Multiracial children, who are the offspring of multiple racial unions, have unique needs which are possibly not being met in the schools because, among other things, they are racially categorized on the basis of "one race only" on school forms. This monoracial categorization has become a visible symbol that acts as a foundation for a much wider array of experiences and situations in our schools and communities which affect the racial self-image of multiracial children. This incomplete categorization affects awareness and funding for supportive measures which should be available to them. The basic question which this dissertation raises is the question of whether the needs of interracial children are being met in the schools. In order to study this question, the school's racial categorization procedures as predominant cultural forms were investigated by way of its instruments--school forms, curriculum, resources, cultural programming and school material culture. In order to answer these questions, this inquiry utilized predominantly two methods of data collection: (1) documentation analysis of government and school forms and (2) semi-structured interviews with teachers as key informants. To establish a focus for the direction of the research, a theory of radical pedagogy was used to critically analyze the role of the schools in fostering or obstructing a more positive racial identity in interracial children and a theory of classification to provide a framework to analyze both the nature and language of our racial categorization procedures and its' instruments in the schools. This dissertation found that the schools do unknowingly make the normal racial identity development process problematic for at least some of those students who might want to select more than one racial identity. Multiracial children's invisibility in the schools' racial categorization procedures mirrors a wider range of their invisibility in school curriculum, books, cultural programs, class discussions, and other artifacts of school culture. Therefore, before support for the multiracial child can come into being, there needs to be an alteration in the classification of multiracial children.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9076 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Chiong, Jane Ayers |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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