**9. Conclusion**

The goal of this chapter is to address the concept of multicultural education and explore how it may support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development introduced by the United Nations. By tracing the concept of multicultural education back to its origin and discussing it in light of multiculturalism and critical multiculturalism, we identified the following main challenges:

First, practices of multicultural education that enhance the aim of social sustainability should be seen as an integrated part of education, not an appendage. Although many countries have embraced the idea that multicultural principles should be incorporated in the curriculum, and for that reason has posed multicultural education as an overall aim in curriculum plans and educational documents, issues of diversity are often treated separately from everyday activities in school. The idea of multicultural education—that all students, regardless of their background, should have an equal opportunity to learn in school—is frequently trivialised, taking the form of superficial practices of cultural affirmation. When this is the case, a majority perspective is often taken for granted, as teaching is charted primarily for the mainstream students and the mainstream classroom.

Second, I have presented the challenges that follow from the deficit discourse characterising contemporary debates on diversity. In this chapter, I have argued that schools and educators—often unintendedly and with good intentions—may reinforce such discourses, even when applying practices of multicultural education. By ignoring the political nature of schooling and its relationship with the dominant society, the process of education is seen as neutral. Consequently, schools run the risk of

overlooking opportunities to address and transform hidden prevailing majority-oriented perspectives and practices. Despite their best intentions, schools may therefore miss the opportunity to challenge the devaluation of identity and background that many students with migrant backgrounds still experience in school and society.

As emphasised by May and Sleeter [4], critical responses to multicultural education "has tended to focus on the theoretical parameters of the debate rather than on their actual application". Consequently, there is a risk that critical approaches—such as the one presented in this chapter—are more interested in what multicultural education should not be, rather than what it may look like in practice. In response, I would like to emphasise the need for critical studies that challenge our understanding of concepts such as multicultural education. We need a conceptual critique that helps us question hidden and embedded power structures and hierarchies and see more clearly what multicultural education can be as a significant contributor to social sustainability.

Furthermore, the alternative perspectives articulated in this chapter illustrate the centrality of teachers and the way they structure their interactions in the classroom. Cummins [40] reminds us that planned change in educational systems involves choices at different levels. Although choices are constrained by certain factors at each level of decision-making, individual teachers exercise agency in the sense that they determine for themselves how they chose to interact with their students, how their orientation towards the students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds should be, and the ways they implement the curriculum in their classrooms. Thus, teachers play a key role in implementing multicultural education. Within their classrooms, they can choose to make issues of diversity an integrated part of their teaching by adapting curriculum material to connect to students' prior knowledge and competencies. By enabling migrant students to use their home language as a powerful tool, teachers can also challenge fatalistic conceptions that reinforce deficit-based thinking. Emphasising what a diverse student population has, and not what they lack, brings attention to the wide array of skills and strengths students bring to the classroom and the community. It is within such an understanding of multicultural education that the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development can be realised.

I want to conclude by reflecting on the prospects for integrating a multicultural education approach that transforms education and expands opportunities for all students to succeed. What are the opportunities for realising the high hopes and great expectations of multicultural education?

For teachers working towards creating a positive classroom climate for diversity, there is often a mismatch between the realised and the expected in their daily work. Although diversity issues are high on the agenda in many countries, competing prominent discourses continue to fascinate the minds of educators, politicians, and policy makers [43], which ultimately affects the classroom. Both in European countries and in the USA, a standardisation of education has long been the case. As governments have aimed to raise standards and performances in education, a prescriptive curriculum policy has been introduced, emphasising international comparisons and the assessment of educational outcomes through standardised tests [44]. Hence, attention is increasingly paid to an educational practice focusing merely on 'what works' within a standardised curriculum and across different contexts. As Biesta [43] has emphasised, however, the aim to control and predict the outcome of a standardised process of learning draws attention away from issues such as how to chart more equitable educational opportunities for all students. Combined with a narrow focus on the assessment of skills through international comparative measures, there can be little

### *Enhancing Social Sustainability through Education: Revisiting the Concept of Multicultural… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103028*

space for discussions on how students' cultural and linguistic repertoires should be activated in the classroom, or how schools can affirm the value of cultural complexity.

For teachers, it is obviously demanding to balance the tensions between different educational agendas. However, as stated above, all teachers have the possibility to advance multicultural education in their daily encounters with students. By encouraging students to take pride in their cultural, linguistic, or ethnic background, introducing varied and diverse content, and taking an interest in the students' prior knowledge and competencies, teachers contribute to challenging the devaluation of identity that many students experience in school and society. For some, this means that they must overcome a tendency to assume that the dominant culture is the implicit norm. For others who aim to be 'colour blind' and tend to overlook diversities in the classroom, they must reorientate and rather become aware of students' unique needs and abilities. By establishing positive interrelations between students and between themselves and the students, teachers create an inclusive environment in which differences are acknowledged and appreciated. In this way, teachers play a key role in the work towards realising not only multicultural education but also the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
