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Aditive Approach

Decent Essays

The United States is full of different ethnicities and races with different cultures and are accustomed to a variety of different behaviors and ways of learning. It is essential that the curriculum within the Nation’s schools, colleges, and universities are reflected to the ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity within the United States. Schools, colleges and universities are using various approaches to inspire ethnic content into the curriculum, including the contributions, additive, transformation, and social action approaches. To respond adequately to the ethnic realities with the nation and the world, the curriculum should be transformed and should help students to develop decision making and social action skills. According to the book …show more content…

This approach allows the teacher to put ethnic content into school curriculum without restructuring it. It is a long process that takes up time, effort, training, and rethinking of the curriculum and its purposes, nature, and goals. An example would be February is Black history month and March is Women’s history month, basically holidays around the world. The additive approach can be the first phase in a transformative curriculum and to integrate in with ethnic content, perspectives, and frames of reference (Banks, 1989). However, this approach shares several disadvantages with the contributions approach. Its most important shortcoming is that it usually results in the viewing of ethnic content from the perspectives of mainstream historians, writers, artists, and scientists because it does not involve a restructuring of the …show more content…

Major goals of instruction in this approach are to educate students for social criticism and social change and to teach them decision-making skills. For example, promoting human rights and peace at schools and working to ensure that the schools building and activities do not harm the environment. To empower students and help them obtain political efficacy, the school must help them become reflective social critics and skilled participants in social change (Banks 1989). The traditional goal of school has been to socialize students so they would accept unquestioningly the existing ideologies, institutions, and practices within society and the nation-state.

I believe that each approach stated by James Banks is important in its own way and do not over power one another. The four approaches to the integration of ethnic content into the curriculum I described above are often mixed and blended in actual teaching situations. An important goal that all of these approaches share are teaching about racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity which should be to empower students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to participate in civil action that will help transform our world and enhance the possibility for human

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