The legacy and trajectories of multicultural education: recognition, refusal, and movement building in troubling times

ABSTRACT

In this conceptual analysis paper, I provide a brief overview of multicultural education and highlight the critiques to the field that demonstrate challenges to implementing an education that is multicultural especially when considering students from minoritized and global majority backgrounds. Next, I explore the changing political and social context that suggests, among other things, the need for re/newed orientations to multicultural education. I focus on two important scholarly lines of inquiry – Decolonization and Antiblack theorizing – that might inform possible trajectories for multicultural education including a pedagogy of recognition and a pedagogy of refusal. I conclude by identifying questions that lay at the intersection of these two pedagogies and share some final thoughts about the role of social movements in forging a more critical, responsive approach to multicultural education.

KEYWORDS:

• History of multicultural education
• critiques of multicultural education
• refusal and multicultural education
• critical multicultural education
• business as usual

Acknowledgments

This paper was first shared in a presentation at the 10th Annual Conference of the Korean Association for Multicultural Education conference held in Seoul, Korea (2018). I wish to thank several people who reviewed earlier versions of this paper and provided feedback including Y. K. Cha, J. Cho, K. Roxas, and O. Hayes. I especially appreciate the detailed review and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For those interested in a more comprehensive historical overview, consider Banks (2013) and Springs (2016).

2. Daniels (2008) described liberal pluralism as concerned with understanding and celebrating diversity within current social and political structures. It refuses to examine the structural causes (such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy) of inequality that would lead to transformation of unequal power relations.

3. See Sikkink (1998) for an excellent account of the critiques and opportunities of advancing social justice via human rights framework.

4. The notion of cultural rights as part and parcel of broader human rights have also been articulated by the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of Minorities and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights; see King (2017) for a related discussion.

5. While Ladson-Billings used the word resist, I’m using the word refusal here while also acknowledging critical differences in meaning and implication. I do so to imagine generative possibilities. As Ferguson (2015) notes, while resistance can be negotiated, ‘refusal “throws into doubt” the entire system and is therefore more dangerous’ (in Grande, 2014, p. 59).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco Rios

Francisco Rios, Ph. D., is Professor, Secondary Education, of the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University (WWU).  He served as dean of the College at WWU from 2011-2017.  His research interests include teachers of color, Latinos in education, and preservice teacher education with a multicultural focus. He was a Fulbright Fellow (Chile) and received WWU’s Diversity Achievement Award in 2017.  Francisco served as President of the National Association for Multicultural Education from 2014-2016