HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Meira Levinson: 'We have to find a way to localize education ... while maintaining a common set of high standards and expectations.' (Staff photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

Levinson's worlds collided, however, on a bus ride across Atlanta four years ago. She and her middle school students, who were all African American, were returning from a quiz bowl at a school on the other side of town, where they had suffered a resounding defeat by the mostly white team there. But Levinson was less interested in discussing their loss than in probing one question: Had her students understood why the rival team laughed when they missed identifying Kurt Cobain as the leader of the band Nirvana, instead pegging him a Wimbledon winner?

They hadn't, she learned, because none of her 35 students had heard of Kurt Cobain or Nirvana. Levinson tried to help them bridge the cultural gap. "Those white kids all know who Kurt Cobain is the way all African Americans know who Master P is," she told them, naming the hip-hop artist who topped the charts that year.

Her students protested the analogy. "Dr. Levinson, you don't get it," they told her. "Everyone knows who Master P is!"

Mainstream knowledge, multicultural perspectives

This battle of the cultural bands led, in part, to the book Levinson is now writing, marrying her classroom experience with political theory, the subject of her doctoral degree. "I don't care if they never know who Kurt Cobain is, or Nirvana, or grunge," she said at her Radcliffe Fellow's Presentation Wednesday afternoon (Nov. 12). "But it does matter that they know about other mainstream knowledge. ... That's what's going to be politically empowering, that's what's going to be economically empowering."

And because mainstream knowledge is not defined by the poor African-American neighborhood her students call home, but rather by an American mainstream that remains very white and middle class, Levinson wondered about her own school's multicultural curriculum, which she described as "really, really inclusive of African Americans and the African-American experience."

Surely it hit some of the goals of multicultural education - righting the historical record, boosting students' self-esteem by celebrating their culture, enhancing their interest in the material by making it relevant to their lives - but it seemed to come up short on others. Was this Afrocentric multicultural education helping her students achieve autonomy and civic and economic empowerment?

"If I wanted to get my students in Atlanta to be politically empowered, they needed to learn the cultural norms and behaviors and references that are true not only of the black world in which they live, but of the white world by which they are surrounded," she said. "That wasn't happening in our school. In this case, multicultural education might be, counterintuitively, as much about infusing white perspectives into the curriculum ... as it is about incorporating minority voices, beliefs, and practices."

While the audience sat uncomfortably with this idea, Levinson continued to prod the sacred cow of multiculturalism. She cited an Iowa high school that is more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white and an elementary school in San Francisco whose diversity includes a high percentage of Samoans. What does multicultural education look like at those schools? Few would disagree, she noted, that the Iowans should learn about the culture and achievements of African Americans and Hispanics, even though there may not be any in their midst, and that Samoan history, while relevant to many of the San Francisco students, should likely not be prominent in the curriculum there.

At the McCormack Middle School in Dorchester, where Levinson currently teaches, her students' identification conflicts with the standard ethnic check boxes that strive to define our population. For her students, Vietnamese, Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, or Cape Verdean supersede the tidy categories of "Asian," "African American," or "Hispanic."

"When I teach about African Americans, am I doing anything for my Cape Verdean students?" she queried, noting that these students from the island off Africa do not define themselves as African American.

The need to localize education

While Levinson's lecture drilled deep into the goals and aims of multicultural education, her forthcoming book, working-titled "Making a Difference: Civic and Multicultural Education in an Age of Segregation and Diversity" (Metropolitan Press), will look at both civic and multicultural education, particularly in de facto segregated schools such as her Atlanta middle school or the socioeconomically segregated McCormack.

In the book, Levinson will attempt to synthesize what she described as two opposing schools of thought in education today. The first champions standards-based assessment, claiming that all students should be held to high standards and high expectations; with the No Child Left Behind act, this approach is currently very much in favor. A second, now weaker theory, maintains that all children and all schools are unique and their education should be adjusted to their circumstances to foster the highest achievement.

"The problem is, these two approaches generally aren't talking to each other these days," said Levinson. As her examples from Atlanta, Iowa, San Francisco, and Dorchester illustrate, the most effective civic and multicultural education would look different at these very different schools. While her Atlanta students needed to learn to "code-switch" - to adapt to the cultural and linguistic equivalents of Kurt Cobain, hopefully without abandoning Master P - the Iowans likely needed a firmer footing in African-American and Hispanic studies.

"We have to find a way to localize education, to make education specific to the context in which children are growing up and being educated while maintaining a common set of high standards and expectations," Levinson said.

Joining a national conversation

Levinson has taken a luxurious two-year leave of absence from teaching to write this book. "Being able to analyze systematically, in a philosophical way, some of the questions that come up in teaching is really important and is something that most teachers don't have time to do and even more teachers don't have the training to do," she said.

As she nears the end of her Radcliffe Fellowship, she's surprised at how "phenomenal" her experience here has been. She anticipated the benefits of a quiet office, a library card, and an undergraduate research assistant but couldn't imagine the impact of the fellows community.

"I didn't expect that so many of the people outside of my discipline would end up influencing what I thought about and what I ended up writing about," she said, ticking off the myriad specialists who had commented on her work: videographer, painter, social psychologist, historian, political scientist, composer, and computer scientist, to name a few. Their perspectives will be valuable, she said, as she works to ensure that her book has a broad appeal. She hopes it reaches beyond academics to teachers, policy-makers, and concerned parents and citizens.

"There is a national conversation about what it means to be American, about citizenship, about patriotism ... about how we come together - do our differences divide us or unite us?" she said. "This book, I'm hoping, will be part of that conversation."