ized.
As Farmer views it, humanistic theory provides a viable and strong conceptual foundation justifying not only multicultural education but other humanistic efforts such as values clarification strategies, self-concept enhancement lessons and bibliotherapy. As a conceptual foundation, humanism/self-actualization is said to provide a means by which each educator, regardless of his/her special professional duties, can view the student as a whole person and thereby enhance both student and teacher effectiveness.
While the focus on a student's culture, gender, and other multicultural concerns is indicative of a perspective that aims at assisting in the development of the student as a whole person, some researchers have attempted to go beyond postulating as to which theoretical perspective provides the best conceptual fit for the multicultural approach and, instead, discover the theoretical foundations that are used by educators in actual program design. In this regard Huh (1994) interviewed several teachers involved in the design of multicultural education programs.
She further looked at the implementations of these programs in terms of their impact on students and their schools. Huh found that programs were maximally effective when designed and implemented using a constructivist theoretical perspective.
Although conceptually sound and multi-determined with respect to its theoretical foundations, it is important to note that multicultural education is also of practical significance. In other words, regardless of the theoretical foundation used to plan and implement multicultural programs, they do appear to be associated with positive gains for students. In this regard, Hale (1986) described cognitive gains achieved by children in a pre-school program integrating material on African- American culture throughout the curriculum.
Also, Zaslavsky (1988) demonstrated how elements of African and other cultural trad...