I recently reviewed a new reference book on multicultural education that explores multicultural education on a global scale and includes chapters on different approaches to multicultural education around the world. It was interesting to learn how history, culture, and migration patterns play a role in all the chapters, but how they play out varies.
Here’s an excerpt from my review:
This reference book provides for deeper understanding of relationships between politics and schools and new directions for multicultural education in the 21st century. The editor has brought together an impressive array of scholarship. It responds to concerns about educational institutions’ capacity across the globe to continue to serve societal missions during times of great upheaval and change through a form of multicultural education that makes sense for 21st century, globalized contexts. In chapter after chapter, the contributors demonstrate how history has shaped multicultural education and schooling in many places around the world. The contributors also explicate the importance of recognizing, respecting, and separating historical versions of multicultural education that reflected the intercultural politics of an earlier time from emerging 21st century approaches to multicultural education that are situated in a completely different set of politics.
This book is an equalizer in that it reminds readers that their local version of multicultural education is not necessarily the only version. It also illuminates our understanding of multicultural education by pointing out how political action and educational gesture collide to shape an approach to education that may have shown great promise originally, but in hindsight also had some shortcomings.
This book is essential reading for educators, policy makers, researchers, and scholars interested in the promotion of a multicultural education that is truly participatory, that involves all of their respective constituencies in shaping and benefitting from education for the greater good. Its scope is especially critical for a time when the migration of so many people globally makes it ever more necessary not only to understand one’s local context, but also the context from which newcomers to the community come.
For the full review, visit this link.
It is safe to say that none of us is alone with the challenges and opportunities of multiculturalism. Neither are we alone in rethinking multicultural education for the realities of the 21st century.
