**4. Different dimensions of multicultural education**

The concept of multicultural education comprises several dimensions that partly overlap. At its core, multicultural education calls for a curriculum no longer limited to content charted for the majority group. Furthermore, it challenges how education is done, and critically reviews the purpose and outcome of education [5, 8]. Hence, the concept of multicultural education promotes a re-envisioning of education, striving for equal educational opportunities for all students, regardless of ethnicity, social class, and cultural or racial backgrounds.

Such a wide conception thus stands in contrast to how teachers and educators have often thought of multicultural education as primarily related to curriculum content [11]. Although a critical reflection on curriculum is an important dimension, conceptualising multicultural education exclusively as content is problematic because it fails to consider multicultural education as an integral part of all subjects. When multicultural education is exclusively bound to content related to various cultural and ethnic groups, teachers who cannot see the relevance of the content within their disciplines easily dismiss multicultural education as peripheral to their day-to-day work in the classroom.

The content dimension of multicultural education encourages teachers to use a variety of examples and knowledge from different cultural contexts in all their teaching [10]. For instance, when working with songs and different kinds of folktales in school, teachers should include histories and cultural material from parts of the world other than those of the linguistic and cultural majority. This would also imply letting the students see how cultural motives find their parallel in different cultural and ethnic contexts [12]. By becoming aware of how to expand the curriculum, teachers can draw on multicultural content in all subjects, although it will be easier within social studies, language instruction, arts, and music than in science and mathematics [7]. Nevertheless, advancing the general awareness of teachers on the kinds of knowledge and experiences presented—and therefore made legitimate—in the classroom will help schools better address the diversity of the students.

An important task for teachers is also to present content and knowledge to their students from different perspectives and to discuss the extent to which the world looks different from different angles [4, 6]. This may help students understand how implicit frames of reference and biases within a subject area or discipline influence the way knowledge is constructed. By raising the awareness that narratives are constructed and, in most cases, represent only one perspective out of many, often the majority's perspective, students may critically investigate the often-hidden cultural assumptions that characterise presentations of content in the schools. Nieto [5] draws on examples from the subject of history and illustrates how examinations of the knowledge construction processes may contribute to challenging the narrative of European discovery of America. History can "no longer be about the exploits, conquests, and achievements of Europeans and White Americans" [5]; it also has to include "the study of Brown and Black and working-class people, and of imperialism, colonization, and exploitation" [5]. Thus, the claim for a critical stance against a one-dimensional presentation of history parallels post-colonial studies, for example, Said's [13] work on oriental representations, which challenges the idea of history as a 'neutral' and 'universal' concept.

Connecting the curriculum to students' lives and identities and fostering a critical awareness of how knowledge is constructed, schools may contribute to reducing stereotypes and prejudice. Described by Banks and Banks [7] as a key dimension of multicultural education, prejudice reduction refers to activities and practices teachers use to help students to develop positive attitudes towards cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity. Prejudice and stereotyping are biases that work together to create and maintain inequality in society and schools. Stereotypical beliefs and assumptions that teachers need to address may include prejudicial attitudes towards cultural groups, sexual orientation, gender differences, and social background—diversities that often make up the student body in a plural classroom. Positive intergroup relations may thus develop as students become acquainted with each other through their interactions [14].

Finally, multicultural education comprises an empowering dimension, referring to the organisational and structural changes that the idea of multicultural education requires [4, 8]. Thus, implementing multicultural education in a school means rethinking the culture of the school and reforming its power relationships. Therefore, multicultural education initiatives cannot be reduced to a single activity separated

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

from the day-to-day work in the classroom. Rather, to realise an empowering school culture through the means of multicultural education, issues of diversity should be integrated into the entire curriculum [15]. As emphasised by May and Sleeter [4], developing empowering school culture, all sides of schools' practices should be examined, including perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours, teacher-student interaction, assessments, evaluation programmes, and extracurricular activities. It is also important that all members of the school staff are involved in reforming the culture and organisation of the school [16]. In this way, multicultural education will be more easily integrated as a strategy that affects all aspects of the school's practice.

### **5. Multicultural education in light of multiculturalism**

Multiculturalism is a concept that has affected the understanding of multicultural education decisively. Arising in the context of what Modood [17] called a "liberal or social democratic egalitarianism and citizenship", multiculturalism is a new political idea that developed in parallel to multicultural education in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For Modood, multiculturalism "presupposes the matrix of principles, institutions and political norms that are central to contemporary liberal democracies" [17]. As a modern political idea or philosophy, multiculturalism advocates equity and equal rights between cultural communities in a plural state.

Modood [17] followed Kymlicka's [18] contextualisation of the concept, defining multiculturalism in close relation to certain norms and political understandings of society. According to Kymlicka [18], multiculturalism has both descriptive and normative aspects. Understood in a descriptive sense, multiculturalism refers to the understanding of society as a patchwork of different cultural and ethnic groups living side by side within the same community or geographical territory. Hence, used in a descriptive way, the concept implies a recognition of the integrity and distinct identities of cultural groups, accepting that groups have their own existence relative to other groups. Normatively, multiculturalism advocates the view that cultural and ethnic groups should receive special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture. The argument has been that a modern, liberated democratic state should provide equal rights for the different minorities, ensuring their existence and helping them withstand the pressure to assimilate into the majority culture. For some theorists, equal rights have been equivalent to acknowledging a group's contributions to the community as a whole, while others have argued for special protection under the law or autonomous rights for minority groups [18].

With its descriptive and normative perspectives, Kymlica underlined Modood's understanding of multiculturalism as a liberal, political, and ethical response to the fact that societies have become more diverse and contain some different groups existing within the same society. Furthermore, by framing multiculturalism within this specific political and historical context, the idea can be seen as moral compensation for the former treatment of minorities, aiming to make up for past oppression, violation, exclusion, and discrimination [17]. In both a descriptive and normative sense, multiculturalism is an inclusive philosophy that aims to address the diversification of society in a way that prevents balkanisation and hostile conflicts.

Given that multiculturalism as a political idea finds a parallel in the emergence of multicultural education, there is a close relationship between the ideas and norms within the two concepts. Consequently, several of the early studies in the field of multicultural education focused on issues of recognition, exploring ways that teaching

can better match the home and community cultures of students who are different from the majority. A telling example is Jordan's [19] classical work on the affirmation of Hawaiian children in school, in which she introduced the term "culturally compatible" to underline the responsibility that schools have for creating equal learning opportunities. Jordan [19] discussed cultural compatibility as follows: "Educational practices must match with the children's culture in ways which ensure the generation of academically important behaviours. It does not mean that all school practices need be completely congruent with natal cultural practices, in the sense of exactly or even closely matching or agreeing with them. The point of cultural compatibility is that the natal culture is used as a guide in the selection of educational program elements so that academically desired behaviours are produced and undesired behaviours are avoided." [19].

Jordan [19] addressed the need for schools to affirm the local culture of students in ways that make it a relevant source of knowledge in the classroom. Given that students enter schools with different cultures, teachers should know these cultures and reflect them in their teaching. Finding the right match between the students' cultures and the school, the teaching becomes "culturally compatible"—that is, students' home cultures are recognised as significant contributions to the mainstream.

As Ladson-Billings [20] emphasised, the term "culturally compatible" finds its parallel in terms such as "culturally appropriate" [21] and "culturally congruent" [22], used by pioneers of multicultural education. A common feature of these studies is their concentration on the content dimension of multicultural education, promoting the recognition and affirmation of students' cultures in school through the use of examples and knowledge from different cultural contexts. According to Ladson-Billings, however, these terms included Jordan's [19] cultural compatibility and "seem to connote accommodation of student culture to mainstream culture" [8]. As an alternative, she suggested the term "culturally relevant" [20], which some years later was picked up by Gay [23, 24] in her much-cited work on culturally responsive teaching.

Similar to the other concepts, Gay's [23, 24] work on culturally responsive teaching is closely connected to the ideas of multiculturalism on recognition and equality. Being one of the pioneers of multicultural education, the author was concerned with the recognition of minority students, emphasising dimensions of content integration, and equity pedagogy. It is important for Gay [24] that teachers need to know in-depth the cultural characteristics of the different ethnic groups represented in the classroom. According to Gay [23], the "knowledge that teachers need to have about cultural diversity goes beyond mere awareness of, respect for, and general recognition of the fact that ethnic groups have different values or express similar values in various ways". Rather, a "requirement for developing a knowledge base for culturally responsive teaching is acquiring detailed factual information about the cultural particularities of specific ethnic groups (e.g., African, Asian, Latino, and Native American)" [23]. For Gay [23], "the intellectual thought of students from different ethnic groups is culturally encoded in that its expressive forms and substance are strongly influenced by cultural socialization". Hence, to implement multicultural education in schools, teachers must be able to decipher the codes of various cultures and to use this information to get to know and relate to their students better, exploring the kinds of differences that make communication difficult.

According to Gay, the school's attention to the cultural characteristics of ethnic groups is important because many teachers are hesitant to address cultural differences for fear of stereotyping or making generalisations [23]. Teachers will therefore try to compensate for the fear by ignoring or denying the existence of differences,

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

and conduct their teaching from an assumed neutral position, which in most cases is equivalent to a majority culture perspective. Nevertheless, Gay's [23] approach has been criticised, an important critique that has targeted the concept of multiculturalism and its versions of multicultural education. Among others, Mason [25] emphasised that multiculturalism presupposes an essentialist conception of culture, reifying the identities and practices of ethnic groups. Therefore, when Gay [23] argued that teachers need to know the "ethnic groups' cultural values, traditions, communication, learning styles, contributions, and relational patterns", she faced the risk of treating cultures as static, bounded, and homogeneous [25].

This conception of cultural affirmation has proven to be problematic for several reasons. First, the diversification of societies has made communities highly differentiated [26]. This implies that a person's identity is rarely bound to one particular group or community; rather, it reflects a range of the communities in which the person is a part. Identity is produced and reproduced in transformative processes of cultural interaction and exchange [27]. Second, seeing people as representatives of certain cultures or groups is a limitation of identity that may potentially put restrictions on who people are capable of becoming in their community. To claim that the intellectual thought of students from different ethnic groups is culturally encoded, or that teachers' should be able to discern specifically cultural traits that are characteristic for a group of people, risk trapping people within a narrow understanding of identity that shuts off identity options for people [28]. Hence, culturally responsive teaching aimed at breaking down walls can paradoxically lead to the reinforcement of cultural borders. For minorities, being seen as a distinct group with certain characteristics may, in turn, lead to psychology of separatism, which isolates minority groups and creates a division between the groups inside a country as well as between the groups and the state [29]. By reinforcing a specific type of difference, newcomer cultures may become even more isolated in schools and society.

### **6. Multicultural education in light of critical multiculturalism**

The problems associated with multiculturalism have led scholars to argue for alternative ways of engaging with questions of difference. In this way, they have provided important corrections to the concept of multicultural education.

In a British context, antiracist educators such as Troyna and Foster [30, 31] have argued that liberal multicultural education has largely ignored the structural racism, sexism, and discrimination that often affect students from minorities. As an alternative, antiracist education requires "eliminating from the educational system any practices which are racist or which indirectly restrict the chances of success of members of a particular racial or ethnic group" [31]. In the United States, the critique of liberal multicultural education has often been framed within a similarly critical approach, a critical race theory [4], which combines a progressive political struggle for racial justice with the critique of what is seen as an oversimplified approach to cultural recognition. Similar critical thoughts can also be found in critical pedagogy, for instance, the classical work of Freire [32], who rejected the idea that education should affirm students' experiences only for motivational reasons. In line with antiracist education and critical race theory, a critical pedagogy argues for the inclusion of a global critical dimension that transcends the given and even alters the students' experiences, ultimately changing illegitimate hierarchies that are embedded in social practices within education.

However, in recent years, developments in cultural studies, particularly within education, have been influenced by critical multiculturalism, which has taken up the range of concerns offered by critical responses to multiculturalism. As such, critical multiculturalism has confronted the last decades' hegemony of liberal multicultural education more broadly than a single critique [33]. In line with other critical responses to multiculturalism, critical multiculturalism argues for a critical analysis of the conditions necessary to realise social emancipation for all individuals despite race, class, gender, cultural background, or ethnicity [12]. As emphasised by May and Sleeter [4], structural inequalities and discriminatory practices continue to persist, given that schools have adopted multiculturalism as a pedagogical approach. Hence, multicultural education does not seem to have the ability "to tackle seriously and systematically these structural inequalities, such as racism, institutionalized poverty, and discrimination" [4]. This inability is a result of its "continued use of the affirmational and politically muted discourses of 'culture' and cultural recognition" [4], where the cultural background is essentialised, depoliticised, and treated as a set of practices that can be described, labelled, and taught [15]. By contrast, critical multiculturalism seeks to highlight structural inequalities that prevent education from responding to the variety of needs in a diverse student population and to realise optimal learning conditions for all students [4].

Critical multiculturalism is therefore critically concerned with the consequences of multicultural education. When cultural background is treated as something fixed that should be affirmed and recognised, cultural practices and experiences are understood as something that can be categorised and compared [34]. This understanding reflects a conception of cultural background and identities as integral, unified, and related to a specific geographic or ethnic community. Moreover, it undermines the experience that cultural identities are increasingly being deconstructed, altered, and redefined in dynamic processes of change. Although multiculturalism has its roots in the civil rights movement and has highlighted issues of racism in education, it has proven insufficient when it comes to recognising, questioning, and altering structural systems of injustice and embedded power. Thus, from the perspective of critical multiculturalism, there is a need to challenge a multicultural education approach that draws on multiculturalism and stimulate reflexivity, critical thinking, and selfawareness to create opportunities for transformative learning [4].

In the remainder of the chapter, I now turn to what I see as two major hindrances to realising sustainable multicultural education: the reduction of multicultural education to one-off events separated from everyday school activities and the deficit discourse that characterises contemporary debates on diversity.

### **7. Integrating multicultural education into the curriculum**

As we have seen, adopting the concept of multicultural education in schools does not necessarily imply a more inclusive and socially just practice and school environment. When practices of multicultural education are treated separately without truly permeating everyday school activities—for example, reduced to single happenings and one-off events—practices of multicultural education may function counterproductively with regard to their proclaimed aim of inclusion. Hence, structural inequalities and discriminatory practices may continue to persist when schools adopt multiculturalism as a pedagogical approach.

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

In a study of multicultural education in American schools, Hoffman [35] introduced the notion of "hallway multiculturalism", which problematises the practice of celebrating cultural diversity without really integrating issues of diversity into the curriculum. According to Hoffman, schools often turn to superficial ways of recognising cultural backgrounds, displaying posters and decorations made up of collages of "ethnic faces" and statements proclaiming "All Cultures are One" and "Diversity for Unity" [35]. Hoffman's critique corresponds with Troyna's [36] well-known description of the three S's of multicultural education: saris, samosas, and steel bands, that is to say, clothing, food, and music, which often characterise practices of multicultural education. By focusing on the exterior of culture, schools avoid a more critical engagement with deeper issues and become examples of superficial ways of addressing cultural differences in schools [12].

Watkins and Noble [37] offered a recent example of such a critique from migrantbased nations, such as Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. Taking an ethnographic orientation to the field of multicultural education, Watkins and Noble [37] examined how schools often resist the intellectual task of doing diversity differently. Although integrating multicultural education into the curriculum requires an overall approach in which all sides of education are influenced, Watkins and Noble [37] found that schools' practices often offer little more than a superficial celebration of ethnic differences. As examples of unreflexive forms of multicultural education, schools entail simplistic understandings of culture. Thus, instead of enhancing social sustainability, which was the intended meaning of the pedagogical initiatives, schools' practices may reproduce essentialised understandings of difference, providing flawed representations of the complexities in today's classrooms.

An integrated approach to multicultural education requires that issues of diversity affect all subjects in school and that diversity has ramifications for all sides of teachers' professional work in the classroom [15]. Such an approach includes a wider conception of content, assessment, learning approaches, and teaching methods. Thus, to enhance the UN agenda on social sustainability in schools, multicultural education cannot be reduced to a single activity. Rather, issues of diversity should be integrated into the entire curriculum, thereby creating an empowering school culture for all students. This implies that knowledge should be presented not as a neutral objective statement but rather as several—and to a certain extent—competing narratives that comprise different perspectives. Understood in this way, multicultural education may create a space for action, intervention, and even transformation that may contribute to enhancing social sustainability as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
