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By Henry Millstein, PhD., Content Manager and Analyst.
This opinion appeared in the online journal The Muslim World.
Since the late 1980s, education advocates have pushed for more multicultural representation in instructional materials. The multicultural education movement emphasized a pedagogical paradigm that shifted away from tolerance towards acceptance, respect, and solidarity emerging from multiple perspectives.[1] Indeed, the multicultural education model, developed partly from the ideas of Freire, was premised upon the need for educators to eradicate notions of privilege from teaching approaches and instructional content.[2] Moreover, it required educators to demonstrate reflexivity that acknowledges racial, class, and gender privilege in classroom settings. That paradigm expanded to include religion and sexuality as well.[3]
However, while multicultural education became a prevailing call among education and cultural studies scholars, it has not been systematically implemented in classrooms and instructional content across the country, in part because of the politicization of the term multiculturalism and also because of the different ways various scholars and activists conceptualized multicultural education in theory and practice. Moreover, despite a rapidly diversifying K–12 population across the country, instructional materials publishers have been slow to implement changes to the way historically underrepresented groups have been represented. Since September 11, 2001, the ways in which Islam and Muslim‐Americans are represented has been a unique and persistent challenge for both diversity advocates and educators seeking to find more inclusivity in their instruction. As Hutchins‐Viroux argues, 9/11 perhaps exacerbated trends already taking place among textbook publishers in response to the demands of the American right.[4] In highlighting the case of Texas, she notes:
“It would be an overstatement to attribute this rightward shift entirely to the attacks of 9/11, as the Christian Right was mobilizing even before 2000 in ways that indicated it might gain strength, and publishers were already practicing self‐censorship as they sought to gain the approval of influential conservative groups. Whatever the cause, the 2003 textbooks adhered so closely to conservative wishes that it is clear that the right was ahead in the culture wars.”[5]
The term Islamophobia, coined long before 2001, refers to Othering in discourse about Muslims.[6] Drawing upon Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism,[7] scholars and activists have defined Islamophobia as a rhetorical othering of Muslims that is often translated into applied xenophobia. As the political climate shifted after 9/11, textbook representations of Islam came under increased scrutiny. As a result, Muslim‐American (and Arab‐American) groups grew increasingly vocal in countering misrepresentations in instructional content, working at both the state and local level to help change the dominant narrative on Islam. The work of Muslim groups, particularly on issues of cultural fluency and accurate pedagogy, became a paradigm for other communities as well, notably Hindus and Sikhs. While some issues emerged among the groups over the past decade, the broader effort of constructive engagement has shaped a new era of Hindu‐Muslim discourse and helped to form alliances to ensure that long marginalized religious minorities can make long‐term and sustainable reforms in combating Islamophobia and Hinduphobia in America’s classrooms.
In this essay, we highlight some of the key efforts—including textbook reform in California during the mid‐2000s and in Texas in the early to mid‐2010s—to show how Hindu and Muslim‐Americans worked together to supplement education about world religions in the context of social studies and world history, to enhance understanding of world religions and the diversity of peoples who follow them, and to help move paradigms away from the essentialism so common in teaching about religion. The article also seeks to map out additional areas in which marginalized groups such as Hindus and Muslims can build lasting coalitions to ensure long‐term transformation in the way their faiths are depicted—and how faith‐practitioner students are treated—in classrooms.
The Oriental Gaze, Privileged Pedagogy, and the Construction of Xenophobic Education Paradigms
For generations, Hinduism and Islam in the West were (and continue to be) discursively mapped through a lens of power and privilege. Hindus and Muslims were racialized and treated as Others in Western popular culture and in public policy. American institutionalized racism such as limits on Hindu and Muslim religious practice, mistreatment of immigrants at points of entry such as Angel Island,[8] the Bhagat Singh Thind citizenship case,[9] and the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act[10] posited the identity of Hindus and Muslims (and Sikhs) as irreconcilable with an American identity. The disenfranchisement of Hindus and Muslims in the public sphere was reified by popular culture representations, particularly in film, where Hindus were portrayed as colonial lackeys and Muslims (often in the aesthetic of Arab sheikhs) were depicted as barbarians. As Wingfield and Karaman note, the stereotypes were so pervasive that they were incorporated as fact, particularly in textbooks.[11]
The power relations between the West and its others, often affirmed through the subtle (or overt) marginalization or patronization of specific groups, were at the heart of Said’s notion that the Oriental gaze continues to factor prominently in such dynamics. Said claimed that groups such as Arabs are Othered to fulfill the West’s preconceived notions of their exoticism and inferiority, and that this had a profound impact on cultural discourse.
“The boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and strength, the range of work done, the kinds of characteristic features ascribed to the Orient: all these testify to a willed imaginative and geographic division made between East and West, and lived through during many centuries.”[12]
Orientalism became a useful theory to explain the depictions of non‐Europeans in the West, and how Arabs, Muslims, South Asians and Hindus became the subjects of stereotypes, caricatures, and vilification.[13] Scholars such as Rizvi and Lingard note that Orientalism shaped education practice, too, as textbook publishers and curriculum developers privileged a European (and Christian) worldview, leaving other groups omitted, marginalized, and vilified within American classrooms.[14] Similarly, educators had long relied on tropes that exoticized groups such as Hindus and Muslims, depicting them as other‐worldly or irreconcilable with the idea of Western civilization. For example, Muslims were depicted as constantly committing violence, while Hindus—judged from a Judeo‐Christian paradigm of religion—were consistently depicted as being “backward,” reifying long‐held preconceptions of Western superiority over its Others. In many ways, they harkened to a colonial mentality shaped by “a peculiar amalgam of science, politics, and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non‐European portions of mankind.”[15]
The critique of what some teacher activists called privileged pedagogy developed two educator‐driven movements: critical pedagogy and multicultural education. Drawing from Freire, who emphasized “critical consciousness,” the development of critical pedagogy sought to move away from the Eurocentric paradigm that Western education was modeled after. Critical pedagogy was embraced by teacher educators who sought to move to a more inclusive model of teaching, particularly on issues related to and about minority groups. But some scholars noted that critical pedagogy always functioned reactively to constructions of these groups and failed to dislodge a white‐male‐centric view of education.[16] Moreover, critical pedagogy, as Burbeles and Berk note, “would never find it sufficient to reform the habits of thought of thinkers, however effectively, without challenging and transforming the institutions, ideologies, and relations that engender distorted, oppressed thinking in the first place ‐ not as an additional act beyond the pedagogical one, but as an inseparable part of it”.[17]
Similarly, multicultural education developed as an effort to include marginalized groups within curriculum and content. Multicultural education efforts sought to stem the negative portrayals of minority communities, and after the 9/11/01 attacks, multicultural perspectives became more prominent in an effort to combat a rise in Islamophobia and xenophobic discourse in the public sphere. However, some scholars such as Prashad have critiqued the multicultural lens, arguing that it continues to privilege a Eurocentric position and has marginalized groups often fighting to be represented on terms that are already set for them.[18] Others such as Mahmood Mamdani have noted that multiculturalism, at least in its political iteration, also idealizes model minority depictions.[19] In other words, the prototypical “good Muslim” depiction is predicated upon the idea that good Muslims are somehow exceptional (and that most are bad).
Another important component in the way Hinduism and Islam are depicted has to do with how both religions—and their practitioners—have been racialized. While Hindus and Muslims in the United States come from a broad spectrum of cultural and ethnic backgrounds (though the majority of Hindus and a significant portion of Muslims in America are of South Asian descent), their racialization as irreconcilable Others has contributed to both their perceptions in classrooms and in their own communities[20] As Joshi notes in her study of Indian‐American Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, “the religious discrimination experienced by the research participants is embedded in the systemic privilege and dominance Christianity enjoys at all levels of U.S. society. In other words, religious discrimination is an element of religious oppression.”[21] The racialization of religious groups such as Muslims and Hindus began before September 11, 2001, but in the aftermath of the rise in Islamophobia and xenophobia, educators were forced to revisit the way both faiths were depicted in curriculum and instructional content.
In many ways, the cultural climate in the United States in the early 2000s also created awareness among Hindu and Muslim‐Americans about the way their religions were represented in education and public discourse. Groups such as the Council on Islamic Education and the Uberoi Foundation Institute for Curriculum Advancement conducted lengthy analyses of disparities in textbooks, and found that both Islamophobia and Hinduphobia, respectively, were commonplace in textbooks and curriculum wording. As we discuss in the next section, the depictions of Hinduism and Islam in instructional content and curriculum, drawn heavily from Orientalist paradigms, became an important rallying point for both communities in asserting their right to define themselves accurately.
Case Studies in Hindu and Muslim Involvement in Changing Educational Narratives
According to a 2015 Pew study, Islam and Hinduism are the country’s third and fourth largest religious groups, respectively, with steady rises in population over the past decade. Though both groups have been part of the American social fabric for centuries, their presence in American textbooks and curriculum has been marginal.
A 1994 study of K–12 history and social studies textbooks by the Middle East Studies Association and the Middle East Outreach Council (following on an earlier study in 1974) showed commonly used textbooks to be woefully inadequate and inaccurate in their portrayal of Middle Eastern people and of Muslims, often reinforcing common prejudicial stereotypes.[22] Islam was generally portrayed as militant and violent, and peoples of the Middle East as nomadic desert‐dwellers.
In the late 1990s, the state of California began revising its content standards and curriculum frameworks. However, presentation of both Islam and Hinduism continued to rely on archaic and outdated descriptions of the religions, while placing more emphasis on Christianity. According to his doctoral dissertation, Bradley Fogo, who is now part of the Stanford History Education Group and the National History Center the California Department of Education (CDE) solicited feedback from politically motivated groups and individuals in the wording of its curriculum revisions. Those individuals included David Barton, a right‐wing Christian activist who has long been under scrutiny for his xenophobic and homophobic writings. According to Fogo, groups like Hindus were excluded from the backchannel input, and the CDE ignored the recommendations of its own scholarly committee members in developing standards that were immediately considered outdated and inaccurate by most historians.
Thus, public school curriculum, even in a liberal state like California, often does little to counter prejudicial images of Muslims, Hindus, and other adherents of minority religions, and may in fact reinforce them. Such prejudices are still endemic among the general public. Islamophobia and anti‐Muslim bigotry, for instance, remain widespread: according to polls by Zogby Associates, the percentage of Americans viewing Islam favorably dropped from 35% in 2010 to 27% in 2014.[23] This goes along with findings that 42% of Americans approve of law enforcement profiling Muslims and Arabs (whom most Americans assume, incorrectly, are all Muslims), while only 34% are confident that an American Muslim could be trusted to work in an important government post. A Pew Research poll found that Americans view Muslims more “coldly” than any other religious group, including atheists.[24]
Islamic Networks Group (ING) has long been involved in challenging Islamophobia and building positive images of Muslims and people of other religions in schools and other venues. Its approach has been two‐pronged:
- Educational presentations on Islam and interfaith panels on five major religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism), providing students not only basic religious literacy but also face‐to‐face interaction with practicing representatives of these religions, which, according to social scientific research, is the most effective antidote to prejudice; and
- Cultural diversity seminars for teachers and school administrators that train educators to work appropriately and sensitively with Muslim students.
ING recently has added a third channel for outreach to students through youth workshops that increase the Islamic literacy of Muslim students and equip them to educate their peers and teachers about their faith and to stand up to teasing and bullying and misrepresentation in curriculum.
ING conducts attitudinal surveys before and after its Islamic presentations to middle and high school audiences. These provide substantial evidence that these presentations are effective in reducing prejudice. For instance, after an ING presentation, the percentage of those believing that Islam promotes terrorism falls by 75% and of those believing that Muslims view women as inferior drops by 70%; the percentage of those knowing that Muslims “have long been a part of the history of this country” increases by over 43% and of those seeing American Muslims as “Americans like myself” rises by almost 50%.
ING’s interfaith panel presentations, bringing Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Christians together, not only provide basic understanding of five world religions but model interfaith cooperation and friendship. ING administers open‐text questionnaires after these presentations, and one of the most frequent responses to the question, “What moved, interested, or surprised you most from the presentation today?” is that respondents are surprised to see five people with different religious convictions working and presenting together not only with an absence of conflict and argument but with obvious warmth toward one another. While these evaluation questionnaires do not provide quantifiable evidence, their tenor indicates that ING’s interfaith panels succeed in expanding students’ vision of what is possible in our multi‐cultural and multi‐religious world.
The new INGYouth program can also document evidence of positive outcomes. After a workshop:
- The number of students who stated they would alert a superior or a friend if they were bullied rose by 82%, while the number who stated they would ignore the incident dropped by 60%;
- The number of students who stated they would report bullying against them to an Islamic organization rose by 100%, while those who said they would alert a parent rose by 55%;
- The number of students who viewed education as one of the ways to promote a more positive view of Islam and Muslims at school rose by 45%;
- Students reported, using a scale of 1 to 5, a 19% increase in their knowledge and comfort level answering difficult questions about Islam and a 22% increase in confidence in their ability to give a classroom presentation about Islam if asked to do so.
Since the aim of the program is to provide students with the knowledge and self‐confidence needed to confront anti‐Muslim bigotry among their peers, these results are convincing evidence of success.
ING has also collaborated with the Hindu community in ensuring that both religions and their practitioners are fairly and accurately represented in the classroom. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, local ING affiliates and HAF began a collaborative professional development effort called Hinduism/Islam 101, which focused on making sure teachers were aware of how teach about both religions accurately. The effort, which included individual presentations on each religion, included the mobilization of training teams comprising one HAF and one ING representative. Based on survey feedback and individual correspondence from training organizers, the program was met with nearly unanimous approval and accolades. In two districts, HAF and ING were brought back for encore presentations for teachers. The Hinduism/Islam 101 model was also featured at the 2015 New Jersey and Pennsylvania Councils for the Social Studies conferences, facilitated by demand for interfaith pedagogy training initiatives.
HAF and ING’s efforts on the classroom level dovetailed with broader efforts—including partnerships between Hindu and Muslim groups—to change how diverse religious groups were represented in curriculum and textbooks. Two efforts, notably in California and Texas, represented how collective mobilization was designed to counter prejudiced narratives about both faiths.
In California, HAF worked with the state legislature to pass Senate Bill (SB) 1057, legislation that would overhaul the state’s outdated content standards and would create more opportunities for input from communities covered by the state’s education curriculum. As Fogo notes, the process of drafting the state’s content standards and curriculum frameworks was uneven and rejected advice from historical experts, particularly on ancient India.[25] For Hindus, the longstanding contention was that the content standards were not just inaccurate, but rendered an impression of Hinduism that violated California’s own statutes on how minority groups. For example, Education Code sections 51501 and 60044 “prohibit the State Board of Education and local school boards from adopting any instructional material for use in schools which contains any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, handicap, or occupation.”[26] Similarly, the Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Contentstates that to avoid “adverse reflection,” “No religious belief or practice may be held up to ridicule and no religious group may be portrayed as inferior.”[27]
HAF’s contention—backed by numerous faith‐based and secular groups, as well as prominent scholars of religion—was that the California’s history standards, notably their standard on ancient India, created a prejudicial climate towards Hindus. This was affirmed in survey and testimony gathered by other Hindu groups, notably the Kauai‐based Himalayan Academy, publishers of Hinduism Today. The standards, for example, urged educators and textbooks to discuss “the significance of the Aryan Invasions,” though California’s own history consultants urged the Department of Education to drop that reference because of its inaccuracy. As Adluri and Bagchee argue, the very premise of Aryans was built on a notion of racialism propagated by 19th century German Indologists and transmitted into mainstream academia for much of the 20th century[28]. Further, Adluri and Bagchee note that even a term such as Brahmanism—foreign to Hindu practice—was conceptualized by prominent Indologists to create a means of identifying Brahmins as corrupting influences on the supposed Indo‐Germanic authenticity of ancient Vedic texts. In a damning assessment of Indology, they go on to write:
“Given that Indology has only been able to think of Indians in terms of stereotypes such as flying carpets and yogis, it is unthinkable that it would seriously strive to find some link or access to the Indian tradition… . since Indology’s claim to superiority over the classical Indian tradition has rested on its claim that it alone is not indebted to history—that it alone has transcended the elementary conditions of historical being to attain pure objectivity—it cannot now acknowledge that its perspective, too, is historically conditioned, unless it is willing to accept the problems with past scholarship. But, as we know, Indology is far from taking up such a critical relation to its own past. Indeed, even at the price of sheltering Nazis, German Indologists are unwilling or unable to accept a critical reflection on the history of German Indology.”[29]
Additionally, the standards focused on the caste system, which religion scholars found deeply problematic because the idea of caste—derived from the Portuguese term casta—did not exist until well into the Common Era and was not limited to Hindus in the Indian subcontinent. Introduced by Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett, the bill had wide backing, ranging from religious and cultural organizations to the California Council for the Social Studies and the California Teachers Association. Even influential public figures such as longtime Bay Area Congressman Mike Honda wrote in support of the effort. But perhaps the most impressive aspect was the effort of numerous Muslim groups, notably Muslim Public Affairs Council, United Muslims of America, and Muslims for Progressive Values, to back the HAF‐led initiative, which led to the formation of an ad hoc umbrella group called Equity in Education.
Despite passing overwhelmingly in both the Senate and General Assembly, the bill was ultimately vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown, who cited his concern that its passage would “slow progress that is already underway, and does not include a role for the Instructional Quality Commission.” While the bill was struck down by Brown, it proved to be an effective means of cultivating a multi‐faith coalition led by Hindu and Muslim groups. Additionally, the collaboration set a template through which education reform within California and across the country could be achieved. Moreover, they also affirmed the idea that substantive efforts to be more inclusive and multicultural within K–12 education could not be done in silos, but rather through leveraging of partnerships.
While the California bill fell short, another effort in which Hindu and Muslim groups worked side by side did result in major changes. In Texas, the State Board of Education’s adoption of textbooks proved to be a political fight pitting right‐wing Christian groups and their allies on the board against a broad coalition of racial, ethnic, secular, and faith‐based groups. Both HAF and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) were part of a larger umbrella effort led by the Texas Freedom Network to combat racism, ethnocentricity, and xenophobia in the drafts submitted by textbook publishers. The significance of the Texas textbook adoption was underscored by the fact that more than 20 states adopt some version of the Texas textbooks, making it the most influential state in textbook sales.
During the public comment period, right‐wing advocates focused on mentions of Islam, urging the Board to adopt language in the textbooks that linked Islam with terrorism. However, the coalition of education advocates countered, drawing attention to Islamophobic and Hinduphobic references. They especially noted the politicized manner in which the textbook review panels were organized. As David Brockman, a Southern Methodist University professor who documented cases of bias in textbooks, noted, “the official review panels were woefully short on credentialed specialists in the various social studies fields.”[30] However, the Texas Freedom Network conducted its own analysis, incorporating feedback from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation, to highlight cases of Islamophobic and anti‐Hindu passages in the draft textbook. Its publication was reported nationally, leading some of the board’s right‐leaning members to walk back their support of contentious statements. Additionally, representatives from CAIR and HAF testified during the board’s adoption hearings, citing numerous concerns about the way their respective religions were represented. As a result of collective efforts on the part of a diverse coalition, the board overwhelmingly passed adoption of textbooks that were more accurate and cut out most of the Islamophobic references. In the case of Hinduism, the changes were transformative, focusing on the religion as a living tradition and moving away from the Orientalist “caste, cows, and curry” paradigm that had so long dominated textbook interpretations.
While the textbook vote in Texas was construed as at least a partial victory for multicultural advocates, it still highlighted the challenges remaining in education reform efforts in combatting Islamophobia and Hinduphobia in classrooms across the country. As we note in the next section, the case studies also underscore the progress that remains to be made in developing and sustaining long‐term Hindu‐Muslim coalitions in combating Orientalist narratives about both religions.
Conclusion: Beyond Orientalism and the “Old World” and Into New Alliances
As the previous section highlighted, education reform has provided an opportunity for Hindus and Muslims to collectively and collaboratively challenge their Otherness within America while pushing for more constructive approaches to teaching about both religions. The efforts highlighted both a collective response to inaccuracies and misrepresentations, as well as proactive initiatives designed to help change the narratives about both faiths.
However, challenges remain outside of challenging Orientalism within classroom content and teacher pedagogies. To cultivate long‐term alliances, Hindu and Muslim groups must acknowledge some of the Old World geopolitics that have led to tensions between some members of both faiths, especially Hindus and Muslims of South Asian descent. As Pew and other surveys have found, while Hindu Americans are becoming more heterogeneous, the overwhelming majority still identify as being of Indian descent, thanks to a steady influx of Indian immigration since 1965. Similarly, while the Muslim American population is relatively heterogeneous, thanks to a larger African American Muslim population and the growth of European American converts to Islam, a larger share of the Muslim community in the United States now hails from the Indian subcontinent. As a result, tensions among some parts of the Hindu and Muslims populations, particularly among those whose communal identities were in part shaped by the 1947 partition of India, should be acknowledged.
Similarly, building interfaith alliances in education also involves addressing the tensions that exist within faith communities such as Hindus and Muslims. For Hindu Americans, generational and cultural tensions (owing to the faith’s heterogeneity), as well as practitioner and philosophical approaches, continue to present obstacles to defining a collective and inclusive narrative. Moreover, while sectarianism is not considered a source of tension within Hinduism, disagreements on how to define Hinduism within education have in the past hampered a collective community effort in education reform. Some Hindu sects, including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (which many Hindus do not view as Hindu) and the Swaminaryana sect, have launched their own education initiatives as a means of promoting their perspectives on Hindu philosophy. It remains to be seen if collective efforts within the Hindu community can be developed and sustained to construct a narrative that is inclusive of all of Hinduism’s diversity while appreciating the separation of church and state in American classrooms. Similarly, essentializing Islam is also deeply problematic given the occasional cultural, sectarian, and theological tensions among the Muslim community. Therefore, finding a consensus narrative can also be complicated by those considerations. Groups such as ING have pushed to highlight the diversity in the faith, while Muslim groups such as the Ahmadiyya—considered by many Muslims to be heretics—have also launched their own educational programs to define themselves as distinct from yet also part of the larger Muslim community. These efforts have also led to a better understanding among educators.
As Hindu and Muslim Americans continue transitioning generationally and find themselves in shared education spaces, the opportunities to build and sustain alliances to combat prejudice will likely only increase. It is likely as diversity and inclusion in public education becomes a prominent issue in the American social and political landscape, both Hindus and Muslims—each with their own vested interests—will pursue common causes in hopes of effecting comprehensive change.
Footnotes:
[1] Sonia Nieto, “Moving beyond Tolerance in Multicultural Education,” Multicultural Education 1/4 (Spring 1994), 9–12, 35–38.
[2] Nelly Ukpokodu, “Breaking through preservice teachers’ defensive dispositions in a multicultural education course: A reflective practice,” Multicultural Education 9/3 (Spring 2002), 25–33: 25.
[3] Geneva Gay, “Beyond Brown: Promoting equality through multicultural education,” Journal of curriculum and Supervision 19/3 (Spring 2004), 193–216.
[4] Rachel Hutchins-Veroux, “Multiculturalism in American History Textbooks before and after 9/11,” American Multiculturalism After 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives, eds. Derek Rubin and Jacob Verheul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 133–44.
[5] Rachel Hutchins-Veroux, “Multiculturalism,” 144.
[6] Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason. “The resistible rise of Islamophobia Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43/1 (March 2007), 61–86.
[7] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[8] For details, see http://www.angel-island.com/history.html.
[9] For details, see http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/court.php.
[10] For details, see https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.
[11] Martin Wingfield and Bushra Karaman, “Arab stereotypes and American educators,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 7/4 (March–April 1995), 7–10.
[12] Edward Said, Orientalism, 201.
[13] Yoshiko Nozaki, “Orientalism, the West and non-West binary, and postcolonial perspectives in cross-cultural research and education,” International handbook for critical education (2009), 482–90.
[14] Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard, Globalizing Education Policy (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[15] Edward Said, Orientalism, 232.
[16] Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy” in Harvard educational review 59/3 (August 1989), 297–325.
[17] Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk, “Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits,” Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics (1999), 45–65.
[18] Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
[19] Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Stenløse, Denmark: Three Leaves Publishing, 2005).
[20] Khyati Joshi, New roots in America’s sacred ground: Religion, race, and ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Khyati Y. Joshi, “Standing Up and Speaking Out Hindu Americans and Christian Normativity in Metro Atlanta” in Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South, eds. Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 190–216: 190; and Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities. (Berkeley, California: Stanford University Press, 2007).
[21] Khyati Joshi, New Roots, 121
[22] See Elizabeth Barlow, “Middle East Facts and Fictions,” in The Journal of the International Institute 2:2 (Winter 1995), 1–5. Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0002.207.
[23] See Maha Elgenaidi, “Fewer Americans View Muslims Favorably, But the Door Is Wide Open to Better Understanding,” in HuffPost Religion, 7/31/2014, updated September 30, 2014.
[24] See Maha Elgenaidi, “Coming in from the Cold: Pew Survey Reveals Continuing Icy Attitudes toward Muslims,” in HuffPost Religion, 7/17/2014, updated September 16, 2014.
[25] Bradley Fogo, “What Every Student Should Know and Be Able to Do:” The Making of California’s Framework, Standards, and Tests for History–Social Science. PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010.
[26] California Education Code 51500: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=edc&group=51001-52000&file=51500-51501
[27] California Education Code 60040–60052: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=edc&group=60001-61000&file=60040-60052
[28] Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[29] Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science, 427.
[30] David Brockman, “Six overlooked takeaways from a reviewer of controversial Texas textbooks.” Religion Dispatches. December 17, 2014. http://religiondispatches.org/6-overlooked-takeaways-from-a-reviewer-of-controversial-texas-textbooks/