Reimagining Multicultural Education for Students’ Diverse World
Dr. Barry M. Goldenberg is a Lecturer in the Education Sciences and MAT + Credential programs at the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, where he teachers over 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students each year. A historian of education by training, his scholarship has explored the history of Black schools and multicultural education as well as community-based history instruction in K-12 schools today. To learn more about Dr. Goldenberg, please visit his personal website.
When English teacher Sandy Campbell walked into his classroom each day — with ever-changing chairs and movable blackboards serving as walls — the success of his lesson depended on his success in engaging his students. “There was never a sense of ‘I’m the teacher so I know,’” Campbell explained. “It was more a matter of ‘There’s a lot to know, and we’ll learn it together.’”
Campbell was one of many teachers at Harlem Prep: an independent community school that existed from 1967 to 1974 in Harlem that sent over 750 non-traditional students to college. Known for its neighborhood engagement, its open-space design in a refurbished supermarket, and, most importantly, its multicultural philosophy, Harlem Prep became a highly celebrated school during this noteworthy era.
For over a decade, I worked to excavate the history of this extraordinary institution for my book Strength through Diversity: Harlem Prep and the Rise of Multiculturalism, interviewing dozens of former students and teachers, reading hundreds of periodicals, and analyzing thousands of documents ranging from curricula to memos to student poetry. Through the stories of students, teachers, and administrators, I reveal how Harlem Prep’s multicultural philosophy — woven into each school component from its classroom design to its community partnerships to its curriculum and pedagogy — led not only to educational rejuvenation for its pupils, but for an entire community.
Harlem Prep’s leaders recognized the importance of preparing adolescents for the diverse world they inhabited — a sentiment even truer today. Its entire educational program was premised on the belief that the school’s diversity was its greatest asset. Despite having a majority Black population and a school culture steeped in Black pride, educators taught students to appreciate people of all ideologies, religions, social classes, and racial/ethnic backgrounds, particularly — and especially — within each group. The school offered a genuine form of multicultural education that we have seemingly forgotten today: where the cultures and identities of students are celebrated, while explicitly never demanding uniformity of one viewpoint. Instead, the school taught students to see the humanity in, and find love for, each other across difference.
And key to this innovative multicultural program? Literacy — multi-modal and expansive. Literacy was the doorway to the world for a population of students who had been pushed out of their previous institutions. Not coincidentally, the English department was by far the school’s largest, reflecting administrators’ mandate to strengthen students’ traditional academic literacies. But there was also an emphasis on developing students’ literacies of the world, echoing Paulo Freire. The school’s headmaster even wrote in 1973 that students must be “trained to cope with the accelerative thrust of technology, advertising and propaganda” — what scholars like Ernest Morrell later defined as critical media literacy.
Ultimately, Strength through Diversity illustrates what it looks like to prioritize multiliteracies and educate with rigor, but still do so with kindness, empathy, and love. Because, as the school’s leaders knew, to build community and to exist in love is to have hope in the people around us. Perhaps we can still learn from their example today.
