Constructing the Margins: Of Multicultural Education and Curriculum Settlements

ABSTRACT

This article examines multicultural education as an example of a curriculum “settlement” or negotiated agreement as to what “truth” and whose “truth” is taught in the schools. It locates the emergence of multicultural education historically in the 1960s and relates it to the emergence of new social movements on the democratic Left. Although multicultural education as a settlement represents a significant victory for democratic progressive forces, it has also tended to become incorporated within a dominant reform discourse and practice in public education that severely restricts its democratic and progressive potential. Carlson argues that currently multicultural education is limited by: the marginalization of multicultural education in a highly differentiated curriculum, an essentialistic treatment of identity that fails to see identity as a historical and cultural production, the treatment of discrimination and bias as an individual psychological phenomenon, and a failure to ground multicultural education within the context of a critical pedagogy. In a brief concluding section, Carlson speculates on how multicultural education might be reconstructed consistent with a democratic progressive counterhegemonic or oppositional discourse.