Mainstreaming and marginalization: two national strategies in the circumscription of difference

Abstract

This article explores the social and historical contexts of recent curricular initiatives in multicultural education in the USA and Canada, giving special attention to the formative narratives that propelled multicultural education to the center of debates on public schooling. In the USA, debate about cultural diversity has been framed and interpreted within the framework of a larger discussion of goals associated with a set of efforts, begun in the 1980s, to reform American elementary and secondary education; multicultural education developed as a curricular response to the advocacy of groups on the fringes of the school reform movement. In Canada, multicultural education is a part of the official fabric of Canadian society, and extension of the state ideology concerning multiculturalism.