Lazy multiculturalism: cultural essentialism and the persistence of the Multicultural Day in Australian schools

ABSTRACT

Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and strengthening community, they have long been critiqued for their avoidance of a more critical engagement with deeper issues around cultural complexity. The intent of this paper is not simply to add to this critique but to understand why such forms of lazy multiculturalism persist in schools. Taking an ethnographic orientation to the field of multicultural education, it examines one school's approach to the Multicultural Day. The paper considers how, despite engaging in professional learning designed to challenge established practice in this area, teachers resisted the intellectual task of doing diversity differently. The ethnographic methods used in the study not only allowed for an examination of the practices this school engaged in, they drew attention to how teachers might modify their practice and develop a deeper understanding of cultural complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Multicultural education
• multiculturalism
• teacher professionalism
• cultural essentialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Megan Watkins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3078-2819

Greg Noble http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8565-5222

Notes

1. Scheffer (2000) has railed against ‘lazy multiculturalism’, an uncritical liberal tolerance which fails to recognise the values of Western society. We, of course, don’t buy into a discourse of ‘failed multiculturalism’.

2. Language Background Other Than English or LBOTE is the most common term used within Australian schools to refer to students of non-Anglo backgrounds. A linguistic rather than ethnic marker is employed.

3. The term EAL/D or English as an Additional Language or Dialect is now the more preferred term in Australia rather than ESL.

4. CALD is an acronym for ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ which we avoid for two reasons: first, while we can speak of populations as being diverse it doesn’t make sense to identify ethnically defined groups as being ‘CALD communities’, implying that Anglo-Australians are not part of this diversity; secondly, it also doesn’t make sense to talk about an individual being ‘diverse’ (‘she is a CALD student’).

5. There is little mention of multiculturalism in the materials related to intercultural understanding within Australia’s National Curriculum, suggesting it is on the wane within Australian political discourse. Multicultural education is much broader than intercultural understanding, entailing programmes which address an array of diverse logics. We could discuss the relations between multiculturalism and intercultural education, but the point here is how schools operationalise implicit understandings in practice.

6. The research team from Western Sydney also included Prof. Kevin Dunn and Dr. Garth Lean (School of Social Sciences and Psychology) who provided expertise during the survey stage of the project.

7. This unit no longer exists. Its staff has been greatly reduced and subsumed within a new Equity Programs division of the NSW Department of Education.

8. During the project the NSW Institute of Teachers became part of the Board of Studies Teaching and Educational Standards which has since changed yet again to the NSW Educational Standards Authority.

9. The readings used in the training were: UNESCO (2009); Inglis (2009); Timperley and Robinson (2000).

10. Binto Valley PS is a pseudonym as are the names used for all participants.

11. Thong, in this instance, refers to sandal-like footwear worn by many Australians.

12. Vegemite is an Australian sandwich spread much like the English Marmite.

13. Lamingtons are coconut covered spongelike cakes that are considered typically Australian.

14. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the soldiers who fought at the Battle of Gallipoli during World War 1. A slouch hat was part of their uniform still worn today.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number LP100200797].