“OK, I Get It! Now Tell Me How to Do It!”: Why We Can’t Just Tell You How to Do Critical Multicultural Education

As educators who work with preservice teachers on critical multicultural education, we often struggle with our students’ desire for us to provide them with the how-to’s of multicultural education—a kind of “answer list.” In this paper, we share the analogies we have developed and found effective in explaining to our students why the list that they imagine not only doesn’t guarantee success, but could actually result in undermining core principles of critical multicultural education.