Stephen May (editor) - Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis

STEPHEN MAY AND CHRISTINE E. SLEETER

A little more than a decade ago, it seemed that multicultural education would become common practice in schools. After all, advocacy for it had by that time in the 1990sa history of 3040 years in Western countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Its core tenets seemed both obvious and unproblematicat least, that is, with respect to its most popular variant, liberal multiculturalism. What could be wrong, surely, with recognizing, respecting, and including cultural differences as the basis for teaching and learning, as liberal multiculturalism averred? Wasnt fostering intercultural respect and engagement among both students and teachers a worthy and important goal? Why couldnt we all just get along better, recognizing and celebrating our ethnic and cultural differences in the classroom, and beyond?

You might well ask these questionssince in the last decade, we have seen a major retrenchment of the principles of multiculturalism, in both education and wider public policy. In the United States, a rapidly growing standards and testing movement has replaced earlier attention to racial and ethnic diversity. Beginnings of this shift were visible in the report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), which warned that U.S. international preeminence was being eroded by the mediocre performance of its educational institutions. A system of setting standards and measuring student performance based on them was cemented by passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, leading to pressure to raise test scores, which has turned the work of teachers into that of standardized curriculum technicians and test managers (Valli, Croninger, & Chambliss, 2008). In this context, despite emphasis on efforts to close the achievement gap, multicultural education has all but disappeared.

This move towards a standardized curriculum was also framed within a wider, growing skepticism of the merits of diversity per se, particularly, after 9/11. For many, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity are no longer something to be celebrated, but rather feared. Bellicose U.S. critics of multiculturalism, such as Barry (2000) and Huntingdon (2005), argue that ongoing ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious differences are simply no longer to be tolerated if nation-states are to continue to make their way safely in the world. And the role of multicultural education is often at the center of such attacks.

As a result of such visceral critiques of multiculturalism, and their prominence in political and media commentary, wider multicultural policies and practices that seemed well accepted have simply unraveled. For example, decades of affirmative action and related civil rights advances for African Americans have been dismantled, most notably in relation to access to higher education (Kellough, 2006). The provision of bilingual education, particularly for Latino/a Americans, has also been severely circumscribed, and in some U.S. states actually proscribed, by legislation promoting a monolingual English language philosophy as a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship (May, 2008). Meanwhile, across Europe, multiculturalism as public policy is in apparent full retreat, as European states increasingly assert that minority groups integrate or accept dominant social, cultural linguistic and (especially) religious mores as the price of ongoing citizenship (Modood, 2007). The obvious target here, as Modood argues, are Muslims and Islam (see also Rhedding-Jones, this volume), who have regularly been both homogenized and demonized in the post-9/11 environment, a position represented most clearly in the former U.S. President George W. Bushs irresponsible and reductionist phrase axis of evil.