December, 2000
Book Review
Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist,
Multicultural Education and Staff Development
Editors: Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart, Margo Okazawa-Ray
Published in 1998 by The Network of Educators on the Americas.

Reviewed by Jerome E. Morris

According to their Annual Report of 1999, “The Network of Educators on the Americas
(NECA) is a nonprofit organization committed to promoting social and economic justice
through transformative, quality education for all learners.” Editors Enid Lee, Deborah
Menkart, and Margo Ozakawa-Ray, and NECA have made a major contribution to
multicultural education. Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-
Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development brings the ideas and thoughts of
multicultural education to the “masses” of educators.

This edited book is a must-have for educators at all levels. Beyond Heroes and Holidays
consists of classroom lessons, professional development activities, critical literacy,
stories, and excerpts of readings that focus on major multicultural principles and thought.
The volume is organized into the following ten sections: (1) School, staff, family, and
community development; (2) Reading between the lines: Critical literacy; (3) Language;
(4) Lessons for the Classroom; (5) Technology; (6) School-wide Activities; (7) Holidays
and Heritage; (8) Talking Back; (9) Glossary; and (10) Resource guide. Interspersed
within the writing are activities for workshops, courses, and institutes.

The editors use the philosophy of critical pedagogy, pioneered by the Brazilian educator,
Paulo Freire to guide the book. Infused within critical pedagogy is a focus on race and
class-based inequity in education that analyzes multicultural education through multiples
lenses and from multiple levels: the individual and personal (micro); community (meso);
and the societal (macro). I personally found this refreshing because too often misuses of
what some define as “multicultural education” avoid serious analyses of race and racism in
schools and society. If not careful, multicultural education has the potential to be coopted
by naive and sometimes well-intentioned educators who have not critically
examined their relative positions within a personal, and global context. For many of them,
unfortunately, multicultural education is only about heroes, holidays, ethnic foods, and
cultural attire, and devoid of serious discussions of race and class-based inequities. Beyond
Heroes and Holidays provides educators with practical tools for deconstructing surfacelevel
celebrations and analyses of culture in schools and societies.

An example of the information presented in the edited book includes an article by Sonia
Nieto, “Affirmation, Solidarity, and Critique: Moving Beyond Tolerance in Education.”
In this article, Nieto takes the reader inside schools to illustrate how multicultural
education might actually look like in various schools’ practices and policies. She does this
through five scenarios and notes how each school—through a critical analysis of the
cultural symbols, power arrangements, curriculum, and the extent of affirmation of
students’ diversity and ethnicity—provide different levels of multicultural education
support. Numerous examples of insightful critiques and analyses permeate this book,
including critiques of popular knowledge such as the notion that Mexicans are “taking”
U.S. jobs and movie depictions of Pocahontas. Educators are encouraged to begin to see
historical events and movements such as “Thanksgiving,” “Chinese exclusion” in America,
the “Westward Movement” the “Civil Rights Movement” and slavery and the Civil War,
through different lenses. Moreover, the book not only focuses on multicultural education
for diverse, ethnic, cultural, and language groups; selected articles by noted authors and
researchers such as Beverly Daniel Tatum and Peggy McIntosh enable the reader to begin
to deconstruct whiteness, white racial identity, and their accompanying privileges.
This edited book also includes a collection of writings by prominent scholars such as
James Banks, Lisa Delpit, and Christine Sleeter, as well as articles, essays, and poems by
not so well known students, teachers, and activists. A major strength is the editors’
ability to operationalize theoretical and abstract concepts by providing concrete readings
and examples of the manifestation of hidden privileges, racism, ethnocentrism, and
oppression. Beyond Heroes and Holidays not only “educates” educators, students, and
activists, but it also illustrates how to “Talk Back” through protest and collective
community action. This 450+ page volume ambitiously provides examples of “how to”
infuse multicultural education into every aspect of our daily lives. In some ways,
however, the editors realize how humanly impossible this task might become. Therefore,
they provide references, resources, and internet sites to encourage the reader to move
beyond the text.

The major weakness of the book is organizational, rather than substantive in nature. Some
of the transitions between the writings are dis-jointed. While the book is already
voluminous, brief interludes at the beginning of each section might help the reader to make
a smoother transition. The contents, without a doubt, clearly convey NECA’s
seriousness in publishing informative and consciousness raising texts and guides, as well
as the editors’ expressed commitment to transformative multicultural education and social
justice.

Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural
Education and Staff Development will prove to be extremely useful as a resource guide for
school-based educators, and a valuable supplementary text for courses that focus on race,
culture, class, and gender in education. I currently use selected writings for graduate-level
courses that I teach on race and culture in education policy, and the cultural politics of
post-colonial education. I highly suggest this book for beginning and advanced
multicultural educators, schoolteachers, and college professors across disciplines, as well
as activists and intellectuals outside of formal educational institutions.

Jerome E. Morris is a member of Edliberation, a national organization of activists,
academics, and practitioners who focus on education for critical consciousness. He is also
an assistant professor in the Department of Social Foundations of Education at The
University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.