Although knowledge, caring, and action are conceptually distinct, in the classroom they are highly interrelated. In my multicultural classes for teacher education students, I use historical and sociological knowledge about the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups to inform as well as to enable the students to examine and clarify their personal attitudes about ethnic diversity.

One way in which people in power marginalize and disempower those who are structurally excluded from the mainstream is by calling their visions, histories, goals, and struggles special interests and by refer-ring to them as identity groups. This type of marginalization denies the legitimacy and validity of groups that are excluded from full participation in society and its institutions.

Agreement about the meaning of multi-cultural education is emerging among academics. A consensus is develop-ing among scholars that an important goal of multicultural education is to increase educational equality for students from diverse ethnic, cultural, (Banks, 2016d; Nieto, 2015), social-class (Weis, Cipollone, &Jenkins, 2014; Weis, 2016), and language groups (Gandara & Hopkins, 2010); for female and male students; for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) stu-dents (Mayo, 2013); and for exceptional students (Meyer, Park, Bevan-Brown, & Savage, 2016).