether you agree or disagree. These assumptions of the authors guide the portraits they paint and evaluations they make of culture and the present pluralism, as well as informing their advice on how we ought to navigate a pluralist classroom as educators. I suggest reading a bit in philosophy before trying to tackle this problem. Routledge has a great series to familiarize yourself with philosophical problems, I especially suggest their book on _Ethics_ by Harry Gensler. It is simply written, and very practical. That is a _perfect_ place to start figuring out how to deal with these practical (and partly theoretical) problems without introducing a "solution" that only brings more bad weather in the future.
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