Pedagogies of intellectual equality for connecting with non-Western theories : alternatives to celebrating multicultural or sanctioning fundamentalist identities

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 Some students have been withdrawn into schools that are self-absorbed with regard to issues of ethno-specificity.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.