**8. Counteracting the deficit discourse on diversity**

In this last section, I highlight the significance of counteracting deficit thinking within practices of multicultural education. Within education, discourses of deficit are often used to explain why students misbehave in class and underachieve. From this perspective, students perform badly because of their problematic family background, their communities, and/or their culture. Individuals' failure in school is thus ascribed to the deficits and problems of people from marginalised communities rather than to inequities in access and opportunities [38]. Minority children and their families are seen as culturally, socially, and linguistically deprived and in need

of repair, and school becomes the cure that should repair the errors and deficiencies. Subsequently, the role of education is to remove the barriers that the student's home culture and resources represent in the encounter with the dominant culture.

According to Cummins [39, 40], however, such discourses are never limited to schools and education alone. Rather, a deficit discourse of diversity is interwoven in public debate as an everyday way of speaking and thinking about people, communities, and cultures. Cummins [39] explained that there are certain power relations between dominant and subordinated groups within wider society that directly influence pedagogical practices within the classroom: "Teacher-student interactions within the classroom are a direct function of the choices that teachers make, individually and collectively, about what kind of educators they want to be." [39]. According to Cummins [39], teachers may institute what he calls collaborative relations of power, in contrast to coercive power relations. The relationship between the teacher and the student may counteract and actively challenge oppressive patterns on the macro level: "The choices that define teacher identities also open up or shut down identity options for their students" [39]. Hence, for Cummins [40], teachers always have the opportunity to challenge and counter the deficit discourse that plagues the media and institutions, such as schools. This can happen when teachers empower their students by recognising and affirming their cultural and linguistic background as being relevant to the school community and, therefore, also relevant to the society in which the school exists.

Bourdieu and Passeron [41] remind us that school, as a social system and an integrated part of society, transmits, and maintains the dominant culture. Schools integrate political and social discourses, mirror their communities, and thus may contribute to reproducing inequality. For some students, the content and form of the school correspond to their upbringing—their habitus. The subjects, language, and learning activities at school recapitulate the atmosphere around the dinner table, the discussions being a part of the daily life in the families, and the literature the parents read for their children. For other students, however, school represents something different from daily life, demanding access to social and cultural capital that they do not have or can possess because of the position and dispositions that their family and communities are assigned in society. According to Bourdieu and Passeron [41], to succeed academically in school is, therefore, harder for some students than for others, not because of their intellectual capacities but because they face structural hindrances. In this way, schools may contribute to social stratification, reinforcing the structural discrimination that also characterises other parts of society.

Moreover, according to Bourdieu and Passeron [41], parents from the dominant culture actively seek to give their children part of what can be framed as 'free culture', which supports and strengthens the activities conducted in school. Free culture includes leisure activities, such as travelling, which should not be confused with mass tourism. While tourism is associated with collectiveness, shallowness, and disruption of the environment, travelling—often to remote and expensive destinations—is pictured as a transformative journey that is unique in its duration and the personal commitment of the one who performs it. The traveller discovers new insights, learns about other cultures, and advances his or her individuality and self-development. In contrast to deprived families that do not have the same opportunities, affluent groups of people will thus have an advantage in school. First, they are able to give their children first-hand experience with language and culture. Second, the children are given self-confidence that is strengthened by the school and the content of the curriculum. Third, the 'free culture' may create relations between the families and the teacher in the sense that they share experiences, capital, and even habitus.

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

Taking Bourdieu and Passeron's [41] analysis of schools and society into consideration, the process of education is never neutral. Scholars such as Mayo [42] and Cummins [40] have emphasised the possibilities that teachers possess to challenge the unarticulated and often hidden mechanisms that reinforce social inequalities. Mayo [42] writes: "There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

As we can see from the quote, Mayo admitted that Bourdieu and Passeron [41] were right to claim that school and education transmit the dominant culture and hence contribute to the reproduction of the power relations and hierarchies within society. By drawing attention to the deficit discourse that often characterises debates on immigration and immigrants in school and society, Mayo illustrated the opportunities that teachers have to challenge marginalisation in school and make education a "practice of freedom" [42]. Becoming aware of the deficit discourse in schools and society—how it works and how it affects students—can help us better perceive the prospects and potentials for multicultural education in the future. Such an awareness reminds us of the political nature of schooling and its relationship to the dominant society. Hence, it may also enhance a critical stance against the perceived neutrality of schools that covers hierarchies, power relations, and other mechanisms that reinforce social inequalities. Counteracting deficit discourses, multicultural education can make a difference by promoting the transformation of societies towards social sustainability.
