Reimagining Race in Education: A New Paradigm from Psychology

This article calls attention to the paradigms underlying current approaches to multicultural education and expands on them with contributions from the field of psychology. The first section introduces a typology of philosophical assumptions that has been used to classify approaches to multiculturalism in the field of psychology. The typology classifies assumptions as universal, ubiquitous, traditional, race-based, or pan-national. The second section discusses racial identity theory as an important psychological component of a race-based perspective for understanding race and culture in education. The third section describes how racial identity affects educational thought and practice.