Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World: Critical Perspectives on Multicultural Education

Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World explores the challenges facing multicultural education in the 21st century. It argues that the ideas fashioned in 1970s ‘multiculturalism’ are no longer adequate for the culturally complex world in which we now live. Much multicultural education celebrates superficial forms of difference and avoids difficult questions around culture in an age of transnational flows and hybrid identities. Megan Watkins and Greg Noble explore the understandings of multiculturalism that exist amongst teachers, parents and students. They demonstrate that ideas around culture and identity don’t match the complexities of the social contexts of schooling in migrant-based nations such as Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World draws on comprehensive research undertaken in Australian schools. It examines how a diverse range of schools address the challenges that ‘superdiversity’ poses, considering how the strengths and limitations of each school’s approach reflect wider logics of traditional multiculturalism. In contrast, the authors argue for a transformative multiculturalism involving a critically reflexive approach to understanding the processes, relations and identities of the contemporary world. With a Foreword by Fazal Rivzi, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and Professor of Global Studies in Education, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Foreword, Fazal Rivzi, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and Professor of Global Studies in Education, University of Melbourne, Australia Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Doing Diversity Differently 1. ‘Thinking’ Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education 2. Questions of Identity and Culture 3. Grappling with Cultural Complexity: Knowledge Translation and Professional Learning 4. Lazy Multiculturalism: Civility, Celebration and the Limitations of Cultural Recognition 5. Engaging with Others: Constructing Educational Problems 6. From Inclusive Curriculum to Cultural Intelligence 7. Engaging with Cultural Complexity, Enhancing Professional Practice Conclusion: Diversity Done Differently References Index

About the Author :
Megan Watkins is Professor, in the School of Education, at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is co-author (with Greg Noble) of Disposed to Learn: Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus (Bloomsbury, 2013). Greg Noble is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society, at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is co-author (with Megan Watkins) of Disposed to Learn: Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Review :
This book reinvigorates the pedagogies around multicultural education and brings them to a whole new level! Through the analysis of 14 school-led action research projects, we are challenged to re-think and re-do multicultural education anew. This book should be required reading in all teacher education programmes. Diversity is an idea that is as fraught as it is essential—this is the case that Megan Watkins and Greg Noble eloquently make in this important book. “Diversity” might sound a note of cosmopolitan pleasantry while barely hiding a multitude of underlying evils, from educational inequality to social fracture. Grounding their study of the lives of students and their teachers in Sydney schools, this book captures with nuanced subtlety and critical incisiveness the necessities yet the difficulties of multiculturalism. Concerning key concepts such as ethnicity and culture, Watkins and Noble investigate common understandings and offer crucially needed reconceptualization. Further, they offer important proposals for reorienting approaches to educational and social environments characterized by increasingly multifaceted characteristics. This book is a real milestone for grasping and shaping change.