Multiracial Curriculum Perspectives

Multiraciality is a historical reality that has existed as long as the racializing of any group, community, tribe, nation, or continent. Multiraciality is a silenced reality that has been informed by history, politics, geography, law, research, scholarship, media, popular culture, and education. In turn, the same fields have been informed by multiraciality. Multiracial curriculum perspectives provide key historical understandings to contextualize the present multiracial scholarship around curriculum. The work within multiracial studies is research addressing the implications of people identifying as two or more races. The study of multiraciality outside psychology is methodologically nonlinear, qualitative, storied, personal, and operating “in-between” multiple theoretical orientations. This type of research is not acknowledged in academia as influential enough to garner considerable attention and value. Prior to 2014, the research and scholarship associated with multiraciality was often dispersed across disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and public policy. Historically, the two prominent fields that orientate to the cross-/interdisciplinary field of multiracial studies are psychology, where multiracial identity development is explored, and policies studies with the multiracial movement and the addition of “mark-all-that-apply” in the U.S. Census. Understanding multiracial curriculum perspectives requires a historical perspective to contextualize 21st-century discourse and scholarship around the multiracial curriculum. The use of 21st-century figures brings to the surface historical understandings germane to synthesizing what it might mean to theorize multiraciality in the curriculum. An analysis of multiracial encounters in P-12 schools, universities, and educational institutions exemplify how generations living in the 21st century are making sense of multiracial identities and curriculums.