Abstract
In response to Georgina Tsolidis, this paper considers whether multicultural education is itself a doxa. While acknowledging a post 9/11 backlash against multiculturalism and the emergence of a discourse around social cohesion within the public sphere, it questions whether this is simply a return to integrationism or more a reaction against the tired and perhaps outmoded identity politics that, from the 1980s, has increasingly framed multiculturalism as public policy. It explores how multiculturalism is performed in schools often fashioning culture or ethnic diversity as a form of exoticism through pedagogies of difference that, while well meaning, tend more towards exclusion than inclusion. Drawing on recent research in schools, it reveals how such forms of multicultural education may promote a kind of unreflective civility that, while providing a gloss of acceptance, often yields little more than a superficial community harmony that when tested reveals its fragility. The heresy inherent in this response is its questioning of the current doxa of multicultural education. It calls for a rethinking of policy and practice to encourage an ethics around difference that avoids essentialising that difference in the process and equips students with the tools for effective social participation to deal with the cultural complexity of the world in which they live.
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Notes
- 1.
Terms of identification are often problematic as they do not adequately reflect the complex nature of students’ ancestral backgrounds. The terms used in this study were arrived at for various reasons. ‘Chinese’ was a term of self-identification used by the parents of students investigated in this study. ‘Anglo’ is a term of identification that groups together long-time Australians of English speaking backgrounds. Some parents also chose this as their label of ethnic identification. Pasifika is a collective term used to refer to students whose parents identified as Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islander, Maori or Tokelauan and was the term favoured by the NSW Department of Education and Training which was the research partner in this ARC Project.
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Acknowledgements
The empirical data drawn upon in this chapter is derived from two Australian Research Council Linkage Projects, Discipline and Diversity: Cultural Practices and Dispositions of Learning and Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education. Both of these projects were undertaken with the NSW Department of Education and Training (now the Department of Education and Communities) and the latter also with the NSW Institute of Teachers. I wish to acknowledge the generous support of each body and also the assistance of my co-investigator Greg Noble from the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney.
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Watkins, M. (2015). Multicultural Education: Contemporary Heresy or Simply Another Doxa. In: Proctor, H., Brownlee, P., Freebody, P. (eds) Controversies in Education. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08759-7_11
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