Intercultural and Multicultural Education

Enhancing Global Interconnectedness

Carl A. Grant, Agostino Portera, Carl A. Grant, Agostino Portera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136949371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

By addressing intercultural and multicultural education in a global context, this volume brings together the dynamic discussions and lively debate of intercultural and multicultural education taking place across the world. Not content with discussion of theory or practice at the expense of the other, this collection of essays embodies dialogical praxis by weaving together a variety of epistemologies, ideologies, historical circumstances, pedagogies, policy approaches, curricula, and personal narratives. Contributors take readers to the countries, schools, and nongovernmental agencies where intercultural education and multicultural education, either collectively or singularly, are active (often central) concepts or practices in the daily educational undertaking and discourse of society. Readers are also informed about how intercultural education and/or multicultural education within a country came to be and will learn about the debates over intercultural education and/or multicultural education at both the government and local level.

Part I
Introduction

1
A Global Invitation

Toward the Expansion of Dialogue, Reflection and Creative Engagement for Intercultural and Multicultural Education

Carl A. Grant and Stefan Brueck

When we learn to recognize … ‘the infinite extent of our relations,’ we can trace the strands of mutually supportive life, and discover there the glittering jewels of our global neighbors.

—Daisaku Ikeda (1996)

The project of this book is undertaken in the spirit of Daisaku Ikeda’s wisdom, that global interconnectedness is a gem to be recognized and polished. It is becoming increasingly clear that many people involved with education across the world are addressing a variety of related issues in their own contexts and respective ways. Although born of different times and spaces, both Multicultural Education and Intercultural Education are continuing to develop as important responses to, engagements with and preparations for contemporary life. Each can assist in developing an understanding and ethical negotiation of the complex world in which we interact. Whether economically advantaged or situated in poverty, extremely mobile or relatively stationary, we all can benefit from more tools that might cultivate human thriving in our ever-changing, globalized landscape. In order to bring our best selves forward, there is value in educational scholarship, sharing experiences and passing along successful strategies.

This venture is, in part, an attempt to contribute to such worthwhile goals as well as foster increased dialogue and debate between thoughtful, caring and creative persons. Indeed, such discussion acknowledges that the most powerful ideas can be produced when people are expressing their opinions on various topics and listening to others express theirs (Hess, 2009, p. 14). Perhaps we might view the global educational community as one big classroom, and as such, attempt to treat it as our forum for ongoing inclusive and equitable conversations.

As the chapter title suggests, this book is an invitation to examine insights and analyses involving Intercultural and Multicultural Education from a collection of different perspectives. Yet the authors’ contributions are rightly situated within pre-existing exchanges among academics, other educators, concerned citizens, activists and additional interested parties about a host of related subjects as well. For example, multicultural/Intercultural Education intersects with complementary educational themes involving pedagogy, theory, practice, methodology and policy. This educational webbing also mixes with topics such as culture, identity, abjection, recognition, power relations, justice, cosmopolitanism, globalization, planetspeak and other arenas. As a supplement to the corresponding examinations and commentaries in later chapters, the following pages briefly address such connected strands as they surround and weave through Multicultural Education and Intercultural Education.

For example, intimately connected to and embedded in both Intercultural and Multicultural Education is the notion of “culture.” Numerous definitions of the concept have been proposed. For example, it has been suggested as “a body of common understandings … (that are) the sum total and … arrangement of … (a) group’s ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Brown, 1963, pp. 3–4). It has also been described as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of a society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs” (UNESCO, Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 2001). Additionally, “culture … is not composed of static, discrete traits moved from one locale to another. It is constantly changing and transforming, as new forms are created out of old ones. Thus culture … does not arise out of nothing: it is created and modified by material conditions” (Mullings, 1986, p. 13). Accordingly, culture is never fully essentializable, but rather inherently incorporates hybridity.

From this, a string of related questions may come to mind. What dynamic processes are involved in the development of culture? What types of knowledge are valued? Who gets to decide? What are the implications and accompanying roles for various educational stakeholders?

Answers to such questions are dependent in part on aspects of identity formation. Rather than being purely fixed and stable entities, people’s identities are to a large degree constantly assembled, based on who they believe they are and want to be. This involves both personal and social processes of construction, which often depend upon environmental relationships involving politics and power. In establishing who one is (i.e., the self) and who we are (i.e., a group and/or community), humans are shaped by their backgrounds and surroundings while also partially acting themselves in each present moment. Interpretations of similarity and difference are established as the shaping of me and we inherently also assembles you and them, a process that might be consciously recognized or not. The looseness and tightness of such bonding categories may well shift, depending on past group conflicts, alliances, positionality and a number of other possible factors.

Additionally, differing degrees of homogeneity and heterogeneity exist within group parameters. Identification of insiders and outsiders indicates levels of intimacy that can create belonging or rejection, membership or separation, inclusion or exclusion. Outsiders and strangers may, for example, be invisible, respected or feared. Whereas extreme dissimilarity may appear exotic, with enough mental and/or physical distancing people can also be psychically “cut off.” Often those who are deemed too different become xenophobically regarded as the Other. Importantly, when dominant groups exert their power in this way there are extreme repercussions and differential impacts.

Such a range of personal mental frameworks and collective imaginations affects behaviors. Resulting actions in turn have consequences for relationships between humans as well as those with their environments. In the interpersonal realm there are aftereffects when Others are devalued and judged as deviant. Possible responses include aversion, condescension, ostracism, stereotyping, silencing, abuse and worse. For example, in the United States the psychologically influenced medical model of disability has often labeled such persons as pathologically irregular. This in turn has led to the sorting and binning of body-minds into categories such as “normal” and “abnormal,” with strategies for “fixing” those considered inferior, and society-wide reactions that include virtually all of the aforementioned callous discriminations.

Yet even when there are good intentions, communities and even entire societies that are trying to be inclusive may not fully do so. Take the case of immigration, a topic which numerous authors in this book address. Among many possible reactions, immigrants may at times be welcomed, shunned or harmed, both in terms of official policies and societal consideration. Regardless, how they are labeled and situated in the social order affects them in unique ways.

The concept of abjection casts light on such a phenomenon. Abjection is based on the social expulsion of those who represent the fear of particular features (Popkewitz, 2005). It can be seen as a kind of rejection that recognizes those not included, but in so doing, directs attention to borders by labeling some people as different (Kowalczyk & Popkewitz, 2005). As with caste-like minorities such as the Roma in much of Europe, such persons or groups can never fully be the same as the normalized population. They are in an in-between space. Thus, abjection is material, not just an idea; it is both real and conceptual. Abjection allows us not to think in binaries, dualisms or opposites, but includes multiple spaces and dimensions at once. It is simultaneously bringing something in while seeing it as different at the same time; the seeming paradox of mutual absence and presence.

Language and discourse also contribute toward reinforcing as well as assembling systems of reasoning, which in turn affect dimensions of belongingness. Relatedly, Multicultural Education and Intercultural Education resides amid such spheres involving scales of recognition. Both psychological and material, recognition in part incorporates facets of representation, individual and collective memory/forgetting, versions of historical account, locale and territory claims, resource access, distribution, societal status and opportunity. It is within these and many related realms that race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion, language, age and dis/ability have emerged as significant identifiers and grounds for celebration, negotiation and contestation. Such diverse and pluralistic assemblages have also spawned dual, hyphenated and multiple mixing of categories. These labeling devices can in turn align with or generate tension between self-understandings and socially imposed interpretations, recognition and valuing of personhood.

The combination of identity formation, dispositions and behaviors, abjection and recognition has significant implications in the real world. As a case in point, the self-construction of Barack Obama, president of the United States, may not be equivalent to those projected on him by other politicians, the media and/or the public at large. Although he personally embraces his dual Kenyan and American heritage, as well as his international upbringing, many others rarely refer to him in such a comprehensive light. Rather, he is typically reduced to being the first Black president. He has been branded as “not Black enough,” and at the same time, vilified for his earlier relationship with a strong, African-American, justice-seeking pastor. Meanwhile, he has additionally been (falsely) “charged” with being Muslim, embracing socialism and having been born outside the United States. His youthful image and education have also been questioned. Still, given his historic election into the highest public office in the country, he too has gained support and acknowledgment at an unprecedented level. This wide range of markers demonstrates the assorted readings, lenses and priorities by which different segments of society are guided.

As the aforementioned processes unfold, and as the general public interacts across a wide variety of differences, this occurs within domains where power dynamics are constantly present and negotiated. Therefore, Intercultural Education and Multicultural Education also lives within social discourses and functions in situations that involve power relations. Internally generated power, often referred to as agency, can at times be created and utilized. Power with, among or against individuals, groups and structures is also embedded. Additionally, sovereign power, such as that which people have over one another, can support or significantly limit people’s choices and possibilities. Oppression and hegemony¹ exist in contexts where these extreme institutional conditions reside.

Subsequent justice issues can materialize as claims for both individual and group rights emerge and are disputed. In diverse and pluralistic societies, conflict resolution between individuals as well as majority and minority collectives is at times necessary. It is in this regard that assorted social structures may engage in problem solving toward goals of equality, equity and/or the common good. A host of utopian ideals may be invoked as prevention or response. Pragmatic solutions are also sought. Both micro and macro fields can be negotiated. Responsibilities toward neighbors both near and far are shaped as expectations of morality and citizenship may be deliberated and established. In this way, a particular focus may be shifted between local and global dynamics. “Glocalization” is a term used to refer to the dialectical synthesis between the larger world and provincial contexts, a process characterized by simultaneity, interpenetration and mutual adaptation (Robertson, 1995). Such vibrant interaction between multiple spheres involves nation-states but often crosses them. There is a constant circling back and through such constructions, while simultaneously touching upon and challenging other borderlands as well. This may have positive as well as negative consequences.

With awareness of such processes has come increased focus in some academic and political circles on the notion of the cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism, having taken multiple forms throughout history, may be broadly defined as “belonging to all parts of the world” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2008). It derives from the Greek word kosmopolites, which literally means “citizen of the cosmos, or universe” (Heater, 2004). Importantly, a distinction has been made between “cosmopolitanization” and “cosmopolitanism.” The former suggests an internal process that includes interconnections across boundaries and affects the dialogic imagination, including that with the Other. Yet additionally, it has been seen as involving transformation of the social and political dynamics inside nation-state societies, such that everyday consciousness and identities are changed sig-nificantly (Beck, 2002). Thus, cosmopolitanization is claimed to be a process that affects persons and societies, regardless of intentional personal or joint awareness of it. Examples of such internal personal imaginaries influenced by global cultural flows are the increased public demand for “ethnic cuisines” and “world music” across many countries. In this way personal tastes have been significantly shaped, even transformed, by international networks.

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