July 31, 2006
Gorski, Paul. “Multicultural Pavilion.” 2006. EdChange. 31 Jul 2006.
www.edchange.org/multicultural
This website, designed by Paul Gorski, an Education Professor at Hamline University, is a useful resource for teachers of all levels and incorporates a wide variety of classroom materials and critical articles on race and education. Gorski’s “Multicultural Pavilion” includes links to diversity handouts, awareness activities, speeches and quotations dealing with multiculturalism in the classroom, articles about multicultural education as well as a link to a listserv of hundreds of educators interested in multicultural education.
This site does an especially good job of addressing the issue of the “digital divide,” or the current disparity between predominantly White schools, which tend to have access to computers and the Internet, and schools with a high percentage of Black and Latina/o students, which tend not to have access to these technologies. As Gorski points out in his article “Understanding the Digital Divide from a Multicultural Education Framework” (featured on the “EdTech” link on the website), this divide includes not only access to technology, but also the way in which teachers incorporate new technologies into their classrooms. In predominantly White schools, Gorski argues, teachers use computers to engage students in critical thinking activities, whereas in schools with a large percentage of Black and Latino/a students, teachers tend to use computers for a skills-and-drills approach to learning (Gorski).
Gorski concludes his article on the digital divide by pointing out that, “As information technology becomes more and more interwoven with all aspects of life and well-being in the United States, it becomes equally urgent to employ the complexities and critiques of multicultural education theory and practice to the problem of the digital divide. It is the next–the present–equity issue in schools and larger society with enormous social justice implications.” If this is so, then the Multicultural Pavilion itself represents an attempt to narrow the digital divide by raising awareness of the issues of technology and multiculturalism in schools and by building an online community of educators who can engage in productive dialogue about these issues.