Teaching Guides

Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education, and Staff Development

Teaching Guide. Edited by Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart and Margo Okazawa-Rey. 2006. 436 pages.
Guide for teachers, administrators, and parents shows how to teach from a multicultural perspective that goes beyond the superficial “heroes and holidays” approach.

bhhThis award winning interdisciplinary guide for teachers, administrators, students, and parents offers lessons and readings that show how to:

  • Analyze the roots of racism
  • Investigate the impact of racism on all our lives, our families, and our communities
  • Examine the relationship between racism and other forms of oppression such as sexism, classism, and heterosexism
  • Learn to work to dismantle racism in our schools, communities, and the wider society.

Beyond Heroes and Holidays has sold over 55,000 copies to date and is used as a core text in teacher education courses.

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Find free downloadable lessons and other resources at the Zinn Education Project website, search by theme, time period, or resource type.

Reviews

Beyond Heroes and Holidays is a find. It provides a rich array of resources, models and strategies for promoting multicultural education. And it can be used by all teachers, new as well as experienced, K-12 as well as university-level. This book is for anyone who has either wondered, ‘How can I incorporate multicultural education into my classroom?’ More. . .  — David Stone, Assistant Professor in Counselor Education at Ohio University, Democracy and Education

Beyond Heroes and Holidays is a must-have for educators at all levels. . . The editors use the philosophy of critical pedagogy, pioneered by the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire to guide the book. Infused within critical pedagogy is a focus on race and class-based inequity in education that analyzes multicultural education through multiples lenses and from multiple levels: the individual and personal (micro); community (meso); and the societal (macro).

I personally found this refreshing because too often misuses of what some define as “multicultural education” avoid serious analyses of race and racism in schools and society. If not careful, multicultural education has the potential to be coopted by naive and sometimes well-intentioned educators who have not critically examined their relative positions within a personal, and global context. For many of them, unfortunately, multicultural education is only about heroes, holidays, ethnic foods, and cultural attire, and devoid of serious discussions of race and class-based inequities. . .

I highly suggest this book for beginning and advanced multicultural educators, schoolteachers, and college professors across disciplines, as well as activists and intellectuals outside of formal educational institutions.  — Jerome E. Morris is a member of Edliberation and assistant professor in the Department of Social Foundations of Education at The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia

ISBN: 9781878554178 | Teaching for Change

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