Abstract
For multicultural education, in its manifold and variable forms, identity and the accommodation of diversity are important problems. Key questions being: Who am I? How do we live together? Knowing who you are is seen as a way of challenging stereotypes. The identification and ambivalent defense of the integrity or authenticity of religious identities as fundamental in the national context remains a major focus for educational debate and practice. While multicultural education is diverse and contested, it has had a consistent focus on the heterogeneity of students' identities. Some students have been withdrawn into schools that are self-absorbed with regard to issues of ethno-specificity. In these schools, students' education centers on privileging self-enclosed religious identities. Assertions of a constrained ethno-cultural specificity as students' sole attachment represents an atomizing sense of identity. In contrast, multi-ethnic schools produce displays of, and to appreciative celebrations of their ethno-cultural differences.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Precarious International Multicultural Education: Hegemony, Dissent and Rising Alternatives |
Editors | Handel K. Wright, Michael Singh, Richard Race |
Place of Publication | The Netherlands |
Publisher | Sense |
Pages | 237-258 |
Number of pages | 22 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789460918940 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789460918926 |
Publication status | Published - 2012 |