Multicultural education in the US and UK in the 1980s and beyond: the role of interest convergence-divergence

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the beginnings of multicultural policies and programs in New York City and London during the 1980s. Using Caraballo’s analysis of intercultural and intergroup programs as a model, we apply Bell’s (1980) principle of interest convergence to examine the antecedents in both cities and detail how multicultural policies and programs were rolled back when the interests of privileged groups and working-class communities of color subsequently diverged. Archival and secondary sources were used to construct and situate historical case studies within larger societal contexts. Findings indicate that multicultural curriculum and policies in both cities arose from a convergence of demands by racialized communities for equal educational opportunities and a representative curriculum, and government efforts to placate tensions from changing demographics and racial unrest. In the end we examine current racial realities and argue that the interest-convergence-divergence cycle can be useful to inform future multicultural education policy, research, pedagogy, and curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Interest convergence-divergence
• multicultural education
• comparative studies
• historical studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Archival sources, interviews, and secondary sources were used to construct parallel historical case studies and situate multicultural programs and policies in each city within larger demographic, social, and political contexts. Archival sources for New York City included investigative reports, curriculum bulletins, and school board minutes located in the New York City Board of Education archives, Municipal Archives, Department of Records; and newspaper articles and photographs chronicling community organizing activities in Harlem and Brooklyn in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

2. Where appropriate, we use ‘Black’ in reference to the social construct of race as experienced by many from various national and ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, when referring collectively to people of Spanish-speaking descent from Latin America and the Caribbean, we adopt the term Latinx as more gender inclusive than Latina/o.

3. Current state documents use the terms Black or African and Hispanic or Latino, respectively, when reporting demographic statistics.

4. Archival sources utilized for the London historical case study included newspaper clippings and journal articles from mainstream media such as The Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian; anti-racist newsletters and journals, such as Race Today; and ethnic community newspapers like the West Indian World and Caribbean Times. Flyers, meeting minutes, photographs, and multicultural and anti-racist curriculum units developed by both activist groups and the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) were accessed at the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), and the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) archives.

5. The recommendations of the Swann Report supported mainstream multiculturalism, but were critiqued by race equality activists for not going far enough to analyze issues such as the school exclusions and underachievement of African Caribbean students (Commission for Racial Equality, 1985).

6. When Thatcher’s government eliminated funding for the ILEA in the late 1980s, this center changed its name to the Centre for Intercultural Education, in part because the work had begun to shift to other European countries and intercultural education proved to be a more common term in reference to diversity work in Europe (see Gundara, 2013). Professor Gundara became a founding member of the International Association of Intercultural Education (IAIE) and one of the senior editors of the association’s journal Intercultural Education which has been continuously published for the past 28 years.

7. The Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), one of the plaintiffs in this NYC lawsuit, is also a plaintiff in the ongoing lawsuit against Harvard University that argues their admission policy discriminates against Asian Americans. The Harvard affirmative action case is also supported by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Conservative activist Edward Blum, who have set their sights at challenging and overturning affirmative action.

8. As members of the Windrush generation, many of those affected were born British subjects in the Caribbean and arrived in the UK before 1973.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauri Johnson

Lauri Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Higher Education at Boston College. Her research interests include culturally responsive and anti-racist leadership in cross national contexts, historical studies of multiculturalism and school-community activism, and successful school leadership in high poverty schools.  She is an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, co-convenor of the WERA (World Educational Research Association) International Research Network on “Families, Educators, and Communities as Educational Advocates,” and a former Fulbright scholar to the United Kingdom (2015).

Limarys Caraballo

Limarys Caraballo is Associate Professor of English Education at Queens College and has a dual appointment in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and co-director of the Cyphers for Justice Research Collaborative. Her research interests include students’ multiple identities and literacies, academic achievement, youth participatory action research, and preparing teachers to teach English in diverse sociocultural contexts. Her scholarship focuses on reframing deficit conceptions of lower-income students of color and advancing the theory and development of curricula, pedagogies in K-12, and teacher education that support the multiple identities and literacies of minoritized students.