The evolution of intercultural and multicultural education: scholarship and practice for new sociopolitical and economic realities

When participants of an anti-oppression movement fail to vigilantly protect its integrity – the ideals that made the movement a threat to the existence of oppression – that movement grows more and more likely to devolve into a reflection of the very conditions it was fomented to redress. This sort of devolution has been observed in the very history of intercultural education in Latin America, where a revolutionary approach to education, built on intentions of equity and decolonisation, slowly was reshaped until it was implemented merely as appreciating diversity or in other ways that masked instead of redressed injustice (Aikman 1997). Similarly, when participants of a movement fail to reshape their approach in response to emerging conditions, and particularly to shifting forms of exploitation and oppression, they render their movement less and less a threat to injustice (Gorski 2009).

We live in an era characterised by many uncertainties and socio-political turbulence. Opportunity, access and material resources are distributed in grossly inequitable ways, which should be, but rarely is, understood as a particularly pernicious form of violence in a world in which the resources exist to provide for everybody’s well-being. There is nothing particularly new about this reality. However, the forms of the inequitable distribution are always adjusting themselves, often in response to gains made by movements created to disrupt injustice. With these concerns in mind we offer this special themed issue¹ of Intercultural Education as a call for proponents of intercultural and multicultural education to reimagine multicultural and intercultural education in light of current socio-political and economic realities, in consideration of new and shifting and worsening forms of oppression.

As Coulby (2011) has stated, ‘Intercultural education needs to reformulate itself so that it can play a part’ (260) in the formulation of a more just world. We share his sentiment, having argued in our own scholarship for an intercultural education that responds in more transformative ways to hegemonic normalisations that continue to marginalise some groups as ‘other’, while privileging already-privileged groups as ‘normal’ and deserving of their privilege (Palaiologou and Dietz 2012), for the broader decolonisation of intercultural and multicultural education and for recommitting to intercultural and multicultural education’s most transformative roots (Gorski 2009). These sentiments underline our recognition of the important role multicultural and intercultural education can play in supporting local and global forms of justice when they are implemented in ways that respond directly to the most pressing contemporary forms of exploitation – when they respond to the newest forms of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and marginalisation.

In addition, our concerns about the constant changes in the modern global sphere make us believe that the role of intercultural and multicultural education today more than ever before could be decisive on younger generations’ minds in the direction of shaping a global awareness. Merryfield (2008) describes global awareness as a mindset that students need in order to survive in a world ‘increasingly characterised by economic, political, cultural, environmental and technological interconnectedness’ (383). Merryfield has suggested that global awareness could be taught through specific pedagogical strategies which include: (a) authentic engagement in projects that solve real-world global problems, (b) reflection on one’s own cultural lens and (c) exposure to primary sources from voices around the world.

As proponents of intercultural and multicultural education, from the European and U.S. side, we do believe that such strategies could be prioritised in the education of youth today. In this way students could be transformed into active citizens who share concern for problems of peace and justice, who respect human and animal rights, who have an ecological sensitivity towards the environment.

In this spirit, as Guest Editors of this special issue, we asked contributors to detail their visions for the evolution of multicultural and intercultural education in the context of emerging local and global conditions and the shifting forms of exploitation and injustice emerging from those conditions. How must we evolve intercultural and multicultural education in order to respond, for instance, to fierce waves of neoliberal school corporatisation in many parts of the world, growing global wealth inequality, climate change, new patterns of migration and new hostile expressions of xenophobia, or upticks in violent heterosexism in some regions? We chose this focus based on our observations that, in some ways, intercultural and multicultural education theory has stagnated or, in some contexts, even regressed, as often happens when progressive movements become popular or profitable. So we posed some questions, including the following:

Are intercultural and multicultural education still relevant in their current iterations? Imagined and implemented as they commonly are today do have the same implications they did ten or twenty years ago in and out of school settings? In what ways do we need to reformulate our conceptions of multicultural and intercultural education to be more inclusive, more anti-oppressive, more responsive to contemporary forms of local and global injustice?

In our collaboration as Guest Editors we exchanged concerns and ideas and through that dialogue opened our perspectives to interrogation by one another’s perspectives. As a result we found common topoî² for the future of multicultural and intercultural education. We are grateful for our collaboration and as Guest Editors we wish to express our acknowledgements to colleagues who contributed articles to this themed issue. Their ideas chart a course forward for intercultural and multicultural education. Their articles address these and other critical questions in either global or region-specific ways, but in each case they do so in ways that are internationally relevant.

The first article is Alyssa Hadley Dunn’s ‘Refusing to be Co-Opted: Revolutionary Multicultural Education Amidst Global Neoliberalization’. The author explores the influence of neo-liberalism on education reform and educational equity in the U.S. and beyond. She focuses particularly on the edTPA, a widely-adopted package for assessing pre-service teachers in the U.S., and Teach for All, a global initiative designed to prepare people into teaching who will wield power and influence in order to impact educational and social policy. She challenges the way the language of multicultural education has been coopted in these and other neoliberal initiatives and challenges us to adopt a theory of revolutionary multicultural education to reclaim the movement.

In the second article, ‘Intercultural Educational Alternatives Based on Sustainability from Mexico: Beyond School and Cultural Belonging’, Juan Carlos A. Sandoval Rivera and Rosa Guadalupe Mendoza Zuany propose a purposeful linkage of intercultural education and sustainability. Beginning with an understanding that education is a critical component of movements to eliminate structural inequality, they argue for a new vision of intercultural education that centres the demands of indigenous people. In order to illustrate the possibilities for this approach they share an experience of engaged intercultural education with fisherwomen and youths in Zaragoza municipality, Veracruz state, Mexico.

Next Sávio Siqueira offers ‘Intercultural Language Educators for an Intercultural World: Action upon Reflection’. He argues for a more critical approach to language teaching, and particularly English Language Teaching (ELT), in order to help deepen students’ consciousness about the implications of globalisation and its relationship to their own realities.

The fourth article, entitled ‘Mobilizing Intercultural Education for Equity and Social Justice. Time to React Against the Intolerable: A Proposal from Spain’, was written by Teresa Aguado-Odina, Patricia Mata-Benito, and Inés Gil-Jaurena. Bemoaning the influence of neo-liberalism on education systems, such as shifts of attention from equity to efficiency, they explore how intercultural education has been manipulated in Spain in ways that erase its transformative capacity. They then propose a vision for intercultural education based on the goal of subverting inequality and mobilising policies, teacher education, school practice and education outside the school.

We believe that these articles offer important points of departure for evolving visions for intercultural education that purposefully respond to emerging local and global realities.

Notes on contributors

Nektaria Palaiologou is an associate professor of Intercultural Education at the School of Education of University of Western Macedonia and Editor in Chief of the Intercultural Education Journal. She is on the board of the International Association for Intercultural Education (IAIE) and the director of the Hellenic Association for Intercultural Education (HAIE) in Greece. Her recent book is entitled Human Rights Education and Citizenship Education: Intercultural perspectives at an international context (with Michalinos Zembylas, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Paul C. Gorski is an associate professor of Integrative Studies at George Mason University, where he coordinates and teaches in programs in Social Justice and Human Rights. He is the founder of EdChange and a member of the board of the International Association for Intercultural Education.

Nektaria Palaiologou
[email protected]
Paul C. Gorski
[email protected]

Notes

1. We dedicate this special issue to Jagdish Singh Gundara, Emeritus Professor of Intercultural Education and former President of the International Association for Intercultural Education, who recently passed away. Jagdish always played an instrumental role in encouraging interculturalists to grapple with contemporary global injustice.

2. Topoi: plural number of ‘topos’ in Latin locus (from locus communis), referred in the context of classical Greek rhetoric to a standardized method of constructing or treating an argument. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_topos