Negotiating the diversity of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism: teachers’ enactments in an inner city secondary school

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the presence of multiculturalism in teachers’ professional practice in a British inner city co-educational secondary school, which featured in two predominant ways: first, as a form of ‘diversity management’ through interventions including a formalised staffing structure to ‘respond’ to the school’s ethnically mixed student body, representation of difference, and same ‘race’ role models; and second, through its sedimentation into everyday practices, whereby teachers enacted multicultural approaches in varied ways. The multiple meanings teachers attached to multiculturalism and its subsequent translations into ‘everyday’ professional practice suggest that the term ‘everyday multiculturalism’ should be used beyond its ‘convivial’ meaning of living in/with ethnic diversity to also reflect the diverse professional enactments of multiculturalism through everyday practice in institutional settings. Further, an analytical focus on professionals in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism elucidates how teachers’ diverse enactments of multiculturalism perpetuate micro-processes of racialisation in schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers
• diversity ‘management’
• policy enactment
• ‘everyday’ multiculturalism

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank all the teachers in the study who gave their time, thoughts and reflections, and to professors Gill Crozier, Heidi Mirza, and Ann Phoenix who kindly provided feedback on first drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The MacPherson report (1999) investigated the failings of the police in the handling of the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and concluded that the police force was institutionally racist.

2. The recognition of institutional racism as significant has also diminished in the wake of the 2001 riots (Pilkington 2008).

3. Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) is a non-ministerial department of the UK government, reporting to Parliament. The department inspects and regulates services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills for learners of all ages.

4. Whilst EMAG (Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant) was ring-fenced funding, this money to support minority ethnic and EAL (English as an additional language) pupils has now been devolved to schools with no obligation on how this money should be spent (see NALDIC). At Hillside, the EMA and Inclusion departments disintegrated shortly after 2011.