Precarious international multicultural education (hegemony, dissent and rising alternative)

Citation

Badrkhani, P. (2018), "Precarious international multicultural education (hegemony, dissent and rising alternative)", Journal for Multicultural Education, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 294-296. https://doi.org/10.1108/JME-05-2017-0032

This book consisted of 19 chapters and each one includes one article. The articles were presented in a conference held in Canada 2012. Different scholars have been gathered together in this event to share their ideas and experiences about the multiculturalism and the multicultural education. The book’s main theme is to contribute to the policies and preferences for multicultural education in different countries and how these matters may affect the life of people of color and those who have different cultural backgrounds. The government laws and decisions efficacy on the multiculturalism issues on people’s life is undeniable, especially on the minority people group’s education. The terminology multiculturalism got different meanings when it is putting on the action. Different authors who have various perspectives, pointed out to the multicultural affairs. In this book, different assentation are represented for alternative educational agenda for the intellectual equality in multicultural countries such as England, Canada, Australia and the USA.

The main stream of the research is focusing on the multicultural society and how the governments are running it to gain better results. Now, for each country, it is necessary to make a meaning for multiculturalism in general and for multicultural education, in particular. In general, the governments posed some statements about supporting multiculturalism in the society like Europe and the USA, and this claim is not sensible in the educational setting and the students’ personal life in the multicultural society. In this situation, the students of multicultural teacher education thought that it is important to have better understanding of the discrimination and the racism. (2009, p. 177, citing Sleeter, 2000/2001 and McDiarmid and Price, 1990). In general, the highlighted points in these articles regard how the identity of each individual with special cultural background is important and how these individuals could live together. The ambivalent and identifications replicating of integrity of ethno-religious identities in the ethnic context has become important. Regarding to the articles, pedagogies that are relating to egalitarian cosmopolitan, are being promulgating the ability to separate oneself from restricted and exclusive ethno-cultural outlooks and the narrow forms of ethno-religious interests, and to self-consciously, entertain the global perspectives, methods and communication (Pinar, 2009). The cosmopolitan pedagogy is being reinforced in opposition to constrains and restrictions of the influences of acute racial, ethnic and national narrow outlooks. Cosmopolitan pedagogy is amplifying intercultural contacts and the exchanges that focusing on the theoretical knowledge rather than evidentiary knowledge (Van Hooff and Vandekerckhove, 2010). From the reviewer’s view point, each policy that is made, has its own opponents and supports in the European and Western countries. Even if these diplomacies are based on the equality of the different people in a community, these laws established silent gaps between different groups in the multicultural society. People from diverse cultures, who are the immigrants, need to touch the condition in the multicultural society while appreciating the national values and customs because the values of the country that accepted the refugees, has its own place.

In particular, based on the descriptions, the students of the minority groups who have different cultural backgrounds are those who are affected by the governmental decisions. Therefore, the multiculturalism education is the response to the struggles over the students’ personality, especially all of them. In this book, the researchers highlight how each student’s personality is unique in its own place, which tends toward self-absorption and withdrawal with regard to ethnicity or generates ethno-cultural reorientations for the spectators. Knowledge exchange requires cosmopolitans’ capability development. The challenges that the educators may facing with, are the administrations, which are based on the alternatives constructed on this premise about intellectual equalization. Pedagogically, probabilities can establish the associations between people from non-Western people who have different cultural backgrounds within a Western nation-centered educational program. What the researcher means is that the educational alternative, which is worldly, embraces a development in the intellectual issues, engaged among the Western educational system, and the speaking English educators have to establish the productive use of their incapability to outreach knowledge boundaries, which is rooted in differences in educational and linguistic cultures.

Part of the articles is about how to make a meaning about how multiculturalism is disposed to understand upbringing the citizenship education. Nation-states have an important role in protecting and securing the well-being of their citizens; there is a possibility for engrossing the meanings that lie behind both children’s education policymaking and intellectual traditions and portend the need for the teachers to find pedagogies and to create diplomacies for engaging with their insufficient knowledge of these. It does not mean that the educators or students have to disconnect themselves from the basic attachments. The nation-state gives continuous protection and the importance of the rights to their non-citizens and citizens (Hollinger, 1995; Sen, 2006; Yang, 2009).The essays in this book also hint to the policies that were applied in the European countries such as Britain, Germany and France and were somehow effective. In the USA, when President Barak Obama was elected, the citizens (especially the people of color) were hoping for the changes in the governments’ policy toward the multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism consisted of the alternatives that are not nation-based but emphasized the themes and the developments between different nations and countries. The articles in this book highlight the preference pedagogies that are navigated toward advancing and overlapping egalitarian and civic national cosmopolitan identity through separated self-reflections that are oriented to build a democratic nationality and internationally by requesting global/local intellectual relations and, in particular, rationalizations for democracy establishments using different theoretical policies available among communities that are consisted of culturally diverse groups (Keane, 2009). Furthermore, the alternatives to the multicultural education are component of assembled intercultural exchanges operated by the main intellectual responsibilities that are contributing to the educational developments beyond the national states with cultural diversities.