Yun-Kyung Cha, Jagdish Gundara, Seung-Hwan Ham, Moosung Lee (Eds.) - Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives - Policy and Institutionalization-Springer Singapore (2017) PDF

Yun-Kyung Cha · Jagdish Gundara
Seung-Hwan Ham · Moosung Lee
Editors
Multicultural
Education
in Glocal
Perspectives
Policy and Institutionalization
Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives
Yun-Kyung Cha Jagdish Gundara
•
Seung-Hwan Ham Moosung Lee

•
Editors
Multicultural Education
in Glocal Perspectives
Policy and Institutionalization
123
Editors
Yun-Kyung Cha Seung-Hwan Ham
Department of Education Department of Education
Hanyang University Hanyang University
Seoul Seoul
Korea (Republic of) Korea (Republic of)
Jagdish Gundara Moosung Lee

Institute of Education University of Canberra
University of London Canberra, ACT
London Australia
UK
ISBN 978-981-10-2220-3 ISBN 978-981-10-2222-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950381
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017

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Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Yun-Kyung Cha, Jagdish Gundara, Seung-Hwan Ham
and Moosung Lee
Part I Global Institutionalization of Multicultural Education

2 Multicultural Education Policy in the Global Institutional
Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham and Kyung-Eun Yang
3 The Valorization of Humanity and Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Francisco O. Ramirez, Patricia Bromley and Susan Garnett Russell
4 Educating Supranational Citizens: The Rise of English
in Curricular Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Yun-Kyung Cha and Seung-Hwan Ham
5 Intercultural and International Understandings:
Non-centric Knowledge and Curriculum in Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Jagdish Gundara
6 Diversity and Citizenship Education in Multicultural Nations . . . . . 73
James A. Banks
Part II National/Local Dynamics in Multicultural Education

7 Harmony and Multicultural Education in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Li-Ching Ho
8 Moving Beyond a Monotype Education in Turkey: Major
Reforms in the Last Decade and Challenges Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Zafer Çelik, Sedat Gümüş and Bekir S. Gür
v
vi Contents
9 Multicultural Community Development, Social Capital

and Social Disorganization: Exploring Urban Areas
in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Na’im Madyun and Moosung Lee
10 Multicultural Practice for Cultural Heterogeneity
and National Cultural Homogeneity: Immigrant Youth’s
Experience in Osaka, Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Yuko Okubo
11 Education for Population Control: Migrant Children’s
Education Under New Policies in Beijing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Jiaxin Chen, Dan Wang and Yisu Zhou
Part III Global and Local Possibilities in Multicultural Education

12 Multicultural Policy and Ethnolinguistic Minority Learners’
Academic Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham, Hara Ku and Moosung Lee
13 Culturally Responsive Leadership for Community
Empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Lauri Johnson
14 Institutionalizing Internationalization Within a College
of Education: Toward a More Critical Multicultural
and Glocal Education Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Kevin Roxas, Karen B. McLean Dade and Francisco Rios
15 Epilogue: Toward a Glocal Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
and Moosung Lee
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Contributors
James A. Banks University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Patricia Bromley Stanford University, Stanford, USA
Zafer Çelik Yildirim Beyazit University, Ankara, Turkey
Yun-Kyung Cha Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
Jiaxin Chen University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong SAR
Sedat Gümüş Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, Turkey
Jagdish Gundara UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
Bekir S. Gür Yildirim Beyazit University, Ankara, Turkey
Seung-Hwan Ham Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
Li-Ching Ho University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
Lauri Johnson Boston College, Boston, USA
Hara Ku Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
Moosung Lee University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia
Na’im Madyun University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA
Karen B. McLean Dade Western Washington University, Bellingham, USA
Yuko Okubo University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, USA
Francisco O. Ramirez Stanford University, Stanford, USA
Francisco Rios Western Washington University, Bellingham, USA
Kevin Roxas Western Washington University, Bellingham, USA
Susan Garnett Russell Columbia University, New York, USA
vii
viii Contributors
Dan Wang University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong SAR
Kyung-Eun Yang University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Yisu Zhou University of Macau, Zhuhai, Hong Kong SAR
Chapter 1
Introduction

and Moosung Lee
Multicultural education is still a contested concept. Definitions and conceptual-

izations vary both within and across countries (Banks 2009; Grant and Portera
2011; Gundara 2015). It even evolves over time, adding new concepts and ideas to
its original meanings (May and Sleeter 2010; Wright et al. 2012). Despite such
complexity, few would disagree that envisioning and implementing an inclusive
education toward social justice and equity for all children regardless of their cultural
group memberships is an integral part of multicultural education. Also, multicul-
tural education is often understood as an important tool to equip all future citizens
with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to live in a culturally diverse
society. Most educational policies that are based on or influenced by multicultural
principles valorize cultural diversity as a way of creating a new form of social unity
for a democratic society. Multicultural education, in such a broad sense, has
emerged as an important policy issue in an increasing number of countries around
the world (Cha et al. 2012; Sutton 2005).
Given the evolving landscape of multiculturalism in education, a central purpose
of this volume is to explore the institutionalization of multicultural education from a
glocal—combining global and local—perspective. We believe that a glocal per-
spective is important for two reasons. First, all children should be provided with
meaningful learning opportunities to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes
necessary to live in a culturally and ethnolinguistically diverse society, where the
distinction between the local and the global is becoming blurred. Second, under-
standing both the “global grammar” and the “local semantics” of multicultural
Y.-K. Cha (&) S.-H. Ham

Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
e-mail: yunkyung@hanyang.ac.kr
J. Gundara
UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
M. Lee
University of Canberra, Canberra, Canada
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 1

Y.-K. Cha et al. (eds.), Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_1
2 Y.-K. Cha et al.
education helps us grasp the whole picture of multicultural education as an evolving

social construct and phenomenon (see also the Epilogue). Organized into three
sections, this volume draws upon expertise from a number of established and
emerging scholars from around the world. The chapters in the volume, taken as a
whole, constitute an illustrative picture of public schooling in the context of varying
levels and aspects of multicultural education.
The first section of this volume, titled “Global Institutionalization of
Multicultural Education,” intends to highlight that while cultivating a sense of
national citizenship remains an important purpose of public schooling around the
world, it is becoming less and less viable to prioritize it at the expense of nurturing a
sense of multicultural awareness and understanding. Focusing on how multicul-
turalism has been incorporated into educational policy discourses as a fairly uni-
versal epistemic model, this section examines multicultural education in terms of its
conceptualizations and manifestations as it has emerged and evolved on a global
scale.
Specifically, this section opens with a chapter by Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan
Ham, and Kyung-Eun Yang. Their analysis of extensive cross-national data sug-
gests that multicultural education is becoming an integral element of educational
policy discourse whose legitimacy is largely taken for granted, often regardless of
individual countries’ immediate societal needs for it. They argue that multicultural
education has been increasingly associated with an expanded notion of citizenship
that emphasizes the centrality of the individual as a member of glocal civil society,
not simply as a member of a national territory. As the nation-state is no longer
regarded as the only primary unit of societal organization, an individual person is
increasingly seen as a member of subnational and transnational communities in
addition to a national citizen.
Further illustrative evidence about the global diffusion of multicultural education
is provided in the next chapter by Francisco O. Ramirez, Patricia Bromley, and
Susan Garnett Russell. They conducted an extensive analysis of social studies,
history, and civics textbooks from many countries around the world, witnessing a
growth of cosmopolitan and multicultural emphases over the past several decades.
They found both common humanity and cultural diversity validated simultaneously
in school curricula in recent decades. That is, while the world has been shifting
from nation-state centric blueprints to universalistic principles and standards, the
epistemic model that undergirds the contemporary world also includes a strong
glocalization thrust that questions the homogenizing thrust of nationalism and thus
revitalizes cultural diversity.
Such shifts toward cosmopolitan and multicultural visions in education are
discussed further in the chapter by Yun-Kyung Cha and Seung-Hwan Ham,
especially in the context of language education. They conducted a systematic
examination of the global diffusion of English language education over the past
century, finding that English has been institutionalized as a legitimate school
subject in most national education systems, reflecting international discourses
emphasizing the empowerment of the individual as a capable and responsible
member of global society. They note that the worldwide discursive promotion of
1 Introduction 3
English language education is not necessarily in conflict with the celebration of

linguistic diversity. That is, while linguistic diversity is seen to contribute to the
richness of the cultural heritages of the world, English as a lingua franca is assumed
to serve as a useful tool for communication in intercultural and international
contexts.
The validation and revitalization of cultural diversity, according to Jagdish
Gundara, necessitates educational efforts toward fostering what he calls noncentric
understandings, which constitute a central aspect of multicultural education. In his
chapter, where he advances a range of arguments especially in the context of Asian
societies, his ideas converge on the importance of having a noncentric, nontri-
umphalist perspective on knowledge. He emphasizes the need to develop systemic
ways to avoid the dangers of various forms of centrism in the curriculum and to
make school knowledge more inclusive. An inclusive epistemology alone is not
enough, however. He notes that participatory pedagogies are also important. That
is, educational processes should foster critical and diverse thinking within a
democratic school system where individual learners actively participate in knowl-
edge construction and meaning making, rather than simply obeying authoritative
rules without questioning them.
Finally, James A. Banks closes the first section of this volume. He argues in his
chapter that citizenship education in multicultural nation-states should be trans-
formed so that it can balance diversity and unity, helping students develop reflective
cultural, national, regional, and global identifications. He emphasizes the impor-
tance of delving into questions about how nation-states can construct societies that
incorporate diversity while also having overarching sets of values and goals to
which their diverse populations are commonly committed. Given that cultural,
ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity exists in most countries, he stresses
that sustained effort is needed to help different groups to maintain aspects of their
cultures while constructing a democratic nation-state into which these groups are
structurally integrated and to which they have a sense of allegiance.
These global illustrations of multicultural education would offer only partial
pictures without local dynamics examined simultaneously. Thus, chapters in the
second section of this volume, “National/Local Dynamics in Multicultural
Education,” illustrate the local in the institutionalization and implementation of
multicultural education policies. Particular focus is placed on understanding local
contextual forces and conditions that shape the contours of multicultural education
differently across places.
Li-Ching Ho opens this section with an exploration of how Singapore, a
heterogeneous young state with a history of ethnic and religious tensions,
approaches multicultural citizenship education based on the notion of harmony.
Based on an extensive analysis of official curricular documents and student inter-
view data, he suggests the possibility that East Asian understandings of multicul-
turalism may substantially differ from how it has been conceptualized in North
America or Europe. Instead of equity, which is an integral element of Western
conceptualizations of multicultural education, a noticeable emphasis is placed on
harmony as a primary goal of multicultural education in Singapore. Considering
4 Y.-K. Cha et al.
that harmony is a deep-rooted value in societies with a Confucian tradition, East

Asian perspectives on multiculturalism and its manifestations in education deserve
further systematic scholarly attention.
Like Singapore, Turkey is a culturally diverse country as expected from its
geographical location at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Middle East. Zafer
Çelik, Sedat Gümüş, and Bekir S. Gür look into this country, assessing its education
system from a multicultural perspective. While Turkey is a society that has hosted
many different cultural groups throughout its long history, policy discourses about
multiculturalism in the Turkish education system have come to the forefront in the
2000s, i.e., a decade after discussions about multiculturalism in general began in
Turkey along with the global trend. Significant steps have been taken in Turkey for
the democratization of the education system toward a multicultural and multilingual
structure that is more inclusive of differences. From an insiders’ perspective, the
authors of the chapter interpret these educational developments as a noteworthy
progress. The country’s legal framework, however, still defines its education system
as a monocultural structure under a centralized control. This has been a serious
hindrance to the protection of the rights of minority children and to the formulation
and implementation of broader educational policies based on multicultural
pluralism.
Causes of educational inequity are usually rather complex and multifaceted in
most societies. This is particularly the case in the United States, which accounts
in part for why multicultural education has received special attention in the country.
In their chapter, Na’im Madyun and Moosung Lee empirically delve into one of
such causes of educational inequity—social disorganization in the context of U.S.
urban communities. They draw our attention to the importance of social ties across
racial/ethnic lines for healthy community development, a significant factor known
to be closely related to educational opportunities. By linking the U.S. census data to
a subset of the 2001 Social Capital Benchmark Survey data, they analyzed 24 cities.
The findings suggested that as long as rigid racial lines persist, racial diversity
would function more often as a negative community factor for both minority and
majority groups. The authors of the chapter remind us that this situation has been a
serious problem facing many U.S. urban communities. They believe that sustained
efforts toward building the capacity to form informal healthy social ties across
racial/ethnic lines are critical to moving toward multicultural community
development.
Unlike many other countries, Japan is often seen as a quite homogeneous
country. Yuko Okubo provides an ethnographic illustration of some ethnic minority
students in Japan, and discusses how the notion of multiculturalism has been shaped
and conditioned within a particular societal context. According to her observation in
Osaka, although U.S.-style multicultural education was introduced to educational
practitioners and teachers there, it was blended with their own tradition of the local
minority education based on the notion of coexistence/co-living. The Japanese term
tabunka kyōsei—translated as multicultural coexistence or multicultural living
together—is a localized notion of multiculturalism in Japan, which seems to have
an epistemic connection to the notion of multicultural harmony observed in
1 Introduction 5
Singapore (see Ho in this volume). She notes, however, that such a notion some-
times sharply contrasts with educational practices that often place immigrant chil-
dren as cultural “others” in the strong presence of national homogeneity as a norm
in the country, with cultural heterogeneity rendered rather invisible.
Finally, Jiaxin Chen, Dan Wang, and Yisu Zhou offer a critical view of the
intersection of social and educational inequities in the context of China—a country
with huge economic disparities between urban and rural areas. In particular, their
chapter focuses on a large number of children in China who migrate from poor rural
areas to Beijing, the capital city of the country. The authors provide a critical
examination of Beijing’s new policy developments which, either intentionally or
not, contribute toward the systematic exclusion of those children from equitable
educational opportunities. Based on a range of data gathered from observations,
interviews, and official documents, they conclude that educational policies in
Beijing have recently lost much of their humanistic purpose, at least for those
migrant children, and have become a mere tool for population control. Although
population control may be a rational goal for Beijing given its massive size, the
chapter problematizes the situation that the primary target of population control
measures is migrant families from rural areas, who are the group that has benefited
the least from the economic growth of the country.
The closing section of this volume, titled “Global and Local Possibilities in
Multicultural Education,” draws our attention to possibilities for multicultural
education. Having provided glocal descriptions of multicultural education in the
first and second sections, this edited volume, then, offers in its third section some
possible approaches to helping all children grow empowered as competent and
responsible future citizens of multicultural democratic societies. While the
approaches illustrated in this section show only a small segment of the wide range
of possibilities, they present a juxtaposition of global and local approaches toward
multicultural education.
In the first chapter of this section, Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham, Hara Ku,
and Moosung Lee conducted a large-scale cross-national analysis, whose results
suggested that multicultural policies, if firmly institutionalized and successfully
implemented, would really work toward enhancing educational equity. Specifically,
their data from more than 150 thousand students in 32 countries indicated a strong
association between the degree of the integration of multiculturalism into national
curricular policies and the level of ethnolinguistic minority children’s academic
engagement. Based on this finding, they highlight the importance of systematic and
sustained policy efforts in order to ensure that all children, regardless of their
cultural group memberships, are provided with meaningful learning opportunities in
a culturally diverse society.
While the previous chapter gives credence to the possibility that well-designed
policy supports may really work toward a more equitable distribution of opportu-
nities for students to learn in school, it is also evident that policy alone does not
suffice. In this respect, Lauri Johnson sheds light on the notion of culturally
responsive leadership, illustrating some exemplary profiles of culturally responsive
educational leaders in three different national contexts—New York City, Toronto,
6 Y.-K. Cha et al.
and London. In particular, through an expansive reconceptualization of leadership

beyond traditional school-based administrative roles, her chapter shows possibilities
of broadening the contours of educational leadership into which multicultural goals
are integrated, such as cultural recognition/revitalization and community empow-
erment. She underscores the importance of leadership preparation programs that
help future educational administrators/leaders to develop culturally responsive
practices.
These formal leaders are important, but individual teachers are also educational
leaders who actively exert their leadership in their classroom teaching based on a
sense of professionalism and the ethic of care. In this respect, teacher preparation
programs inevitably have an enormous responsibility to prepare prospective
teachers to competently teach diverse children. In their chapter, Kevin Roxas,
Karen B. McLean Dade, and Francisco Rios provide an up-close illustration of how
one college of education in the United States effectively integrates critical multi-
cultural and glocal perspectives into faculty work and teacher preparation programs,
providing a reference model for transforming teacher education in the glocal con-
text of increasing cultural diversity and democratic plurality.
Finally, the editors of this volume conclude with an epilogue. They revisit
multicultural education from a glocal perspective, emphasizing the analytic
importance of the highly rationalized formal structural aspects of multicultural
education on the one hand and the varying forms and contextualized meanings of
multicultural education on the other, both within a fuller glocal picture of public
schooling. They see the evolution of multicultural education as a new possibility for
us to creatively expand our epistemic landscape toward embracing glocal modalities
of diversity, calling our attention to the existential imperative of valorizing indi-
viduals’ rights to and responsibilities for their diverse glocal cultural heritages in
educational settings and beyond.
The task of editing this volume was facilitated by the efforts of many people.
We, the editors, are grateful to the contributing authors for preparing their chapter
manuscripts and revising them based on external reviewer feedback. We
acknowledge with deep appreciation the significant contributions made by anony-
mous external reviewers. Many of our colleagues and graduate students at Hanyang
University in South Korea, the UCL Institute of Education in the UK, and the
University of Canberra in Australia also provided useful help and support during
the progress of this project. In addition, the work on editing this volume was
supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by
the Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044609). This volume is primarily for
researchers and graduate students in education policy studies or related fields.
However, it would also be helpful to advanced undergraduate students who desire
to deepen their understanding of multicultural education as an evolving institution
embedded in multiple layers of social context. We hope this new book will provoke
meaningful dialogues and discussions internationally to enrich our insights into
cultural diversity and educational inclusion.
1 Introduction 7
References
Banks, J. A. (Ed.). (2009). The Routledge international companion to multicultural education.

New York, NY: Routledge.
Cha, Y.-K., Dawson, W. P., & Ham, S.-H. (2012). Multicultural education policies and
institutionalization across nations. In J. A. Banks (Ed.), Encyclopedia of diversity in education
(pp. 1554–1558). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Grant, C. A., & Portera, A. (Eds.). (2011). Intercultural and multicultural education: Enhancing
global interconnectedness. New York, NY: Routledge.
Gundara, J. S. (2015). The case for intercultural education in a multicultural world. Oakville,
ON: Mosaic Press.
May, S., & Sleeter, C. E. (Eds.). (2010). Critical multiculturalism: Theory and praxis. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Sutton, M. (2005). The globalization of multicultural education. Indiana Journal of International
Legal Studies, 12(1), 97–108.
Wright, H. K., Singh, M., & Race, R. (Eds.). (2012). Precarious international multicultural
education: Hegemony, dissent, and rising alternatives. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense
Publishers.
Part I
Global Institutionalization
of Multicultural Education
Chapter 2
Multicultural Education Policy
in the Global Institutional Context
Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham and Kyung-Eun Yang
Introduction
While multicultural education is still a contested concept with multiple meanings

(May and Sleeter 2010; see also Banks in this volume), few would disagree that
envisioning an inclusive education toward social justice and equity for all children
regardless of their cultural group memberships is an integral part of what may be
called multicultural education. Multicultural education, in such a rather loosely
defined sense, has emerged as an important policy issue in an increasing number of
countries around the world (Banks 2004; Cha et al. 2012). As the pace of economic
and cultural globalization has accelerated, the importance of multicultural compe-
tence demonstrated by schoolchildren has been receiving increased attention from
educational policymakers and researchers, as immigrant populations are increasing
rapidly in a growing number of countries.
In recent decades, multicultural education has been widely depicted as an edu-
cational approach to deal with the social and cultural diversity that exists within
individual countries. Enhancing schoolchildren’s multicultural awareness has been
conceived as a vital means for promoting social unity, especially in countries with a
high level of diversity. Although systematic research on the cross-national adoption
Using a new dataset, this chapter evolved from a previous study: The Institutionalization of
Multicultural Education as a Global Policy Agenda, The Asia Pacific Education Researcher,
Vol. 23, pp. 83–91, Cha and Ham 2014. The work on the current version was supported by a
National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-
2014S1A3A2044609).
Y.-K. Cha S.-H. Ham (&)

e-mail: hamseunghwan@gmail.com
K.-E. Yang
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_2
12 Y.-K. Cha et al.
of multicultural education policies is less extensive than might be expected, con-

ventional perspectives tend to assume that there exist a range of intrasocietal needs
that constitute the major factors driving countries to adopt relevant policies in their
education systems.
Obviously, such views convey useful insights on cross-national variation.
However, they often have difficulty accounting for the influences from the wider
environment that provides institutional rules and values to which nation-states are
likely to conform to promote their structural legitimacy (Meyer et al. 1997). In this
respect, we offer an alternative conceptualization of the cross-national adoption of
multicultural education policies from a macrophenomenological perspective.
Different from popular understandings of a policy adoption as a rational choice to
optimize its immediate concrete benefits to a given country, an alternative expla-
nation is that the adoption of policies for multicultural education is becoming an
institution or an institutionalized routine whose legitimacy is closely associated
with an evolving reconceptualization of citizenship in global civil society.
By institution, we mean a set of cultural rules that “exist as external reality”
(Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 60) and give “collective meaning and value to
particular entities and activities” (Meyer et al. 1987, p. 13). Applying this concept
to the world-level context of education, we argue that the growing emphasis on
multicultural education across national education systems in recent decades is a
phenomenon that is deeply embedded in the larger institutional environment, where
the collective meaning and value of multiculturalism is taken for granted as a
legitimate policy agenda. As such a policy agenda is based on the highly
rationalized discourse that multicultural education will empower future citizens to
become more capable and responsible members of a “postnational” society (see
Ramirez, Bromley, and Russell in this volume), its immediate usefulness within
individual countries may not become a primary issue in most education systems.
Conceptualizing Multicultural Education as Policy
The cross-national adoption of multicultural education policies around the world

provides a concrete context to which different conceptual perspectives on multi-
cultural education policy can be applied. Three different perspectives are briefly
presented here, which provide useful insights into the mechanisms through which
multicultural education policies are adopted by national education systems. They
represent a sociocultural perspective, an international economic perspective, and a
world-polity perspective. This categorization, as many taxonomic frameworks do,
probably overstates the degree of difference between perspectives. It should be
noted that exceptions and complexities abound within each theoretical approach.
Despite this limitation, we believe that it will be helpful to identify the main
defining qualities of different approaches and their underlying assumptions so that
we may derive some hypotheses that can be empirically tested and further explored.
2 Multicultural Education Policy in the Global Institutional Context 13
First, the most popular account of a country’s adoption of a multicultural edu-

cation policy comes from a sociocultural perspective, in which formulating a
multicultural education policy is understood as a necessary step toward accom-
modating the cultural diversity that exists within a given country in order to
maintain its social cohesion (Gradstein and Justman 2002; Joshee 2004). Since an
indispensable “precondition for a cohesive and peaceful society is mutual accep-
tance and respect” (Castles 2004, p. 25) among diverse sociocultural groups,
multicultural education policies can be seen as part of broader social policy
frameworks to address issues around intercultural communication and accommo-
dation. Based on the logic of functionalism, this perspective posits that initiating a
policy to support multicultural education in a country is a result of a deliberate
policy decision influenced by concrete societal needs for it.
Despite the various ways to define the concept of societal needs depending on
theoretical orientations, one might reasonably speculate from this perspective that
multicultural education policies are likely to be formulated to the degree of a given
country’s intrasocietal cultural diversity. On the basis of this perspective, one might
plausibly postulate that multicultural education policies are more likely to be
present in countries with a high level of sociocultural diversity (Hypothesis 1). For
example, countries that are ethnolinguistically diverse may have concrete reasons
for adopting a policy to support multicultural education. Similarly, countries where
immigrant populations are highly concentrated may be in need of a policy to
increase multicultural awareness through education. A close relationship between
educational policies and the concrete societal conditions of a given country is a
central assumption of this perspective.
Second, from an international economic perspective, a country’s economic
relations with other countries may account for a great deal of the extent to which
multicultural education is given emphasis in the country. With the increasing
consolidation of the global economy and the intensification of complex economic
interdependency between different countries (Castells 2000; Henderson et al. 2002),
promoting multicultural education is often regarded as a rational policy response to
the growing needs for multicultural competence in the global marketplace
(Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1998; Wotherspoon and Jungbluth 1995).
Some countries may be more likely to incorporate multicultural education into
educational policies than other countries depending on the degree to which their
economies are dependent on—or integrated into—the global economic system.
For example, countries with a strong orientation toward international trade might
have concrete reasons to make efforts to promote multicultural education; as part of
attempts to facilitate economic exchange, national governments might want their
future citizens to be better sensitive to different cultures around the world. In a
similar vein, countries with more inflow of foreign investment would be more likely
to adopt a multicultural education policy because the successful attraction of foreign
investment reflects the concentration of economic activities in the global economic
system, where multicultural competence plays an important role in international
communication. Thus, one might reasonably expect that multicultural education
policies are more likely to be present in countries whose economies are highly
14 Y.-K. Cha et al.
dependent on international economic relations (Hypothesis 2). Despite a unique

theoretical orientation, this perspective shares a central underlying assumption with
the sociocultural perspective that there exists a close relationship between educa-
tional policies and concrete societal conditions.
Finally, a world-polity perspective posits that “education is an institution… that
at a deeper level is strongly affixed to global norms and rules about what education
is and how schools should operate” (Baker and LeTendre 2005, p. 8).
Understanding education as deeply grounded in global institutional ontology and
rationalization, this perspective highlights that national education policies are
constantly influenced by institutional dynamics of the wider environment in which
general models of education are constituted and elaborated globally. From this
perspective, a country’s adoption of a multicultural education policy is understood
largely as an institutional embodiment of world-level educational norms and values
and not simply an instrumental means to meet concrete intrasocietal needs (Cha
et al. 2012; Ramirez and Meyer 2012).
Indeed, the institutional environment in the modern world system emphasizes
the centrality of the individual as a primordial member of larger civil society,
providing solid ground for the cross-national adoption of multicultural education
policies (Ramirez 2006; Sutton 2005). Multicultural sensitivity is becoming in
many countries another type of basic competence required of tomorrow’s world
citizens; multicultural education’s major goals are frequently elaborated in terms of
how to help children “develop global identifications and a deep understanding of
the need to take action as citizens of the global community” (Banks 2007, p. 24). In
this respect, it is reasonable to expect that countries with more ties to global civil
society are more likely to formulate a multicultural education policy (Hypothesis
3). Extensive empirical evidence suggests that educational policy discourses often
flow through expanding networks of global civil society, where worldwide epis-
temic models of education are constantly elaborated and diffused.1
Data and Method
To examine what national-level characteristics are associated with multicultural

education policies across education systems around the world, we used a
cross-national research design. Data on multicultural education across countries
were available from the third edition of the Migrant Integration Policy Index
(MIPEX), which measured policies to integrate international migrants in many
countries as of 2010 (Huddleston and Niessen 2011). One of the policy areas
measured was education, scored on a scale of 0–100, which constituted the
dependent variable for this study (divided by 10 to make 10 as one unit). As a
1
See, e.g., Ham and Cha (2009), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Wotipka and Ramirez (2008). See
also Boli and Thomas (1999) and Ramirez and Meyer (2012) for related discussions.
Table 2.1 Description of national-level characteristics

Variable Description Mean SD
Ethnolinguistic Ethnolinguistic fractionalization index, ranging from 0.44 0.26
fractionalization near zero for no fractionalization to near one for high
fractionalization
International International migration stock as a percentage of the 7.45 11.78
migrants population
International International trade as a percentage of gross domestic 86.59 42.43
trade product
Foreign direct Net flows of foreign direct investment as a percentage 5.20 8.38
investment of gross domestic product
INGO Number of international nongovernmental 6.34 0.91
memberships organizations to which individuals or organizations
belong in a given country, logged
Higher education Gross enrollment rate in tertiary education 24.35 19.70
enrollments
Internet users Number of Internet users per 1000 people, logged 2.82 2.06
Note Descriptive statistics are based on data for 161 countries. The ethnolinguistic fractionalization
index is from Roeder (2001); data on INGO memberships are from the Union of International
Association (1996); and the rest variables are from the World Bank (2001). Missing values were
imputed by the expectation–maximization algorithm (Dempster et al. 1977)
reference guide that made an international comparison of educational policies

concerning immigrant integration, the MIPEX education index rated extensive laws
and policies against a set of educational standards for immigrant integration
developed within each country.2
For independent variables, we used three composite variables constructed by
Cha and Ham (2014) to explore the three theoretical perspectives discussed earlier:
a sociocultural perspective, an international economic perspective, and a
world-polity perspective. Specifically, based on a range of national-level charac-
teristics described in Table 2.1, they found three composite factors derived as
reported in Table 2.2. We used these three factors as independent variables, which
were sociocultural diversity (highly correlated with the country’s ethnolinguistic
fractionalization and the influx of international migrants), international economic
relations (highly correlated with the degree to which the country participates in
international trade and attracts foreign direct investment), and linkages to global
civil society (highly correlated with the country’s INGO memberships, higher
education enrollments, and Internet users).3 Two additional variables, GDP per
capita and public spending on education as a percentage of GDP, were used as
2
Detailed information about the index is available at its official website (www.mipex.eu), where
you may also access all raw data. For recent studies that used the MIPEX data for educational
research, see, e.g., Yang et al. (2015) and Yang and Ham (2015).
3
Similar categorizations of variables pertaining to national characteristics are also found in other
cross-national sociological studies of the rise and diffusion of policy models. See, e.g., Cha and
Ham (2011), Ham et al. (2011), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Suarez (2007).
16 Y.-K. Cha et al.
Table 2.2 Exploratory factor analysis of national-level characteristics

Factor loading
Sociocultural International Linkages to global
diversity economic relations civil society
Ethnolinguistic 0.707 −0.277 −0.344
fractionalization
International migrants 0.716 0.352 0.261
International trade 0.043 0.880 −0.074
Foreign direct −0.005 0.692 0.179
investment
INGO memberships −0.015 −0.119 0.877
Higher education −0.046 0.089 0.928
enrollments
Internet users 0.005 0.389 0.828
Note Principal component extraction and varimax rotation were used. Bartlett’s test of sphericity
was significant at the p < 0.001 level. Bartlett’s weighted least squares method was used for factor
score estimation (see Raykov and Marcoulides 2008)
control variables. Descriptive statistics for all variables used in this study are
reported in Table 2.3.
Results
Table 2.4 reports the results of the regression analysis explaining the institution-
alization of multicultural education as a government policy agenda item across
countries. First of all, it is notable that all three variables considered in the present
study—i.e., sociocultural diversity, international economic relations, and linkages
to global civil society—were positively significant as hypothesized. However, the
effect of sociocultural diversity was rather weak (std. beta = 0.235, p 0.10),
giving only partial credence to Hypothesis 1 derived from the sociocultural per-
spective. For the effect of international economic relations, it was fairly significant
(std. beta = 0.363, p 0.05), supporting Hypothesis 2 of the international eco-
nomic perspective. Yet, the magnitude of this effect was far less than that of
Table 2.3 Descriptive statistics for variables

Mean SD Min. Max.
MIPEX education index 4.18 1.90 1.20 7.70
Sociocultural diversity −0.31 0.92 −1.42 1.60
International economic relations 0.42 1.41 −1.25 5.28
Linkages to global civil society 1.31 0.65 −0.19 2.25
GDP per capita, logged 9.48 0.95 7.35 10.74
Public spending on education, % of GDP 5.19 1.09 3.40 8.30
Table 2.4 Regression for multicultural education policy (n = 33)

Coeff. SE Std. beta
Sociocultural diversity 0.483+ (0.264) 0.235
International economic relations 0.491* (0.242) 0.363
Linkages to global civil society 1.890** (0.628) 0.650
GDP per capita, logged 0.392 (0.330) 0.196
Public spending on education, % of GDP 0.047 (0.249) 0.027
Constant −2.319 (2.835)
R2 0.590
+
p 0.10; *p 0.05; **p 0.01
linkages to global civil society (std. beta = 0.650, p 0.10). In line with
Hypothesis 3 of the world-polity perspective, it appeared very clear that countries
with more linkages to global civil society tended to have institutionalized a policy
for multicultural education to a greater degree.
The pattern reported in Table 2.4 appears consistent with Cha and Ham’s (2014)
recent analysis of different datasets, where they found the extent to which a country
had linkages to global civil society strongly associated with the adoption of policies
for multicultural education (whose data came from UNESCO’s World Data on
Education) and related curriculum standards (whose data came from IEA’s TIMSS
Curriculum Questionnaires). Considering the prevailing assumption about multi-
cultural education as a practical approach to meet concrete intrasocietal needs of
individual countries, this result is very suggestive. Multicultural education may be
becoming an institutionalized routine whose importance is sociopolitically con-
structed and thus taken for granted in an increasing number of countries, often
regardless of their immediate, substantive needs for it.
Discussion and Conclusion
Our data analyzed in this study suggest the possibility that multicultural education
is becoming an integral part of educational policy discourse whose legitimacy is
taken for granted in many national education systems, largely regardless of indi-
vidual countries’ immediate societal needs.4 As Meyer (2006) puts it, “the modern
world society is built around an expansive conception of the rights and capacities of
4
The case of South Korea provides an illustrative vignette. Despite the country’s extremely high
degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity compared to most other countries around the world, South
Korea has recently been formulating a range of national policies to ensure that racial/ethnic
minority children are not discriminated against in any aspect of their school life. For example, in
2007, both the national curriculum standards and textbooks were revised to reduce nationalistic
and ethnocentric descriptions. In addition, multicultural education courses have recently been
incorporated into the curricula of many teacher preparation programs in South Korea, and
18 Y.-K. Cha et al.
the individual human person, seen as a member of human society as a whole rather
than principally as the citizen of a nation-state” (p. 264). It seems that multicultural
education around the world has been increasingly linked to the expanded notion of
citizenship that emphasizes the centrality of the individual as a primordial member
of glocal civil society, rather than as a member of a bounded national territory.5
Multicultural education discourse appears to be grounded in the common notion of
the individual whose personhood is seen as constituted independent of national
citizenship (Ramirez 2006). That is, an individual person is theorized as a member
of subnational and transnational communities in addition to a national citizen,
because the nation-state as a societal unit is no longer conceptualized as the only
primary boundary for an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991).
Most conventional views explain the popularity of multicultural education in
terms of its sociocultural and economic functions in a given society. Such expla-
nations proffer useful insights from a realistic stance. However, an educational
phenomenon is not only a functional response to meet substantive societal needs; it
is also a futuristic project in character. Contemporary political conceptualizations of
education continue to expand the purposes of education far beyond providing direct
or immediate functional utility to individuals or to society (Fiala 2006; Gutmann
1987; Labaree 1997). Education systems around the world are constantly respon-
sive to new visions of society, not only within but also beyond national boundaries
(Soysal and Wong 2006). As economic and cultural globalization processes
intensify, children from every part of the world are now expected to become
capable and responsible members of a new “imagined community” that may be
called “world society” (Meyer et al. 1997). Current world-cultural values that
celebrate individual personhood as the fundamental basis of one’s distinctive and
special roles in society undergird various educational policies for empowering
individual children regardless of their backgrounds (Frank and Meyer 2002). In this
respect, the adoption of multicultural education policies across national education
systems can be seen largely as an embodiment of epistemic models that have been
constituted in “transnational spaces” (Gough 2000) for educational discourses on
various dimensions of “world cultural and social diversity” (Lynch 1989, p. viii).
Given the rising popularity of multicultural education across national education
systems, reflective evaluations of current policies on multicultural education are
necessary to better assess their intended and unintended effects on nations, local
communities, and most importantly, individual children (Ham et al. 2014; Yang and
Ham 2015; see also Cha, Ham, Ku, and Lee in this volume). Without such reflective
procedures, multicultural education might remain only as a “symbolic and
(Footnote 4 continued)
in-service teacher training programs for multicultural education are also emerging. See Cha et al.
(2013) and Mo and Lim (2013) for related discussions.
5
In this respect, Sutton (2005) notes that although each national debate on cultural diversity in
education reflects the aspects of diversity that are unique to a given particular country, the uni-
versal purpose of schooling as incorporation of future citizens into civil society renders a common
framework for the formulation of multicultural education policies across different countries.
hortatory” (Schneider and Ingram 1990) policy element whose impact on lived
experiences in the classroom might be limited in many parts of the world, especially
where an adequate teaching force and/or other necessary educational resources are
not present. As the adoption of multicultural education policies appears to be
emerging as a world model, educational policymakers need to be innovative and
reflective enactors of this policy model. Sustained shared efforts should be directed
toward pondering how to help children develop a heightened sense of cultural
diversity and common humanity in the context of today’s world society, where
cultures penetrate each other and are not confined to bounded nation-states.
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Chapter 3
The Valorization of Humanity
and Diversity
Francisco O. Ramirez, Patricia Bromley and Susan Garnett Russell
Treating migrant workers with disrespect is a violation of their human right to

dignity. If a person discriminates and maintains a prejudice against migrant workers
coming from poor underdeveloped countries, that person essentially gives up his
right to be a member of the international community. As a country, we will not be
able to escape from the stigma and disgrace of being a country that does not respect
human rights (Lee and Kim 2005).
On July 14, 1997, South Africa implemented a Language in Education Policy,
stipulating that schools were required to recognize all of the 11 national languages.
That is, students could decide their language of instruction, and the government had
to make accommodations for all students. Within the policy document, the
Department of Education declares, “This approach is in line with the fact that both
societal and individual multilingualism are the global norm today, especially on the
African continent. As such, it assumes that the learning of more than one language
should be a general practice and principle in our society” (DOE, 1997, p. 1)1.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the nation-state and nationalist ide-
ology emerged and diffused throughout the world. This global development con-
tinued in the twentieth century undercutting supra and subnational entities via a
compelling cultural narrative that unified state, nation, and society, as if all people
naturally belonged to a territorially bounded sovereign nation-state. Dynasties and
empires embraced nationalism, overlooking the disdain with which its ruling
classes had historically regarded the unnamed masses under its authority. Colonial
1
See Department of Education, Language in Education Policy: http://www.education.gov.za/
Documents/policies/policies.asp
F.O. Ramirez (&) P. Bromley

Stanford University, Stanford, USA
e-mail: ramirez@stanford.edu
S.G. Russell
Columbia University, New York City, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_3
24 F.O. Ramirez et al.
struggles were fought under the banner of nationalism, with the right to
self-determination adding up to the right to belong to the union of nation-states.
Schooling the masses became a mandatory nation-state project, the litmus test to
attain external and internal legitimacy. Constructing the virtuous national citizen
became an overriding aim of school systems throughout the world. This aim was to
be realized via a curriculum that was unapologetically nationalist, emphasizing the
importance of the national language, the relevance of national heroes, and the
distinctiveness of national society and culture. These interrelated political and
educational developments were national in character but internationally validated.
Processes of forming the national character and constructing the virtuous national
citizen were facilitated by international standards, international conferences, and
international expertise. The role of the international shaping the national is espe-
cially evident in the twentieth century where more conferences with more experts
made more explicit standards both for proper national state identity and education
as a project for nation-building.
More recently, two global dynamics challenge the primacy of the nation-state
and nationalism as the most legitimate way of organizing people and society. These
global dynamics appeared shortly after World War II, but have become more visible
in the last few decades, especially in regard to their educational manifestations. We
refer to these global dynamics as the valorization of humanity and diversity. Their
educational manifestations may be thought of as cosmopolitanism on the one hand
and multiculturalism on the other. The valorization of humanity revitalizes the
supranational and takes the form of universalistic standards affirming human rights
often articulated via international organizations. From the valorization of humanity
perspective the world shifts from nation-state centric blueprints to models of a
world society characterized by a common humanity and a global ecosystem where
world principles and policies need to be activated to solve world problems. In and
of itself the valorization of humanity need not imply the valorization of diversity.
Common humanity could be celebrated without recognizing and validating differ-
ences between and within nation-states. Common humanity could function as a
cultural frame similar to medieval Christianity, emphasizing the universalistic and
ignoring the local. But the contemporary frame includes a strong “glocalization”
thrust (Robertson 1992): a valorization of diversity perspective emerges and revi-
talizes subnational differences, questioning the homogenizing thrust of monocul-
tural nationalisms. From the valorization of diversity perspective the political
incorporation of all sorts of marginalized groups should involve inclusion into the
mainstream of society while respecting differences. The terms of inclusion or the
price of admission into the national mainstream should not require shedding sub-
national identity pegs. From a valorization of diversity perspective between nation
differences should also be respected, less as a matter of national sovereignty and
more as an issue of validating cultural differences. Taken as a whole, what is
valorized is both common humanity and diverse people bearing human rights.
These global dynamics pose a special challenge for school systems and their
citizenship educational curricula. The rise of the valorization of humanity and
diversity is expected to manifest itself in two general ways: (a) there should be an
3 The Valorization of Humanity and Diversity 25
increase in curricular emphases that focus on the wider world, global issues, and
international organizations and (b) there should be an increase in curricular
emphases on subnational groups such as women, children, ethnic groups, indige-
nous peoples, or immigrants. The first shift reorients curriculum from a narrower
national to a broader transnational focus. The second shift takes what had in earlier
eras been local groups with a limited profile and treats them as subnational col-
lectivities with a global profile. These changing emphases should be discernable in
national educational goal statements, in national curricular frameworks, and in the
textbooks that are often at the core of the intended curricula. The national does not
disappear but increasingly cosmopolitan and multicultural emphases emerge
(Huntington 2004).
This paper first offers a discussion of the challenges that these global dynamics
pose to the cultural narrative linked to the nation-state and nationalism. Our goal is
to highlight important worldwide trends and to make sense of these developments
from a neo-institutionalist world society perspective. This perspective emphasizes
the degree to which nation-states and national educational developments constitute
enactments of changing world models or blueprints of proper and legitimate
identity (Meyer et al. 1997). This perspective presupposes that nation-states func-
tion as “open systems” and are thus much influenced by external standards now
often rationalized as best practices. We then focus on an extensive collection of
history, social studies, and civics textbooks for junior and senior secondary school
students from around the world. We examine nearly 500 textbooks for 69 countries
published since 1970 to gauge whether and to what extent these textbooks
increasingly emphasize humanity and diversity in valued ways. That is, we seek to
determine whether schools are moving in the direction of celebrating postnational
society. By postnational society we mean one that is more attuned to world issues
and international organizations, and more inclined to recognize and validate dif-
ferent collective identities within its fold. Lastly, we conclude by reflecting on what
further research directions need to be undertaken to better understand both the
changing character of national political and educational discourse regarding
humanity and diversity and the implications of these changes for school curricula in
the twenty-first century.
Beyond Monocultural National Narratives: Toward

Humanity and Diversity
The historical development of the nation-state is closely intertwined with the history
of mass schooling. In country after country mass schooling emerged as the “beacon
of progress” (Donald 1985) through which the masses would be transformed into
citizens. Mass schooling was the main vehicle for “forming the national character”
(Tyack 1974) and for making Frenchmen out of peasants (Weber 1976). To be sure,
the mass schooling project had its critics. Ideological opposition to extending
citizenship status to a greater number of people went hand in hand with opposition
to schooling the masses. Even among those nineteenth-century progressives who
favored expanded schooling there were serious objections to establishing mass
schooling as a nation-state project (see Mill 1859). But over time a nationalist
imagination, in varying degrees linked to the state, triumphed in both the political
and the educational spheres. All sorts of entities were to imagine themselves as
nation-states characterized by broader principles that favored policies of incorpo-
ration that reached across classes, ethnic groups, genders, religions, etc. (Bendix
1964). These principles and the policies they informed traveled across the world as
abstract “best practices” reflected in national constitutions and in national political
discourse and organization (Anderson 1991). Waves of nationalism swept
throughout the global landscape, in what has been called the “era of nationalism.”
The overarching idea was that national solidarities would take precedence over
supra and subnational bases of solidarity. The ultimate imperative that followed
from the nationalist idea was that all should be prepared to give up their lives for
their country. National heroes would inhabit the modern pantheon; national martyrs
would fill the national sepulcher.
Waves of national educational development covaried with waves of nationalism.
From the mundane establishment of national educational ministries and compulsory
school laws to the celebration of the nation-state in schools and in national society,
national educational developments anchored modern nationalism. Visions of a
vibrant national political community called for national citizenship education,
designed to create a homogenous group of citizens that would patriotically identify
with a distinctive national polity (FitzGerald 1979; Moreau 2004). Throughout the
schools rugged Americanization, rugged French Republicanism, and rugged
Nipponification were pervasive in curriculum and instruction. History was over-
whelmingly national history; civic education emphasized the virtues of national
citizenship, with the duties of citizens often more emphasized than their rights. And,
when rights were stressed, these were depicted in a national idiom that did not much
recognize transnational standards or an international community. Contrast these
earlier developments with the current invocations of “international community” and
“global norms” cited at the beginning of this paper.
To be sure, one could identify growing commonalities in the rights enshrined in
national political constitutions (Boli 1976) and in the ways in which the citizen was
envisioned in curriculum (Meyer et al. 1992). But these commonalities emphasized
national political citizenship and civic education to produce national citizens. What
gave rise to these commonalities were world models that privileged national citi-
zenship and a nationalist civic education. The globalization of these models meant
that all sorts of peoples could imagine themselves as national states with citizenship
promoting school systems. Progressive experts from earlier established
nation-states were eager to advise the aspiring nation-states on how to construct
school systems that would foster national political cohesion and socioeconomic
progress. The right to self-determination, a rallying cry in the struggles against
colonialism, framed self-determination in nationalist terms that enjoyed interna-
tional legitimacy. Neither supranational humanity nor subnational diversity enjoyed
the same leverage on popular imagination as did the nation-state and nationalist
ideology.
However, the human disasters of World War II raised fundamental questions
about excessive nationalism and unchecked state power. The formation of the
United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights posed a challenge
to the exclusive emphasis on the nation-state and national citizenship education.
The idea that there could be “crimes against humanity” that could be investigated
by international commissions and prosecuted in world courts boosted the status of
common humanity in the wider world (Borgwardt 2005). Though many a human
right in the universal declaration had earlier been a national citizenship right, the
human rights frame suggested that these were rights that national states needed to
recognize, not rights established by these national states. The right to an elementary
education, a core social right in most national constitutions, was now a transnational
human right (Article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948), no longer
contingent on national positive law. The emergent human rights frame influences
not just discussion of this or that right but of rights in general: where do rights come
from, what are these rights, and who is entitled to these rights? And, of course, what
should schools be teaching about these rights?
By emphasizing common humanity as the ground for human rights, the human
rights frame revitalized a natural law tradition that had been undercut by the rise of
state authority and an interstate system (on the rise of state authority and positive
law see Huntington 1968). Not surprisingly, this revitalization threatens to subdue
or at least moderate state authority. This revitalization should be evident in both
political discourse and in the educational realm. Even where state authority is firmly
entrenched, more recent discussions of rights of citizens veer from a positive to a
natural law frame (see the case of South Korea in Moon 2008). The rise of a
distinctive human rights education movement is further evidence of the growing
importance of the common humanity frame (Suárez 2007; Suárez and Ramirez
2007). Human rights emphases in general grew in school textbooks that are later
described in this paper (Meyer et al. 2008). Specific references to the Holocaust as a
human rights violation also surface in these textbooks (Bromley and Russell 2009).
And ironically, one also finds an increase in UNESCO affiliated schools, interna-
tionally oriented and human rights affirming in character, throughout the world
(Suárez et al. 2009).
The kinds of rights emphasized include standard citizenship rights but also ones
not earlier anticipated. These include rights extended to women (Ramirez and
McEneaney 1997; Wotipka and Ramirez 2008a), to indigenous groups (Cole 2005,
2006; Tsutsui 2009), to the disabled, and more broadly to the environment (Frank
et al. 2000; Schofer and Hironaka 2005). The rights revolution has drawn increased
scholarly attention (Skrentny 2002; Stacy 2008) and has lead to the thesis that
increasingly the right to rights has emerged (Somers 2008).
But who possesses these rights? Many rights continue to apply to individuals,
and indeed, the empowered individual human person is at the center of the human
rights movement (Elliott 2007). Not only is this the case because most of the earlier
established citizenship rights were individual citizenship rights, but also because the
strong current emphasis on the right to dignity, in practice, applies to individuals

enjoying the right to human dignity. And yet, much of current human rights dis-
course differs from rights discourse grounded in nineteenth-century liberalism. The
globalization of human rights is frequently discussed as a counter to the global-
ization of market forces (Meyer 1996). And this discussion often stresses the right
of groups that are likely to be at risk if only global market forces reign.
So, the human rights discourse applied to the rights of women and children, to
minorities and indigenous peoples and to immigrants and nondominant language
users, often proceeds as if groups are at stake and group rights are the issue. These
groups are indeed invoked but the rights emphasized are often not corporatist in
tone requiring collective decision-making. The right to have one’s ethnicity or
gender treated with respect in curriculum may lead to ethnic or women’s studies
courses but typically does not obligate members of the ethnic group or women to
take these courses. The right to identify with one’s mother tongue or subculture
may covary with multilingual and multicultural perspectives in schools and uni-
versities, but again, the exercise of this right is left to individual discretion. There
are indeed some collective or group rights as in the property rights of indigenous
peoples (see Cole 2006), but a comprehensive analysis of human rights instruments
reveals that the individual is the most frequently cited rights bearer (Elliott and Boli
2008).
The human rights-bearing individual, however, now has rights that activate
supranational and subnational groups. Common humanity underlies these rights
that typically apply to individuals but necessitate a respect for a range of ethnic,
linguistic, gender, and other sources of diversity and identity. Moreover, a greater
focus on common humanity also gives rise to rights to clean air, biodiversity,
sustainable ecologies, and a plethora of other new rights that call for greater global
consciousness and envision more engaged global citizens. Clearly this is a much
more expanded vision of the individual than the “abstract individual” that was the
subject of nineteenth-century citizenship rights developments. Beyond the familiar
civil and political or even social rights, the twenty-first-century individual is infused
with broad cultural rights reflecting cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. As a
result all sorts of collective identities are activated and in turn discussed in the
literature as group rights. In line with this literature, our textbook analysis seeks to
identity references to collective identity or group activating rights.
In the next section, we empirically address the valorization of humanity and
diversity in education through a content analysis of junior and senior secondary
school history, social studies, and civics textbooks. This exploratory cross-national
and longitudinal analysis of a vital dimension of the intended curriculum allows us
to gauge whether and to what extent changing curricular emphases are consistent
with more cosmopolitan and more multicultural educational emphases. Thus, we
focus on the different kinds of issues and groups that emerge in these textbooks as a
way of detecting changing patterns of citizenship education. We expect to find
increases in both cosmopolitan and multicultural emphases.
Data and Methods
Our unique primary source of data consists of 465 civics, history, and social studies
textbooks from 69 countries. Approximately 60 % of these textbooks come from
the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig,
Germany. The Institute collects social science textbooks from countries around the
world and has a library with over 150,000 social science school books from 90
countries. We focus on junior and senior secondary books (roughly, those aimed at
grades 6 through 12) in history, civics, and social studies published since 1970.
During a summer of research at the Eckert Institute, and with the assistance of an
extremely helpful staff, the second author worked to select and code (with trans-
lators) textbooks. In a second phase of data collection aimed at obtaining books
from other regions, colleagues from around the world assisted in gathering nearly
200 additional books from developing countries. Whenever possible, we obtained
multiple books from a country so as to have a range of subjects and publication
dates. However, in some cases we were only able to obtain one book from more
difficult to access countries, usually those in the developing world. Although a
single book is rarely representative of an entire country, it is important to include
these cases as they contribute to creating a more accurate global picture.
Every effort was made to reduce coding error, including the challenges of
translation, by checking inter-rater reliability in developing the coding scheme,
searching out fully bilingual translators (most often native speakers of the textbook
language pursuing a higher education degree in English), sitting with translators as
they coded books to answer questions, and reviewing each coding sheet to check
for inconsistencies. Moreover, we designed our coding scheme to be simply factual
in character, not calling for substantive interpretation. For example, when asking if
a book discusses human rights, coders are instructed to answer “yes” only if the
exact phrase (or direct translation) “human rights” is used. They would respond
“no” if topics they feel might be related to human rights, such as access to
schooling, are discussed but the exact phrase “human rights” is not used. This high
bar for analyzing data leads to, if anything, a conservative bias to our findings. That
is, we are likely to underestimate the extensiveness of emphases on humanity and
diversity.
Each textbook has been coded on parameters that measure the extent to which its
content valorizes diversity and humanity. We use six dichotomous indicators to
capture how the book valorizes humanity: (1) Whether a book discusses global
citizenship or membership in an international community; (2) Whether global
conferences, such as the UN Beijing Conference on Women, are mentioned;
(3) Whether roughly half of the book or more addresses international or global
issues; (4) Whether at least one nonmilitary international organization, such as the
United Nations or Greenpeace, is mentioned; (5 and 6) Two final items consider
whether the text discusses global issues, namely, human rights and environmental
rights. Next, we capture whether a book emphasizes diversity by looking at whether
the rights of a range of five subnational groups are mentioned; specifically, children,
women, minorities, indigenous groups, and immigrants. A sixth indicator of the

valorization of diversity is whether a book mentions rights to language or culture.
Our coding shows that these mentions are always in a positive tone; hence, that is
why textbook mentions count as indicators of valorization of humanity and
diversity.
A limitation of this dataset is that we have varied numbers of books per country.
As a result, our textbook-level findings overrepresent those countries for which we
have many books, such as the USSR (26 books) or the United Kingdom (23 books),
relative to those that have fewer books (such as El Salvador and Guyana, which
each only have one book). To provide a methodological check of this issue, we
present results both at the book level, and at the country level using averaged scores
so that countries are given equal weight.
Findings and Discussion
We find striking trends in increasing valorized humanity and diversity over time
both at the textbook and country levels. In Fig. 3.1, we depict indicators of val-
orization of humanity over time from 1970 to 2008 at the textbook level. Our
measures for the valorization of humanity include mention of environmental rights,
human rights, international organizations, global citizenship, level of internation-
alization (percent of the textbook that discusses international issues), and interna-
tional conferences. The graph (Fig. 3.1) indicates a clear increase over time in the
discussion of international organizations and issues, human rights and other rights,
and the idea of global citizenship or membership in an international community.
Examples of international organizations mentioned in the textbooks include the
Fig. 3.1 Valorization of humanity (indicators mentioned as a percent of total textbooks from 1970
to 2008)
Fig. 3.2 Valorization of humanity (indicators mentioned as a percent of total countries from 1970
to 2008)
United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International
Court of Justice (ICJ). Mentions of international conferences include the
International Conference on Women in Beijing. The discussions of international
issues are portrayed in a positive tone.
In order to account for the uneven sample of textbooks across countries in our
sample, we also analyze trends in the valorization of humanity at the country level.
Figure 3.2 shows the trend for the valorization of humanity as a percent of total
countries. Reinforcing our textbook-level findings, the graph illustrates a positive
Fig. 3.3 Valorization of diversity (group activating rights mentioned as a percent of total
textbooks from 1970 to 2008)
increase in indicators of humanity at the country level. The trend lines are
remarkably similar at the country level and textbook level for each measure, sug-
gesting our textbook results are not unduly influenced by just a few countries.
Figure 3.3 depicts valorized diversity through the mentions of group activating
rights, which includes indigenous people, linguistic minorities, immigrants,
minorities, children, and women. The graph (Fig. 3.3) illustrates the percent of total
textbooks in the sample that mentions these group rights by decade for the 1970s,
1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Generally, mention of group activating rights increases from the 1970s to 2000s
with some variation over the decades. Proportionally, immigrants increase most
dramatically with the percent of books discussing the rights of immigrants roughly
tripling (from about 6–19 %) in the period of our study. Children’s rights and
women’s rights also experience a large increase; roughly 10 % more books mention
the rights of children and women in the 2000s than in the 1970s. The rates for
indigenous peoples’ rights and minority rights increase only slightly since the
1970s, suggesting perhaps that an emphasis on these rights increased prior to the
1970s, perhaps in connection with the civil rights movement period, or more
broadly, with the national independence movements of earlier eras.
Interestingly, the number of books mentioning women’s rights shows a dramatic
spike in countries worldwide in the 1980s. When we analyzed the distribution of
these mentions by country, we found that the books come from a surprisingly
diverse range of countries including Turkey, Taiwan, Czechoslovakia, China, and
India, as well as most Western European and North American countries. Given the
cross-national nature of this trend, it is difficult to attribute the trend to specific
national characteristics, such as legal developments within a particular country. We
suspect one important factor contributing to this worldwide emphasis on women’s
rights in textbooks during the 1980s is the establishment of a U.N. Decade for
Women (1976–1985) and two accompanying world conferences in 1980 and 1985
heightened attention to women’s rights in many countries worldwide.
Taken together, these changes over time represent not just an increase in
attention to teaching about specific groups in curricula worldwide, but a valoriza-
tion of diversity through emphasizing the rights-bearing nature of subnational
groups. The emergence of rights-bearing identity groups is more complex than a
battle between individual rights versus group rights. The cases of true group rights,
such as land ownership of Indian tribes in the US and elsewhere, are few and far
between. Instead, the common form of valorized diversity is a more diffuse group
activating notion. For example, attention is called to the plight of immigrants or
“guest workers” as a collectivity; but more often than not, what follows is the
extension of citizenship rights to individual immigrants rather than giving immi-
grants collective rights to elect representatives to a labor council or governing body
(Soysal 1994). Naturally, though, ensuring the provision of rights is a separate
matter from effectively protecting these rights. The gap between intention and
implementation is found in the wider society as well as in the classroom. Still, the
intended educational and political curricula may lead to a greater awareness of
implementation shortcomings. This in turn may further fuel human rights-based

social movements.
In some societies, such as Korea, groups are often thought of as having greater
weight than the individual, relative to Western societies. Typically, this means
participation in the extended family and assimilation to a common identity under
the nation-state; submission to the hierarchy of authority rather than individual
autonomy being an important aspect of both. Curiously, this characteristic is not
orthogonal to the valorization of diversity, as we see the persistence of these tra-
ditional group affiliations alongside the celebration of multiculturalism.
We also analyze trends at the country level for the valorization of diversity.
Figure 3.4 depicts the trend for the valorization of diversity as a percent of total
countries. The graph illustrates a positive increase in indicators of diversity at the
country level, which supports our textbook-level findings.
Importantly, Figs. 3.2 and 3.4 both show that the permeation of valorized
humanity and diversity into each nation-state is more extensive than indicated by
the textbook data. For example, approximately 15 % of textbooks discuss indige-
nous rights, but when averaged by country we find roughly 25 % of nation-states
have a book that mentions indigenous rights. Some of this difference between our
country and textbook-level results can likely be attributed to our sampling strategy.
We include history, civics, and social studies texts, but it is plausible that national
history books are less likely to emphasize notions of diversity and common
humanity than civics or social studies books, and more likely to have a chrono-
logical discussion of national events. However, even within national history texts
there is wide variation in the extent to which a country depicts its evolution as
connected to, or independent from, other countries and global influences.
Fig. 3.4 Valorization of diversity (group activating rights mentioned as a percent of total
countries from 1970 to 2008)
Comparing the figures, one finds that the trends at the textbook level closely
mirror the country level. For example, where the trends are more pronounced at the
textbook level, they are also more accentuated at the country level; and where the
trends are more modest at one level, they are also more modest at the other level.
Higher percentages of the indicators are found at the country level, because a
country with one textbook that includes mention of group rights or international
issues is given equal weight as a country that may have many textbooks discussing
these issues.
Future Research Directions
We focus specifically on the valorization of diversity and humanity in high school

textbooks, but the phenomena we describe extends far beyond schooling and
reveals itself in both the changing character of the state and society. High schools,
however, constitute a very important area of political socialization and textbooks
increasingly are a core technology through which political visions and values are
communicated. This is the underlying rationale for this study. In what follows
though, we briefly identify some research avenues that explore changes in human
rights emphases in national constitutions and state structures and in national society
as well as the wider world.
Focusing on national constitutions, Beck et al. (2009) find human rights lan-
guage not evident in earlier studies of national constitutions (Boli 1976). Expanded
language rights, for instance, are evident in the revised postapartheid Constitution
of South Africa that identifies 11 official languages: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele,
isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga.
One could also examine whether constitutions explicitly reference international
organizations or treaties to consider whether unbounded notions of humanity enter
national ideology. For example, Article 6, Section V of the 2002 Constitution from
Bolivia states: “The fundamental rights guaranteed to individuals will be interpreted
and applied according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as
international conventions and covenants ratified by the Bolivian government.”
Numerous other countries, such as Argentina, Yemen, Belize, Portugal, and
Tanzania, explicitly mention “human rights” in their constitutions.2
Taking another approach and examining state structures, (Drori and Meyer
2007) track names of government ministries and find an increase in ministries with
the word “minority” in the title. The data in Fig. 3.5 show an increase both in
OECD and non-OECD countries, with a marked increase post-1948 for the latter
and a constant leveling off of the former. This finding is consistent with a literature
that highlights the rise of ethnic minorities in countries that used to proudly
2
See www.hrusa.org/workshops/HREWorkshops/usa/HRConstitutions.doc for a complete list of
countries in 2005. Accessed on June 11, 2009.
Fig. 3.5 Number of Ministries with “minority” in the title in OECD and non-OECD countries
from 1870 to 2002. Source Drori and Meyer (2007)
proclaim themselves monocultural (see Tsutsui for the case of Japan 2009). It bears
emphasizing that in our study of textbooks, minorities and other collective identities
are positively displayed. The same positive spirit underlies the establishment of
these ministries.
Conceptions of diversity and humanity exist not just in official government
bodies, but also in general societal trends. Aside from the many attitudinal surveys
(e.g., the World Values Survey) looking at relevant items such as sentiment toward
immigrants or the United Nations, changes could be tracked in newspapers, orga-
nizations, and education systems. For example, there is a recent spate in university
degree programs related both to humanity and diversity [for human rights, see
Suárez and Bromley (2009); for ethnic women’s, and African American studies in
the US, see Olzak and Kangas (2008); for women’s studies worldwide, see Wotipka
and Ramirez (2008b)].
As a rough example of the type of data that could be gathered, we used factiva.
com to generate counts of the word “multiculturalism” or “multicultural” in
newspapers from four countries. Table 3.1 shows a general increase in articles
containing the word multicultural in English language newspapers from the USA,
Canada, UK, and Korea.
Data on the founding processes, aims, and activities of international organiza-
tions paired with surveys and interviews could provide particularly rich data for
understanding the mechanisms through which ideas of multiculturalism spread
around the world. For example, a nonprofit organization, the European
Multicultural Foundation (EMF) in the United Kingdom aims to promote tolerance
and understanding between all cultures in Europe. An intergovernmental organi-
zation, the Global Alliance on Cultural Diversity, was officially launched in 2002
by UNESCO’s Arts and Cultural Enterprise Division. Its mission is to: “Forge
partnerships between public, private and not-for-profit sectors that promote and
develop small and medium sized cultural enterprises in developing countries and
Table 3.1 Mentions of the word “multicultural” in newspapers from four countries, 1988–2008
Newspaper Country Year
1988 1998 2008
New York Times USA 23 193 170
The Globe and Mail Canada 211 188 240
The Guardian UK 2 62 359
The Korea Herald English n/a 6 90
Fig. 3.6 Mentions of the word “multiculturalism” in education journals from the Education
Resources Information Center (ERIC) database from 1972 to 2008
countries in transition, targeting areas such as music, multimedia, cinema,

book/publishing, crafts and design; promote human creativity and preserve cultural
diversity through the strengthening of cultural industries in developing countries
and the enforcement of copyright.” While the initial interest in multicultural edu-
cation may have been primarily American (see Banks 2004) multiculturalism and
multicultural education are now clearly global themes.
Finally, discourse analysis of academic journals and conferences has often
proven to be a fruitful course of study. Our exploratory survey of the number of
academic education journals in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
database containing the word “multicultural” shows an increase over time, with a
particular spike in the 1990s (Fig. 3.6). The current levels though lower than in the
mid-1990s clearly exceed the pre-1990 levels.
The material we present here is intended to show examples of the types of data
available for further empirical work related to the valorization of diversity and
humanity. Some of this research is underway, but there are many more potential
avenues to explore.
Conclusion
The valorization of humanity and diversity are ongoing global processes that pose a
challenge to nationalism and the monocultural narrative once favored in schools
and universities. Our exploratory analysis of textbooks shows a growth of cos-
mopolitan and multicultural emphases. Students are increasingly exposed to world
issues and international initiatives calling for greater global citizenship con-
sciousness. Students are also further exposed to a depiction of their own societies as
ones filled with validated diversity along many dimensions.
Past waves of nationalism overwhelmed local loyalties and subnational soli-
darities. The era of nationalism also kept visions of common humanity in check.
The price of entry into the national political mainstream was adherence to the
monocultural narrative, in principle, if not in practice. There simply was not much
room for respecting differences in a world which so strongly linked progress to the
nation-state and its imperatives. The patriotic school house did not foster respect for
differences between or within countries. Schools and universities were indeed
laboratories of nationalism.
The shifts in the intended curricula reflected in the textbooks that students
increasingly face suggest a world beyond nationalism. This is a world within which
national borders are porous and often imagined as barriers to progress. This is a
world of universalistic standards, international conferences, and transnational social
movements. Within this world the model nation-state acknowledges and respects
differences within its fold, significantly lowering the price of admission to its
political mainstream. Within this world, the model nation-state presents itself to
other nation-states (and to a broad spectrum of other entities) as a nation-state
attuned to a common humanity that serves as the rationale for respecting differences
between nation-states. In short, this is a world in which humanity and diversity are
increasingly valorized elements in national educational systems.
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Amsterdam: Elsevier JAI Press.
Chapter 4
Educating Supranational Citizens:
The Rise of English in Curricular Policies
Yun-Kyung Cha and Seung-Hwan Ham
Introduction
Preparing future citizens for “post-national society” (see Ramirez, Bromley, and
Russell in this volume) necessitates an education for communication in intercultural
and international contexts. English language education, which is now a global
phenomenon, is an illustrative example. In this chapter, we investigate the
cross-national institutionalization of English as a regular school subject over the past
century and discuss how the rise of English as a global language in today’s curricular
policy models around the world reflects an expansive conception of supranational
citizenship that emphasizes the empowerment of the individual in global society. We
also extend our discussion to the possible problem that the discursive rationalization
of English language education as an indispensable tool to help children become
supranational citizens can also lead to the legitimation of some new forms of social
inequality both within and across countries, especially if curricular policies on
English language education are not accompanied by sustained and shared efforts to
constantly identify and minimize their unintended consequences.
In recent decades, English has been widely depicted as a useful medium of
international communication in various spheres of society. The often-used cate-
gories of the developing and the developed do not appear so meaningful when
This chapter is a substantially revised version of an earlier article: Educating Supranational

Citizens: The Incorporation of English Language Education into Curriculum Policies, American
Journal of Education, Vol. 117, pp. 183–209, Cha and Ham (2011). The work on the current
version was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean
government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044609)
Y.-K. Cha (&) S.-H. Ham

e-mail: yunkyung@hanyang.ac.kr

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_4
42 Y.-K. Cha and S.-H. Ham
considering the perceived importance of this language in many different countries.

In such a global context, English language education has emerged as an important
policy issue that “needs to be taken into account in its language policy by any
nation-state” (Spolsky 2004, p. 91). Although the rise of the United States as the
world’s superpower after World War II seems to have facilitated the rapid diffusion
of English language education across national education systems, the association
between English and some particular Western cultures, if it still exists, is becoming
much weaker today.1 Despite challenges from other languages, English is not only
the most frequently used language in various international agencies and transna-
tional companies; it is also widely seen as the most useful language for accessing
information and scientific findings (Crystal 2003; Grabe 1988).2
Of course, such usefulness of English seems to be an important factor driving
countries to promote the language in their education systems. Enhancing the
English proficiency of future citizens has, in many countries, been conceived as a
vital means for promoting national development, especially in the context of an
increasingly integrated global economy. However, it is also important to understand
that the virtues of providing English language education to schoolchildren have
been taken for granted in most national education systems, despite varying degrees
of actual utility of English depending on country-specific societal needs.
Educational researchers and policy makers in non-English-speaking countries decry
limited opportunities for schoolchildren to learn this foreign language, but the
taken-for-granted nature of its usefulness tends to make scholars devote relatively
little effort to reaching a deeper understanding of the macro-historical context
involved. This study is intended to be a systematic examination of the
cross-national diffusion of English language education over the past century, with
special analytic attention given to its institutionalization after World War II when
the nation-state system became consolidated as the world model in international
institutional arrangements.
Although systematic research on the rapid diffusion of English language edu-
cation across national education systems is less extensive than might be expected,
conventional perspectives tend to expect the incorporation of English into the
school curriculum of a country to result from an educational policy decision con-
tingent upon the country’s concrete societal condition. Despite the various ways to
define the concept of societal condition depending on theoretical orientations of
different perspectives, one might reasonably speculate from such perspectives that
1
Although there have been some critical views on the growing impact of English on local cultures
and languages around the world, a certain high level of ability to communicate in English seems to
be becoming in many countries a new kind of basic literacy that no longer conveys narrowly
Western ideological connotations (Crystal 2003; Graddol 2006; Honna 2005). English proficiency
may be comparable to the new digital literacy for information and communication technologies,
which is now part of basic competency for tomorrow’s global citizens (Ham and Cha 2009).
2
See also Tsuda (1999), who notes that the rise of English as the most dominant international
language may create communicative inequality among people with different linguistic and cultural
backgrounds, giving an unearned advantage to the speakers of English as their mother tongue.
4 Educating Supranational Citizens … 43
English is expected to be taught in schools to the degree of its substantive utility

under the economic, political, and cultural conditions of a given country.
Obviously, such views convey useful insights on some national variation. However,
they often have difficulty accounting for the influences from the wider environment
that provides institutional rules and values to which nation-states are likely to
conform to promote their structural legitimacy (Meyer et al. 1997). In order to
provide a more balanced analysis, we attempt to examine some competing, yet
complementary, explanations through a series of empirical analyses. After exam-
ining several hypotheses derived from different theoretical perspectives, we discuss
implications for educational policy and practice.
Theorizing the Spread of English Language Education
The diffusion of English as a legitimate component of curricular content in schools

around the world provides a concrete context to which different conceptual per-
spectives on the sociohistorical nature of the school curriculum can be applied.
Three different perspectives are briefly presented here that provide useful insights
into the spread of English in the school curriculum. They represent a rational-
functionalist perspective, a neocolonialist perspective, and an institutionalist per-
spective. This categorization, as many taxonomic frameworks do, probably over-
states the degree of difference among perspectives. We should note that exceptions
and complexities may abound within each theoretical approach. While we
acknowledge this limitation, we believe that it will be helpful to identify the main
defining qualities of different approaches and their underlying assumptions so that
we may derive a set of hypotheses that can be empirically tested and further
explored.
First, the most popular account of the spread of English comes from a
rational-functionalist perspective, in which English is understood as a practical
commodity that brings various kinds of concrete benefits to individuals and society.
This perspective posits that the incorporation of English into the school curriculum
of a country is a result of a deliberate policy decision influenced by concrete
societal needs for it. With the increasing consolidation of the global economy and
the intensification of complex economic interdependency among different countries
(Castells 2000; Coe et al. 2008), promoting English language education is widely
regarded as a rational policy choice to address societal demands for international
communication. For example, one might expect that countries whose economic
conditions are heavily dependent on international trade are more likely to incor-
porate English into the school curriculum (hypothesis 1). English as an important
medium of communication in international business is akin to a common currency
whose use increases economic efficiency through reduced transaction costs (Grin
1996). Considering that the use value of a language may be sensitive to the size of
its speaker population as a potential network of communication (de Swaan 2002),
the widespread use of English in international business may well motivate those
countries with a strong orientation toward international trade to make efforts to join
the network. In a similar vein, one might reasonably assume that a country whose
largest export partner speaks English as the national language is more likely to
incorporate English into the school curriculum (hypothesis 2). As part of attempts
to boost exports, national governments might want their future citizens to be more
sensitive to the languages spoken by their major export partners (Stanley et al.
1990). In addition, among linguistically diverse countries, the decision to teach
English as a regular school subject has often been made in order to “avoid the
problem of having to choose between competing local languages” (Crystal 2003,
p. 85). English in those countries serves as a “neutral” means that not only unifies
different linguistic groups into national citizens but also minimizes undue advantage
for a particular group. In this respect, one might plausibly postulate that the
incorporation of English into the school curriculum is more likely in countries of
high linguistic diversity (hypothesis 3). Regardless of different forms of
rational-functionalist thought, the core proposition is that the incorporation of
English into the school curriculum is a result of its fitness to the economic and
social conditions of a given country. A close relationship between what is taught in
schools and the constituency is a central assumption of this line of thought.
Second, from a neocolonialist perspective, historical trajectories of national
societies in relation to international politics account for a great deal of why a
particular country’s school curriculum is in its current shape. Indeed, many newly
independent countries have tended to inherit, with minimal changes, the educational
system from their former colonial powers for reasons such as the shortage of
educational resources and the paucity of alternatives (Altbach and Kelly 1984;
Carnoy 1974). The school curriculum in the third world or peripheral areas has been
influenced by the legacies of colonial education and neocolonial penetration from
the advanced metropolitan center. The spread of English language education across
many third-world countries is often seen as a result of deliberate policies of the
advanced metropolitan center to maintain neocolonial relations with the third world
(Phillipson 1992; Whitley 1971). Many neocolonialist accounts of the spread of
English provide useful insights for understanding various mechanisms through
which colonial discourses on English language education function to disseminate
and perpetuate the image of English as a superior language. Such mechanisms have
often been associated with the neocolonial development of English, not only in
everyday life but also in academic and political discourse, for example (Mühleisen
2003; Pennycook 1998). The core proposition of this perspective is that the
incorporation of English into the school curriculum in a country is contingent upon
the colonial legacy of the country. Following the central logic of this perspective,
one might reasonably expect that countries are likely to incorporate the language of
their former colonizer, if any, into the school curriculum insofar as it is an inter-
nationally used language (hypothesis 4). Despite a unique theoretical orientation,
the neocolonialist perspective shares a central underlying assumption with the
rational-functionalist perspective; both perspectives assume that there exists a close
relationship between what is taught in schools and the concrete societal conditions
of a given country.
Finally, an institutionalist perspective posits that “education is an institution…

that at a deeper level is strongly affixed to global norms and rules about what
education is and how schools should operate” (Baker and LeTendre 2005, p. 8).
Understanding education as deeply grounded in global institutional ontology and
rationalization, this perspective highlights that the school curriculum is constantly
influenced by institutional dynamics of the wider environment in which general
models of curricular formations are constituted and elaborated globally. Based on
this perspective, the incorporation of English into the school curriculum is under-
stood largely as an institutional embodiment of world-level educational norms and
values and not simply an instrumental means of individual societies to meet
idiosyncratic local requirements. With the modern nation-state model consolidated
as a taken-for-granted political unit of sovereignty in the world polity, nation-state
purposes have been increasingly rationalized around common principles of progress
and justice (Meyer et al. 1997). Such a homogeneous cultural construction of
nation-states has been an important institutional condition for rapid diffusion within
the world system (Strang and Meyer 1993). Indeed, the institutional environment in
contemporary world society provides solid ground for the rapid diffusion of English
as a curricular subject. For instance, English language education is widely regarded
as important not only to facilitate the spread of modern scientific and technological
discoveries but also to contribute to the economic and cultural development of
nations. The association of English with such collective meanings and values
embedded in modern world culture undergirds the legitimacy of English as an
appropriate curricular subject across countries. In this respect, it is reasonable to
expect from an institutionalist perspective that countries with more ties to global
civil society are more likely to incorporate English into the school curriculum
(hypothesis 5). Extensive empirical evidence suggests that world models often
diffuse through international linkages of global civil society with assistance from
various international nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas 1999). In
the modern world system, where various policy discourses flow through expanding
networks of global civil society, national education systems, and their school
curricula are likely to be quite isomorphic across countries in accordance with
worldwide epistemic models of education despite pervasive “loose couplings”
between official models and actual implementations.3
3
It is important to note that the transnational isomorphism in educational policy discourses
inevitably involves the pervasiveness of various “loose couplings” (Meyer et al. 1997; Weick
1976) within individual countries. The reason is that imported models may be “indigenized” or
“hybridized”, at various levels of policy and practice, into innovations extensively different from
the original models that have been officially adopted and institutionalized (Anderson-Levitt 2003;
Paine and Fang 2006). Such institutional isomorphism accompanied by local or national recon-
textualization processes is primarily due to the “structural duality of educational policy” (Ham
et al. 2011) through which nation-states successfully incorporate and display elements that con-
form to global epistemic models of education and yet preserve considerable autonomy of state
action.
Data and Method
In order to see the global patterns of institutionalization of modern foreign lan-

guages in school curricula, we have collected and updated cross-national and his-
torical data.4 The accumulation of the data gathered for our prior exploratory
studies conducted over the past two decades allows us to systematically examine
the cross-national contextual factors that have contributed to the spread of English
as the most popular foreign language in primary and secondary school curricula.5
Our data analysis involved five historical periods between 1900 and 2005.6 In each
period, countries were treated as either an adopter or a nonadopter of English as the
first foreign language, both at the primary level and at the secondary level.7 Since
curricular standards and guidelines are susceptible to change over time, the adopters
in a given period were not automatically assumed to be adopters in succeeding
periods but were assessed regarding whether or not they continued to have English
as the first foreign language in the school curriculum. Since we were interested in
English taught as a foreign language, English-speaking countries were excluded
from the sample.8
Using a series of descriptive statistics, we first traced the historical patterns of the
incorporation of English into school curricula across countries. Next, differences in
the historical trend of diffusion of English language education were found among
countries, depending on the experience of colonization by an English-speaking
country. Regional variations were also examined by analyzing the data according to
world regions. Finally, we used ordered logit regressions to assess the effects of
different national characteristics on the incorporation of English into school cur-
ricula. In our regressions, we were interested in the diffusion of English language
education across countries that were never under colonial rule by an
English-speaking country in order to examine the diffusion mechanism through
which “voluntary” adoption of English language education occurred as opposed to
“inherited” adoption. The dependent variable was an ordinal categorical variable
4
For data sources, see notes 5 and 10 in Cha and Ham (2011).
5
For a bibliography of our prior exploratory studies, see the “References” section in Cha and Ham
(2011).
6
Only independent (or self-governing) countries were included for analysis; societies under
colonial rule were not included until they became formally independent. Including all societies for
analysis wherever data were available regardless of formal sovereignty did not change overall
historical patterns, however.
7
In our data, either a compulsory or compulsory elective subject taught in primary or general
secondary schools was considered as a regular school subject in this study, but an optional subject
was excluded from analysis.
8
If English was an official language in a given country and, at the same time, was the first language
of more than half of the population, we regarded the country as having English as the first/national
language and thus excluded the country from the sample. In other words, unless English was used
as the first language by more than half of the population in a given country, we regarded it as de
facto a foreign language even if it had an official status in the country.
indicating the degree of adoption of English language education in a given country.

For this ordinal variable, we coded two for a given country in a certain period of
time if English was incorporated into the school curriculum as the first foreign
language at both the primary and secondary levels (i.e., full adoption); we coded
one if English was incorporated into the school curriculum as the first foreign
language only at the primary level or only at the secondary level (i.e., partial
adoption); we coded zero if English was not incorporated into the school curriculum
as the first foreign language either at the primary level or at the secondary level (i.e.,
nonadoption).
Seven independent variables were entered into our regressions according to the
three perspectives reviewed earlier. Table 4.1 presents the descriptive statistics and
definitions of the independent variables used in the ordered logit regressions. The
variables used from the rational-functionalist perspective were international trade,
English-speaking export partner, and linguistic diversity, based on hypotheses 1, 2,
and 3, respectively. In connection to the neocolonialist perspective, we used the
international language-speaking colonizer variable to test hypothesis 4. In relation
to the institutionalist perspective, we included the global civil network variable to
examine hypothesis 5. Two additional variables, economic development and re-
cently acquired sovereignty, were entered into the regression equation as control
variables. These two control variables were added because, considering the costs
involved in providing English language education for schoolchildren, most con-
ventional perspectives would expect countries in better economic conditions to be
more able to incorporate English into the school curriculum; in addition, countries
of recently acquired sovereignty might temporarily prioritize establishing a solidary
national community over educating supranational citizens.
Results
Overall Historical Patterns
Table 4.2 shows the percentage of countries teaching English as the first foreign
language in primary and secondary schools over the period from the beginning of
the twentieth century to the present. Our historical data indicate that English was
not a strong candidate for a modern foreign language as a regular curricular subject
in schools before the mid-twentieth century. Less than one-tenth of independent
countries taught English as the first foreign language in primary schools before
1945. Even in secondary schools, where the instruction of modern foreign lan-
guages was firmly institutionalized by the end of the nineteenth century (Cha 1989),
the proportion of countries where English was incorporated into the curriculum as
the first foreign language was less than one out of three countries before 1945.
However, the proportion sharply increased to 32.2 % at the primary level and
59.5 % at the secondary level in the 1945–1969 period; the proportion finally
Table 4.1 Independent variables with descriptive statistics, among countries that were never
under colonial rule by an English-speaking country, 1945–2005
Variable Description 1945–1969 1970–1989 1990–2005
Mean Mean Mean
(SD) n (SD) n (SD) n
International trade International import and 4.663 71 6.164 80 7.070 106
export divided by gross (2.699) (3.175) (3.092)
domestic product; 1960,
1980, and 1995 for the
first, second, and third
periods, respectively
English-speaking Is English the national 0.375 80 0.310 87 0.336 110
export partner language used by the
largest export partner?
Coded one if yes,
otherwise coded zero;
1960, 1980, and 1995 for
the first, second, and
third periods,
respectively
Linguistic diversity Linguistic diversity index 0.329 83 0.350 87 0.396 111
ranging from zero for no (0.279) (0.281) (0.281)
diversity to near one for
high diversity; 1961,
Int’l Was the country once 0.446 83 0.414 87 0.438 112
language-speaking under colonial rule by a
colonizer French, German,
Russian, or Spanish-
speaking country? Coded
one if yes, otherwise
coded zero
Global civil Number of international 3.086 83 4.152 86 9.016 109
network nongovernmental (3.094) (3.897) (8.061)
organizations to which
individuals or
organizations belong in
the country (100
memberships); 1966,
Economic Gross domestic product 3.162 78 5.764 82 6.381 106
development per capita ($1000); (4.813) (8.812) (10.741)
1960, 1980, and 1995 for
the first, second, and
third periods,
respectively
(continued)
Table 4.1 (continued)

Variable Description 1945–1969 1970–1989 1990–2005
Mean Mean Mean
(SD) n (SD) n (SD) n
Recently acquired Independence after 1920, 0.373 83 0.356 87 0.196 112
sovereignty 1945, and 1970 for the
periods, respectively.
Coded one if yes,
otherwise coded zero
Note Descriptive statistics in this table are based on countries for which data on English language
education are also available at both primary and secondary school levels
Table 4.2 Percentages of countries having English as the first foreign language in the school
curriculum, 1900–2005
School level 1900–19 1920–44 1945–69 1970–89 1990–2005
% n % n % n % n % n
Primary 5.4 37 9.6 52 32.2 115 44.2 138 68.1 163
Secondary 18.2 33 32.7 49 59.5 116 65.5 139 78.5 163
reached 68.1 % at the primary level and 78.5 % at the secondary level in the
1990–2005 period.
Our data reported in Cha and Ham (2011) provide additional information about
historical patterns of the incorporation of English compared to French, German,
Russian, or Spanish as the first foreign language. The data show that the ratio of
countries that taught English as the first foreign language to those that taught
French, German, Russian, or Spanish was only 0.2 at the secondary level in the
1900–1919 period, meaning that English was seldom the first choice. However, the
situation dramatically changed: the ratio increased to 1.5 in the 1945–1969 period
and to 4.3 in the 1990–2005 period. It is thus possible to say that, in the 1990–2005
period, the number of countries teaching English as the first foreign language at the
secondary level was more than four times the number of countries teaching other
foreign languages. The situation was not very different at the primary level: the ratio
was 1.0 or less before 1945 but increased dramatically from 1.1 in the 1945–69
period to 4.0 in the 1990–2005 period.
Some may plausibly suspect that the rapid spread of English language education
was due in part to the addition of newly independent former British or U.S. colonies
to the sample. This appears true in our data presented in Table 4.3. Consistent with
hypothesis 4, a substantial difference persisted at the world level in terms of the
percentage of countries choosing English as the first foreign language in the school
curriculum, depending on the experience of colonial rule by an English-speaking
colonizer. Our data show that, among societies that were once under colonial rule
by an English-speaking country, the proportion of countries having English as the
Table 4.3 Percentages of countries having English as the first foreign language in the school
curriculum, depending on the experience of colonial rule by an English-speaking country,
1945–2005
School Colonial rule by an 1945–69 1970–89 1990–2005
level English-speaking country? % n % n % n
Primary Once under colonial rule 80.6 31 85.4 48 98.0 51
Never 14.3 84 22.2 90 54.5 112
Secondary Once under colonial rule 93.3 30 87.8 49 98.0 51
Never 47.7 86 53.3 90 69.6 112
first foreign language at the primary level was already more than four-fifths in the
1945–69 period. The proportion in the same period, however, was far less than
one-fifth among societies that were never under colonial rule by an
English-speaking country. The situation was not very different at the secondary
level. As a proportion, more than nine out of ten former colonies of an
English-speaking country chose English as the first foreign language in the 1945–
1969 period, whereas less than half of other countries did so in the same period.
However, it is important to note that the rapid spread of English language
education has another facet. Our data clearly show that countries that were never
under colonial rule by an English-speaking country have also been increasingly
attentive to the incorporation of English into the school curriculum over the past
half century. Notably, as the proportion of countries that incorporated English into
the school curriculum increased, the rate of increase became even greater. Among
those countries without any historical experience of colonization by an
English-speaking country, the percentage that had English as the first foreign lan-
guage at the primary level increased exponentially from 14.3 % in the 1945–1969
period to 54.5 % in the 1990–2005 period. At the secondary level, following a
modest increase from 47.7 % in the 1945–1969 period to 53.3 % in the 1970–1989
period, the percentage sharply increased to 69.6 % in the 1990–2005 period.
A further breakdown of the data by world region in Table 4.4 once again clearly
shows that the legitimate status of English in the school curriculum is evident across
most world regions, even with former colonies of English-speaking countries
excluded from the sample. In particular, countries in Asia and Oceania, despite
huge cross-national differences within this region in terms of history and economic
development, appear to converge on teaching English as the first foreign language
at both primary and secondary levels. An illustrative case of such enthusiasm for
English language education in this region is South Korea, where a variety of policy
strategies have been employed to enhance the quality of English language education
for schoolchildren despite controversies regarding their actual impact on educa-
tional practices in local contexts (Nunan 2003; Shin 2007). Some examples of such
policy items include introducing an increasing number of English native speakers
into public schools as English teachers, encouraging Korean teachers of English to
use only English as the language of instruction, and even setting up English-only
villages exclusively for educational purposes. English is now taught as the only
Table 4.4 World-regional patterns of the diffusion of English as the first foreign language in the
school curriculum, among countries that were never under colonial rule by an English-speaking
country, 1945–2005
School Region 1945–69 1970–89 1990–2005
level % n % n % n
Primary Africa South of the Sahara 16.7 18 9.5 21 20.0 25
Asia and Oceania 9.1 11 23.1 13 80.0 15
Central Europe and the former 11.1 9 12.5 8 65.0 20
USSR
Latin America and the 20.0 20 25.0 20 47.6 21
Caribbean
Middle East and North Africa 12.5 8 22.2 9 40.0 10
Western Europe 11.1 18 36.8 19 81.0 21
Secondary Africa South of the Sahara 15.8 19 20.0 20 28.0 25
Asia and Oceania 50.0 12 66.7 12 100.0 15
Central Europe and the former 11.1 9 12.5 8 70.0 20
USSR
Latin America and the 80.0 20 76.2 21 90.5 21
Caribbean
Middle East and North Africa 55.6 9 70.0 10 70.0 10
Western Europe 58.8 17 63.2 19 76.2 21
required foreign language in virtually every school in South Korea from the third
year of primary education to the end of the upper secondary level.
Also noticeable is the dramatic increase in the number of countries teaching
English as the first foreign language in Western Europe at the primary level. The
rapid spread of English in this region seems largely due to the consolidation of the
European Union as a supranational political, economic, and cultural entity, where
English functions as de facto the most important working language notwithstanding
the Council of Europe’s “plurilingualism” policy that celebrates linguistic diversity
in Europe (Breidbach 2003; van Parijs 2001). An interesting example in this respect
is Zurich, the most populous canton of Switzerland. In Zurich, where German is the
official language, French had long been taught in schools as the most popular
second language because it is one of the “national” languages of Switzerland along
with German, Italian, and Romansh. However, the canton of Zurich decided in the
late 1990s to increase the share of English in the school curriculum while reducing
the share of French (Grin 1998). Despite concerns that it might damage the Swiss
model of national unity, English in Zurich’s schools is now given more curricular
emphasis and is even taught from an earlier age than French. Zurich’s decision has
recently triggered many other cantons, especially in German-speaking Switzerland,
to consider similar educational plans.
It is also notable that a great proportion of countries in central Europe and the
former USSR incorporated English into the school curriculum as the first foreign
language at both primary and secondary levels during the 1990–2005 period.
The rise of the United States as the world’s unchallengeable superpower with the
fall of the Soviet Union during this period seems to have contributed to this sudden
increase in the percentage of countries teaching English in this region. It is an
illustrative example of educational change that “all countries in central and eastern
Europe in which Russian was a mandatory [foreign] language [in the school cur-
riculum at a particular stage of compulsory education] in 1982/83 abandoned this
policy from the beginning of the 1990s” (Eurydice 2005, p. 37).
Sub-Saharan Africa, which shows a relatively moderate increase in the per-
centage of countries incorporating English as the first foreign language into the
school curriculum, is the only exception. This phenomenon is probably due to the
fact that most countries in this region inherited, upon independence, the
metropolitan languages of their former colonizers as their official languages (i.e.,
French, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as English). Since these languages are de
facto foreign languages for the speakers of local languages, these countries may
have difficulties accommodating an additional foreign language in the school cur-
riculum. Nevertheless, it is important to note that many of these countries also teach
English as a required foreign language in schools in addition to the metropolitan
languages inherited from their former colonizers. Former French colonies in this
region, such as Central African Republic, Congo, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger,
and Togo, for example, teach English as well as French as a compulsory subject in
secondary schools, although slightly less curricular emphasis is devoted to English
compared to French.
Cross-National Diffusion Patterns
Another issue of interest here is how well the incorporation of English as a regular
school subject can be explained by national characteristics. The coefficients in
Table 4.5 indicate the amount of increase in the predicted ordered log odds of
moving to the next higher level in our ordinal dependent variable by a one-unit
increase in an independent variable, with all other independent variables held
constant. In our regression analyses, we focused on examining the effects of the
independent variables among countries without any experience of colonial rule by
an English-speaking country. As already shown in Table 4.3, almost all former
colonies of an English-speaking country adopted English as the first foreign lan-
guage at both primary and secondary levels as soon as they became independent;
since this is a ubiquitous postwar pattern, the increasing rate of transnational dif-
fusion of English language education in the past several decades is mostly due to its
institutionalization across countries that were never under colonial rule by an
English-speaking colonizer.9
9
The effects of interest did not much differ if countries that were once under colonial rule by an
English-speaking country were added to the sample. The results are available on request.
Table 4.5 Ordered logit regressions for English as the first foreign language in the school curriculum, among countries that were never under colonial rule by
an English-speaking country, 1945–2005
1945–69 1970–89 1990–2005
(A1) (B1) (C1) (C2)
International trade −0.022 (0.134) −0.136 (0.083) 0.029 (0.077) 0.028 (0.077)
English-speaking export partner 1.386 (0.721)* 0.588 (0.487) 0.303 (0.469) 0.353 (0.484)
Linguistic diversity 0.389 (1.102) −0.469 (0.916) −2.380 (0.804)** −1.533 (0.874)
Int’l language-speaking colonizer −0.534 (0.606) −0.424 (0.496) −1.885 (0.485)*** −2.004 (0.513)***
Global civil network −0.057 (0.153) −0.009 (0.103) 0.166 (0.053)** 0.124 (0.052)*
Economic development −0.004 (0.094) 0.011 (0.047) −0.107 (0.038)** −0.101 (0.037)**
4 Educating Supranational Citizens …
Recently acquired sovereignty −1.360 (0.884) −1.695 (0.620)** −0.733 (0.578) −0.597 (0.600)
Sub-Saharan Africa −1.973 (0.649)**
Threshold 1 −0.364 (1.130) −1.725 (0.844)* −2.044 (0.847)* −2.492 (0.863)**
Threshold 2 1.780 (1.164) −0.114 (0.822) −0.812 (0.822) −1.154 (0.828)
Parallel lines test v2 3.500 5.909 10.354 7.610
Nagelkerke R2 0.280 0.278 0.394 0.462
n 68 80 104 104
Note Standard errors are in parentheses. The dependent variable is an ordinal categorical variable indicating the degree of adoption of English language
education in a given country: full adoption, partial adoption, or nonadoption. Full adoption = English was the first foreign language at both primary and
secondary school levels; partial adoption = English was the first foreign language only at the primary level or only at the secondary level; and
nonadoption = English was not the first foreign language at either the primary level or the secondary level. For v2 tests of the parallel lines assumption, df = 7
in all models except for model C2, where df = 8. All v2 values are statistically insignificant at the level of p 0.05, suggesting that the assumption is not
violated
*p 0.05
**p 0.01
***p 0.001
53
Considering the prevailing assumption of a tight linkage between curricular

contents and country-specific conditions, the results in Table 4.5 are quite sug-
gestive. With regard to the effects of the individual variables, with other variables
held constant, most of the independent variables describing national characteristics
did not stably increase the expected ordered log odds of moving to the next higher
level of incorporation of English into the school curriculum. Inconsistent with
hypothesis 1, there was no statistically significant effect of international trade in
any period from 1945 to 2005. Similarly, although the English-speaking export
partner variable had a significant positive effect in the 1945–1969 period in line
with hypothesis 2, the effect disappeared in the succeeding periods. These
insignificant or unstable results suggest the possibility that the diffusion of English
language education around the world may have been rather independent of indi-
vidual countries’ actual needs for English, as expected from the institutionalist
perspective.
The effect of linguistic diversity was also not significant, except in the
1990–2005 period, when its effect was significantly negative, meaning that lin-
guistically more diverse societies were less likely to incorporate English into the
school curriculum in this most recent period. Hypothesis 3 was not supported. One
possible explanation of this significant negative association may be that many
sub-Saharan African countries, where high ethnolinguistic fractionalization is
normal, tend to place relatively moderate curricular emphasis on English compared
to countries in other world regions, as already shown in Table 4.4. Our further
analysis in model C2 of Table 4.5 supported this explanation. We added the
sub-Saharan Africa dummy variable to our regression and found linguistic diversity
insignificant after controlling for this dummy variable. The inclusion of this dummy
variable, however, did not meaningfully alter other results. The effect of another
language-related variable, the international language-speaking colonizer, was
consistently negative in line with hypothesis 4, but it was statistically significant
only in the 1990–2005 period. What this significantly negative effect in this latest
period also means is that English language education has become highly institu-
tionalized to the degree that only some countries that inherited other international
languages from their former colonizers compose the majority of nonadopters of
English as the first foreign language.
Overall, the results in Table 4.5 show that the structuration of national education
systems often exceed—or is “loosely coupled” with—concrete societal needs of
individual countries (Meyer et al. 1997). In addition to such loose couplings, the
institutionalist perspective expects countries with more ties to the global civil
network to have a greater tendency to incorporate English into the school cur-
riculum (Boli and Thomas 1999). Since a certain high level of English proficiency
has been emphasized increasingly in world discourses as a basic literacy skill for
tomorrow’s supranational citizens, a country’s institutionalization of English lan-
guage education is likely to be associated with the extent to which a country is
connected to the cultural construction of world discourses. The results in Table 4.5
provide some evidence that supports this explanation. There was a significant
positive effect of the global civil network on the tendency to incorporate English
into the school curriculum as the first foreign language in the 1990–2005 period. In
line with hypothesis 5, the transnational diffusion of English language education in
the recent phase appears to have been facilitated by international linkages of global
civil society. However, its effect was not significant in earlier periods. One plausible
explanation of this insignificance may be that the prevalence of international dis-
courses emphasizing English proficiency as part of basic literacy skills is rather a
recent phenomenon. Indeed, contrasting discourses have been present concerning
the prevalence of English and its impact on various spheres of society, with
associated fears of linguistic domination by a particular culture.10 Today’s new
vision of education as contributing to unlimited progress and justice throughout the
world, however, appears to give increasing legitimacy to English as an integral
curricular subject, whose significance in empowering the individual as a capable
and responsible member of global society has become an institutionalized rule or
“myth” in international policy discourses.11
In addition, we found the effects of our control variables very interesting, too.
With regard to the effect of economic development, it was not significant from 1945
to 1989. In the 1990–2005 period, when this variable was statistically significant,
the direction of its effect was negative. Such an insignificant or negative effect of
this variable would not be expected from most conventional perspectives that
expect the feasibility of an educational policy to be contingent upon the country’s
economic condition under which to afford the costs involved in formulating and
implementing the policy. However, even the negative effect of this variable is not
surprising from the institutionalist perspective because the universal meanings of
teaching English to future citizens may have more intense significance for those
countries that are anticipating development than for other countries already seen as
economically advanced economies.12 Similarly, the effect of recently acquired
sovereignty was statistically insignificant except for 1970–1989 period. This
insignificant result is very suggestive as it implies that newly independent societies
10
The linguistic diversity of the world is often seen to be threatened by the rise of English as a
global language. Such a view is based on the analogy between an increasingly reduced number of
living languages in the world and an increasing number of endangered species in the natural
ecology. Of course, this ecology metaphor is useful to draw attention to diverse linguistic heritages
around the world. However, many sociolinguists today observe a variety of modern Englishes that
have evolved in different parts of the globe (Davies 2005; Kachru 1990), thereby questioning the
traditional assumption that English has some unidirectional influence from one particular culture to
another. As Honna (2005, p. 76) notes, “the spread of English as a language for multinational and
multicultural communication utilized by an enormous number of non-native speakers shows that
English is becoming more and more de-Anglo-Americanized in many regions of the world”.
11
The word “myth”, as used in Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) seminal work, emphasizes that an
institutionalized rule often conflicts with practical efficiency but persists as a taken-for-granted
routine.
12
In other words, some countries that are highly developed and modern may delay adopting
innovations; since they are already deeply integrated into world society, conforming to additional
world standards may not be their immediate political priority. For example, Rauner (1998) pro-
vides some evidence supporting this hypothesis with respect to social studies curricula.
were also very attentive to the provision of English language education to their
future citizens despite the possibility that establishing a solidary national commu-
nity might have been their immediate political priority, at least temporarily, upon
independence.
Discussion and Conclusion
In the modern world, an important role of schooling is to provide universal edu-

cation in order to equip children with basic skills that are necessary to learn
advanced knowledge and skills in the future. Today, English appears to have joined
this category of basic skills in the sense that English is no longer seen narrowly as a
language of particular Western countries, although it once used to be. As our data
show, English is becoming a regular school subject whose legitimacy is taken for
granted in most national education systems, largely regardless of individual
countries’ immediate societal needs. As Meyer (2006, p. 264) puts it, “the modern
world society is built around an expansive conception of the rights and capacities of
the individual human person, seen as a member of human society as a whole rather
than principally as the citizen of a nation-state”. Children around the world are not
only learning English language skills; they are changing their identities into new
ones through which they are better positioned within a larger social context beyond
national borders. It seems that English language education around the world has
been increasingly linked to the expanded notion of citizenship that emphasizes the
centrality of the individual as a primordial member of larger civil society, rather
than as a member of a bounded national territory, which we may call “suprana-
tional” or “transnational citizenship” (Meyer 2006; Ramirez 2006). That is, one of
the legitimate and desirable roles that education systems around the world are
expected to play involves “the construction of collective identities” (Koenig 2008,
p. 95) that empower future citizens in global society.
Extensive cross-national and historical data analyzed in this study suggest that
teaching English in schools has been becoming an institutionalized routine across
diverse countries. Only small percentages of countries incorporated English into the
school curriculum up until the first half of the twentieth century. Within half a
century, however, English achieved a legitimate status in the school curriculum in
most countries around the world. Most conventional views explain the popularity of
English language education in terms of its economic and political functions in a
given society. Such explanations proffer useful insights from a realistic stance.
However, an educational phenomenon is not only a functional or political response
to meet substantive societal needs; it is also an institutional embodiment of
transnational cultural rules and values. By gaining legitimacy from universalistic
world models and principles, English language education appears to have consol-
idated its status in curricular policies across countries. Reflecting worldwide
rationales regarding the significance of English proficiency in the increasingly
globalized world as well as international discourses emphasizing the empowerment
of the individual as a capable and responsible member of global society, the

importance of English language education is becoming taken for granted across
non-English-speaking countries. A certain high level of English proficiency appears
to be increasingly conceived as a basic skill for everyone, rather than as something
that privileges particular social strata, although the latter was once the case espe-
cially in many postcolonial societies.
In support of linguistic diversity around the world, the theorization of language
as inseparable from human existence extends to growing concerns about the
“ecology” of languages, and such concerns are now framed in terms of how to
preserve indigenous local languages and promote linguistic human rights
(Hornberger and Hult 2008; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). The celebration of linguistic
diversity in world discourses, however, is not necessarily in conflict with the
worldwide discursive promotion of English language education. Indeed, both ways
of discourse formation are grounded in the common notion of the individual whose
personhood is seen as constituted independent of national citizenship. That is, an
individual person is theorized as a member of subnational and transnational com-
munities in addition to a national citizen. Increasing attention has been given to
both indigenous and global languages along with national languages because the
nation-state as a societal unit is no longer conceptualized as the only primary
boundary for an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). Further, both linguistic
diversity and English language education are commonly “invoked with… the world
interest in mind” (Ramirez 2006, p. 382), rationalized around universalistic prin-
ciples of progress and justice. While linguistic diversity is seen to contribute to the
richness of the cultural heritages of the world, English is assumed to serve as a
useful tool for international communication and global cooperation.
Education is a futuristic project in character. Contemporary political conceptu-
alizations of education continue to expand the purposes of public education far
beyond providing direct or immediate functional utility to individuals or to society
(Gutmann 1987; Labaree 1997). Education systems around the world are constantly
responsive to new visions of society, not only within but also beyond national
boundaries. They have integrated various educational aims into their educational
policies, with increasing emphasis placed on education for world citizenship and
sustainable development, for example (Banks 2008; Cha et al. 2010; Fiala 2006). In
this respect, the incorporation of English language education into curriculum
policies around the world can be seen largely as an embodiment of ideas that have
been constituted in various “transnational spaces” (Gough 2000) for educational
discourses, symbolically reflecting institutional dynamics of the modern interna-
tional system. As economic and cultural globalization processes intensify, an
individual child in even a remote peripheral nation-state is now expected to become
a capable and responsible member of a new “imagined community” that may be
called “world society” (Meyer et al. 1997). Current world-cultural values that
celebrate individual personhood as the fundamental basis of one’s distinctive and
special roles in society undergird various educational policies for empowering all
individual children regardless of their circumstances (Frank and Meyer 2002). In
this context, the potential effect of educational policies for English language
education extends not only to their contribution to meeting some concrete societal
needs within individual countries but also to their institutional impact on our
cognition by which every individual is seen as having the ontological status as a
primordial member of global civil society.
Given the unprecedented spread of English instruction across national education
systems, reflective evaluations of current curricular policies on English language
education are necessary in order to better assess their intended and unintended
effects on nations, local communities, and, most importantly, individual children.
Without such reflective procedures, English language education incorporated into
the school curriculum might remain only as an official policy element whose impact
on lived experiences in the classroom might be limited in many parts of the world,
especially where an adequate teaching force or other necessary educational
resources are not present. Further, close attention needs to be given to the possi-
bility that new forms of social inequality and exclusion may arise due to uneven
access to English language education, which can lead to what may be called the
“English divide” between different groups of people. That is, the access to quality
English language education should not be determined based on children’s socioe-
conomic backgrounds or on other socially constructed categories of difference that
serve to privilege some groups over others, either within or across nation-states.
In this respect, the world institutionalization of English language education
poses both promises and challenges to educational policy makers and practitioners
all around the world. Sustained and shared policy efforts should be directed toward
pondering how to better design English language education as an empowering tool
to help all schoolchildren develop a heightened sense of both cultural diversity and
common humanity in the context of today’s world society. As the incorporation of
English language education into national education systems has become a world
model, educators and policy makers should become reflective enactors of this
curricular policy model in order to achieve its intended educational goals while
constantly identifying and minimizing its unintended consequences. Future research
needs to attend to the importance of developing an empirically based research
agenda to examine the possible disparity in opportunity structures for different
groups of children in the global context of English education policies and practices.
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Chapter 5
Intercultural and International
Understandings: Non-centric Knowledge
and Curriculum in Asia
Jagdish Gundara
Intercultural Dialogue and Education
The experiences of many Asian countries indicate that culture has been a force for
coexistence and for conflict. It has acted as a bridge making intercultural under-
standings possible as well as embodying a potential for dissonance. In many
polities, the majority cultures have tended to control resources in areas where
minority communities reside and isolate them from the social development of their
communities and their markers of identity and cultural differences.
In Southeast Asian contexts, there are significant internal cleavages based on
ethnicity, race, and religion. With the collapse of the ideas of ‘modernisation’ and
increasing neoliberal globalisation stronger communal identities have emerged.
This is especially the case where the revolution of expectations in neoliberal
economies cannot be met and there is a subsequent rise of ethno-nationalisms.
There are numerous fault lines on ethnic and religious basis across the Asian
continent and a few examples of those are: the Han versus the minority nationalities
in China; Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; Hindus and
Muslims in India; Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka; and Shia and Sunnis in
Pakistan. In many of these and states like Laos and Thailand, the governments
purposively ‘misrecognise’ issues to deal with minorities and classify many of the
smaller ‘indigienous’ people as being ‘backward’, and as threats to security. In
Japan there is hardly any recognition of the issues of multiculturalism, especially as
they relate to historical minorities like the Ainu, Burakumin, Okinawans, and
This chapter is an abridged version of a much longer manuscript prepared originally as a keynote
address delivered at the 2013 international conference of the Korean Association for
Multicultural Education, Seoul, South Korea.
J. Gundara (&)
e-mail: j.gundara@ioe.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_5
62 J. Gundara
Koreans. These different situations and policies in different nation states necessitate
intercultural policy measures at local, national, and regional levels.
In Fiji, within the Pacific Ocean region, a very different situation exists, since the
government is implementing multiculturalism by force to create a future state
without racism and to eradicate the narrow identities of the diverse groups in Fiji
(Naidu et al. 2013). This position, however, detracts from the development of trust
through dialogue amongst local groups and communities, as well as through edu-
cational measures toward community-based civic engagement and lifelong
learning.
Conversely, intercultural understandings and coexistence amongst peoples in
East Asia have relied traditionally for instance on Confucianism. In political terms
there are constitutional safeguards through forms of governance which include
federalism, forms of autonomy, self-governance and consociationalism. In many
Asian societies local communities have developed ‘vernacular communitarianism’
to deal with issues of multiculturalism at the local level. Yet, since this entails
harmony, deference, and paternalism (see Ho in this volume), it has been appro-
priated by authoritarian Asian political leaders as ‘state communitarianism’ is used
to justify suppression of political dissent and labelled as ‘Asian values’ (see Chua
Beng Huat, in Kymlicka and He 2005, pp. 170–195).
The challenges of societal diversity cannot be dealt with by imposing dominant
Asian, Eurocentric or nationalistic norms using education systems. This is espe-
cially true of the issues of knowledge within Asian societies which need to develop
inclusive knowledge systems and avoid the dangers of various forms of ‘centrisms’
in the curriculum because these can be inimical to the maintenance of safety, peace
and security in diverse polities. A regional and universal basis of knowledge, which
are recontextualised in Asian societies, presents curriculum planners in education
systems with a difficult but essential challenge.
A non-centric curriculum can enable educators and learners to develop inclusive
and shared value systems which are important for democratic Asian societies.
Particular attention needs to be given to the teaching of history from a
non-triumphalist perspective so that the past is used to develop greater levels of
mutualities amongst the citizens of the states especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
However, such curricular developments need to be part of mainstream education
but ought to build on basic education and acquisition of languages and literacies.
Some of the initiatives might require the development of school-community links
and measures to minimise conflicts in socially diverse schools; educational strate-
gies to improve the educational attainment of children from immigrant families as
well as children, especially from the poorer sections of the majority community.
This can be facilitated through developing bilingual and multilingual strategies as
well as innovative development of the curriculum.
Notions of public safety and policies to defend human rights and the plural social
environments in societies are of fundamental importance to the civil state (etat de
droit). This can help the development of a civil society with a strong civic culture
and encourage active citizenship amongst all young people. The school as an
educational institution has a formative role in developing a constitutional, peace
5 Intercultural and International Understandings … 63
oriented, and inclusive ethos amongst all young people. These can help to ensure
that all children in a state learn together, play together, grow together and then stand
together through shared public and societal values. Yet many current Asian edu-
cation systems in all regions continue to stratify groups rather than develop
framework citizenship, human rights, a civic culture of inclusiveness and similarity
at public level. Groups and communities can retain their different identities at
personal levels and private domains of their lives.
Eurocentrism and Knowledge
The issues of knowledge and curriculum design are critical to the way in which a
state constructs itself. Inclusions and exclusions of knowledge have implications for
ethnic conflict or peace and stability in a state. The assumption being made here is
that a ‘centric’ curriculum is inimical to the strengthening of Asian civilisations at
the global level. It can, in fact, weaken the nation states by privileging dominant
discourses, especially since westernisation and Eurocentric knowledge continue to
assume greater levels of ascendency.
Asian education systems confront a double challenge. On the one hand there is
the European domination of knowledge and on the other there is the problem of
modernisation, development and national integration and a challenge to develop a
curriculum relevant to the implementation of these policies (Blaut 1993; Frank
1998). In terms of Eurocentrism, these hegemonic understandings are informed by
the colonialism and imperialism of Europe. As Said (1993) writes
Without significant exception the universalising discourses of modern Europe and the
United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world. There is
incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct rule; there is coercion. But there is only
infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonised people should be heard from, their
ideas known.
The interpenetration of cultures and civilisations has universal impact and needs
to be analysed at the broadest possible level. Yet, discourses from the colonised
peripheries and the subordinated nationalities are still treated as being marginal
even in the post-colonial contemporary Asian contexts. Furthermore, dominant
nationalities in Asia rather than using Asian and universal democratic means to
devise a national curriculum impose the knowledge inherited during colonialism
from Europe.
Bernal (1987) indicated how in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Europeans developed a historiography which denied the earlier understanding that
the Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic periods had learnt as a result of
colonisation and interaction between the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Greeks. Part
of the reason for this new historiography has been that with the rise of racism and
anti-Semitism in Europe, the European Romantics and racists wanted to distance
Greece from the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and construct it as the pure
64 J. Gundara
childhood of Europe. It was unacceptable from their perspective that the Europeans
would have developed any learning and understandings from the Africans or the
Semites.
The notion of a Northern European culture separated from the world south of the
Mediterranean is largely a mythical construction. The contributions to knowledge in
the ancient period from this immediate region include Mesopotamian astronomy,
the Egyptian calendar and Greek mathematics, enriched by the Arabs. As Amin
(1989) states
The opposition Greece = the West / Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia = the East is itself a later
artificial construct of Eurocentrism. For the boundary in the region separates the backward
North African and European West from the advanced East; and the geographic unities
constituting Europe, Africa and Asia have no importance on the level of the history of
civilisation, even if Eurocentrism in its reading of the past is projected onto the past the
modern North-South line of demarcation passing through the Mediterranean.
The debate about how and where ‘civilisation’ arose is an interesting one for
educationalists and students, but it is only a part of a wider concern with the
intellectual straightjacket that Eurocentric and other centric education systems can
impose. In this sense it is always necessary to consider ways in which the cur-
riculum, both formal and informal, can be modified or changed. As long as history
is studied from the perspective of one or another narrowly nationalist claim to truth,
rather than from one or another paradigm of historiography, education will remain
trapped in the tramlines of nationalist tautology. And within this question of
communalism, racism, xenophobia and ethnicisms will have propagandistic but not
educative value. In the teaching and devising of the curriculum educationalists
should therefore consider several alternative definitions of knowledge. These
alternative definitions ought to include considerations which are democratic and
involve considerations of social justice and equality in education. This can be done
to enhance the quality of education for all and not to lower standards as is normally
suggested by elitists.
Non-centric Civilisational Basis for Knowledge
Developing a non-centric basis of knowledge presents all curriculum developers

with the obvious dilemmas of the rootedness of cultures and civilisations as well as
their inter-connectedness. Curriculum developers as well as academics, educators,
and other policy-makers need to examine these complex notions and to analyse the
myths, feelings, understandings, and concepts surrounding them in order to develop
rational ways of dealing with the resultant dilemmas. Education has normally been
seen as a secular or religious phenomenon but the division and divisiveness caused
by this separation has been very damaging. However, if civilisational knowledge
can be pooled differently to draw the best from each phase of human history, then a
more syncretic understanding from across civilisations and periods of time could
inform the educational process differently.
In the first phase between the fifth century BC and the seventh century AD
universalist concepts of humanity were established by great religions like
Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam and the Confucian and
Hellenistic philosophies. However, as Amin (1997) states
this declaration of a universalist vocation did not establish a real unification of humanity.
The conditions of tributary society did not permit it, and humanity reformed itself into
major tributary areas held together by their own particular universalist religion-philosophy
(Christendom, Dar Es Islam, the Hindu world, the Confucian world). It is still the case,
however, that tributary revolution, like all the great revolutionary moments in history,
projected itself forwards and produced concepts ahead of its time.
Although these earlier movements form an important part of the emergence of

universalist norms and values, they also continue to present unresolved dilemmas at
a global level. Kung (1991), for one, outlines his major project for encouraging an
ethical quest at the global level: through dialogue amongst religions to establish
peace amongst religions and nations.
The second phase of the development of knowledge especially in the
Mediterranean region was the Renaissance. During the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies it was the collaboration between scholars from progressive Catholics, Muslim
and Jewish faiths working on Greek scientific and other texts which led to the
translation of these Greek texts from Arabic to Latin and contributed to the
Renaissance. Hence, what underpins interfaith dialogue is not rhetoric about it but
actual projects like these involving scholars like Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes,
and Al-Kindi in sites like Toledo, Spain.
The third phase during the modern period likewise has made a contribution to
universalism through philosophy of the Enlightenment. This social vision of society
was based on notions of a social contract and the French Revolution sought a nation
based not on ideas of blood and ancestors but of free men (sic). The abolition of
slavery and ideas of secularism went beyond mere religious toleration although the
rights of women were not recognised. However, despite the fact that the nation was
not an affirmation of the particular, but of the universal, such universalist objectives
have not been achieved. In the American Revolution, a nation largely based on
immigration, the right to be ‘different’ was recognised. Nevertheless, there has been
little defence of the right to be ‘similar’ within a constitutional state, especially of
the descendants of slaves and the indigenous Americans. Hence, inclusive social
and political frameworks have not been optimally developed.
Fourthly, the rise of socialism in the nineteenth century further contributed to
notions of radical transformation especially through Soviet Bolshevism. The price
paid by socialism in respecting difference and not building inclusive rights to be
‘similar’ has been very evident in the dissolution of Yugoslavia which brought
ethnic cleansing to Europe 50 years after Fascism was defeated. The Soviet Union
and all the states associated with communism likewise did not develop equalities
and inclusive citizenships with common and shared values.
66 J. Gundara
Fifth, the post-colonial states likewise faced great challenges of maintaining

unity with divisiveness being foisted on them by the colonisers. Most of them have
tried to maintain national unity despite tendencies towards fragmentation. The
Bandung principles (1955) of nonalignment which avoided polarities need to be
re-visited for better inter-state relations. Following the 1955 Conference in
Bandung, the 29 member states formed the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to
avoid becoming part of the bipolar world. This independent voice of those who had
emerged from the shadow of colonialism was a powerful organisation of poor
countries.
The superpowers in the post World War II period undermined many of the
initiatives of NAM especially in relation to the creation of international institutions
to nurture greater levels of economic equalities. Hence, no postwar economic
re-structuring took place to correct the huge economic disparities between the
so-called developed world based on capitalism and the so-called developing
countries, for whom the victory of the Second World War was hollow. This was
despite the very heavy price that the ‘developing’ countries paid to defeat Fascism
during World War II (Mazower 2012, pp. 244–272)
In the absence of economic changes the most powerful economic agreement
within NAM at Bandung was on issues of cultural cooperation and this was an
attempt to curb the cultural chauvinism of imperialist powers. UNESCO sponsored
a critical study of racism and racial attitudes in different cultures. This work
included monographs by Claude Levi-Strauss and Marie Jahoda and it reinforced
the idea of race was an ‘ideological fiction’. The 29 NAM members at Bandung
condemned ‘racialism as a means of cultural suppression’ and stressed the need for
the study of national cultural history as well as developing measures of cultural
cooperation.
They issued the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which argued that
imperialism had prevented cultural cooperation and directed the cultural history of
people, including that of Europe. It is important to remember how the NAM
spearheaded by leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Chou En Lei contributed
to the making of knowledge a universal project and not a prerogative of the
‘civilised’ European and American colonial powers. It is important to remember for
this Conference that it was the work of NAM countries which led to the work on
cultures, education, and scientific cooperation in the post World War II period
which became the substance of work of UNESCO (Prashad 2007).
Hopes for the genuine underpinning of universal values therefore lay in the
collective wisdom of the earlier religious epoch; the Renaissance as an intercultural
enterprise; the Enlightenment philosophy; their reinterpretation by the socialist
movements; and from progressive elements from amongst the post-colonialist lib-
erated states and the Non-Aligned Movement. The educational and political chal-
lenge for democratic ideas is to hold notions of respecting difference but at the same
time ensuring the right to be similar. Such an approach could begin to break the
polarisations between particularism and universalism. This establishment of a
common set of resemblances amongst citizens of Asian states can largely be
accomplished by their education systems.
Historical Knowledge
Omissions and distortions of history play a major role in allowing gossip or

stereotypes to become compounded. The presentation of many local Asian histories
by their absence especially their premodern national past is an important element in
the construction of the exclusions of Asian groups as peoples without a history or a
past. The use of a similar exclusion by dominant Asian groups of non-dominant
Asian communities exacerbates the problems of mutual recognition, as has been the
case in many countries.
The genocide of subordinated Asian peoples and enslavement are glossed over
in many history books. Subjugated groups like the outer island collectivities in
Indonesia, the Dalits, or tribal peoples in India are seen as having no great past, and
their identities are not represented by the powerful legitimising symbols within the
currently constructed national states.
Those who plan the history curricula face a very complicated task. On the one
hand, they need to engage with the identities of groups like the Burmans, the
Vietnamese, the Hindus or the Bengalis. On the other hand, within the state edu-
cation systems, they need to develop a coherent and inclusive story of and for the
whole nation. The question, therefore, for curriculum designers is which aspect of
histories to select and based on what principles to make that selection.
To develop more universal understandings, the historical underlying hypothesis
and the implicit theories of writers needs to be dissected. An epistemological and
methodological break could lead to developing more widely acceptable histories
which include not only the written sources but also the oral understandings of
certain groups. Since school level understandings of history vary so vastly not only
between countries but also within countries, abstract solutions cannot be suggested
here. Nevertheless, in general notions of civilisations, the evolutionist schema, the
impact of stereotypes, re-voicing and re-imaging the invisible and the subordinated
groups do merit attention. The development of the critical understanding of teachers
and the development of appropriate teaching materials and textbooks based on new
research and developmental work deserve immediate attention.
The changes in Hong Kong over the last few years illustrate the question of the
historiography of the island. Colonial powers normally granted colony indepen-
dence. In the case of Hong Kong it was handed back to China, thus, control being
assumed by one state from another. So, neither in 1841 when Britain assumed
control over Hong Kong, nor in 1997 were the residents of Hong Kong consulted
about their wishes (Lowe 1991). Both China and Britain colluded in denying a
voice to the people of Hong Kong including those who fled from China as political
refugees. Whose history of Hong Kong will represent its controversial pasts: will it
be a history of its land, its rulers, its institutions or its peoples? How will its colonial
past or its capitalist present be seen by the Marxists histories? These are complex
historiographical issues.
From the point of view of intercultural and inter-ethnic relations in Hong Kong,
there have been immense contributions by Indian Bohras, Parsees, Sikhs and Jews.
68 J. Gundara
But their histories have been ignored and their citizenship rights undermined
because only the Chinese can acquire rights as Chinese nationals. How can a
China-centred government ignore a history of a dynamic multicultural urban
city-state?
More generally, the usage of terms like ‘tradition’ or ‘modernisation’ as applied
to the study of history tends to have parochialism and linearity. Non-western
civilisations are constructed as traditional, while the west is seen as the acme of
modernity. Such notions detract from the development of a more universalised or
global approach to understanding history. Liberating the notion of the modern from
the Eurocentric straitjacket can help with notions of modernity being universalised.
Recontextualisation of the Social Sciences
In the post-World War II period it was North American social scientists who wrote
about issues of modernisation and development. At one level this was very
important, because it tried to connect the ‘modernised’ world with the ‘mod-
ernising’ world. As the 1996 Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Sciences recalls
The key thesis was that there exists a common modernising path for all
nations/peoples/areas (hence they are all the same) but that nations/peoples/areas find
themselves in different stages on their path (hence they were not quite the same).
This type of development in social science which used concepts like social
change, status discrepancy, and class, as well as quantitative methods to study
development seemed appropriate. However, North American social science did not
focus on the longue durée, the historical tradition (of the Annales as in France).
There has developed a challenge to universal normatism of North American
social sciences from the African-American and feminist constituencies who have
challenged these dominant knowledge systems by questioning its presuppositions.
These new modes of analysis call for the use of scholarship, analysis, and reasoning
to engage in reflection concerning the place and weight in our theorising about
difference (race, gender, sexuality, and class).
The recontextualisation of the social sciences therefore ought to include con-
sideration of a pluralistic universalism akin to the Indian pantheon of past and
present social realities. Such a development would represent an important recog-
nition of the multicultural realities which have a bearing on both the historical study
of the pasts and the social scientific study of the present.
These initiatives can lead to the development of a more intercultural social
science which can reengage with the complexity of different types of localisms, as
well as those at the level of the state and develop these into more global forms of
knowledge. A recontextualised social science of this kind which does not leave out
the analysis at the state level has the merit of carrying with it many of the disci-
plines whose focus is the state. It may also have the merit of developing a common
social science, which cuts across humanity. The key task is to explode the hermetic
language used to describe persons and groups as ‘others’ and that they are objects
of social science analysis, as opposed to being subjects with full rights and
legitimacies.
The inclusion of these historical pasts and contemporaneous presents has more
possibilities of developing comprehensive knowledge systems. Such an inclusive
social science would also make it more objective. The alternatives of Sino-centric,
Indo-centric, Islamo-centric or Eurocentric knowledges are more likely to be
fragmentary if ‘other’ knowledges remain excluded.
Social sciences which are involved with power politics, or are hegemonic or
dominant will be increasingly contested and it is important that polarities and
political contestation is obviated to enable the development of more inclusive social
scientific studies. These can enable us to have a better grasp of the local and the
global and in reshaping them into being more inclusive.
Inclusive Curriculum and Participatory Pedagogy
Many post-colonial Asian states have not yet developed an optimum understanding
of integrating the nation based on an ethos of inclusive multiple identities into the
national cultures of Asian societies. Many states hark back to anti-colonial, dom-
inant and majoritarian knowledge as legitimation of their polities. Knowledge
systems and curricula for both formal and nonformal education therefore are
excluding and ignore the complex basis of knowledge and histories based on
multiple identities of many Asian societies. The recounting of anti-colonial strug-
gles which exclude the contributions of minorities cannot be equated with broadly
based and inclusive national struggles and post-colonial national identities. These
inclusions are important to obviate the separate culturalist developments which use
Charles Taylor’ notion of ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor 2011). These calls can
then be used to demand a separatist ‘curriculum of recognition.’
Representation of the national culture based merely on anti-colonial, economic
development and class politics is not a sufficient basis to constitute national culture
in city state like Singapore (see Ho in this volume). The superficialities of mul-
tiracialism or ‘Asian values’ are no substitute for a serious consideration of the
complex values and histories of its peoples. Religious leaders like the Dalai Lama
do not think that the United Nations Universal Declarations on Human Rights can
be replaced by ‘Asian values’ as suggested by certain political leaders.
The focus on particularism of identities constitutes a major challenge in nation
building especially in the post-colonial states of South and Southeast Asia. On the
issue of ethnicity Anderson (1983) states
70 J. Gundara
The politics of ethnicity have their roots in modern times, not ancient history, and their
shape has been largely determined by colonial policy. (It is no accident that uncolonised
Siam has the least violently ethnicised politics in the region).
Their imbrication with class and religion as well as the differences between the
‘alien’ and the ‘indigenous’ make for complex curricular implications within the
South and Southeast Asian education systems. The best defence for an educational
process with a critical edge is within democratic school systems, where people do
not have to obey rules without questioning them.
The dominant-marginal perspective in educational discourses needs to be con-
stantly challenged and often redrawn. It requires a combination of pedagogical
patience and persistence. There has to be a constant and fundamental reappraisal of
the histories and national identities into which we have all been inducted with such
care. The answer does not lie in trying to establish either a liberal or a
‘back-to-basics’ curriculum founded in centric, narrowly nationalist and
empire-based intellectual milieu which has done so much to contribute to our
present predicament. An important issue which requires rational consideration is
how to engage in processes of national integration, modernisation and development
which are democratic and inclusive. At this level curriculum development issues
ought to include relevant considerations of participatory pedagogies.
In many marginalised communities learning and teaching ought to be seen as
flexible processes which involve both younger and older people in lifelong learning
situations. Such participatory pedagogic situations would enliven the curriculum,
rather than deaden it. Hence, both formal and nonformal learning strategies are
needed, and both of them should also have the potential for lifelong learning.
For most education systems the challenge is to engage in a wide ranging
establishment of connections with other cultures and civilisations which are part of
the fabric of contemporary realities for young people and the future generations of
Asian citizens. Currently, the regional differences at societal levels between
Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia are extremely wide and the role of particularistic
curriculum in worsening ethnic tensions and strengthening siege communal men-
talities cannot be underestimated.
It is a question of disentangling, decoding, identifying the operation and struc-
tures of those discourses which help to sustain the present relations of intellectual
power and subordination in our societies. Eurocentrism is of particular significance
in relation to knowledge, since it has an implicit theory of world history. It is also a
global political project with far reaching universal ramifications. From this per-
spective the so-called western thought and philosophy emerges from Greece and is
based on ‘rational principles’ while the ‘Orient’ does not move beyond ‘meta-
physics’ (Amin 1997, p. 19). The curricular question is how can the Asian edu-
cation systems help to liberate universalism from the limits of Eurocentrism? The
current habits of thought within some education systems inhibit such a development
and this tends to reinforce notions of a fortress mentality. This mentality exists not
only in Europe but has its equivalents in Sino-centrism, Islamo-centrism and
Indo-centrism and these substitutions only continue to perpetuate issues of

knowledge exclusion and dominance.
Education, Training, and Public Values
In the field of education the economic forces are driving institutions to tailor major
activities towards training personnel for the market. The error that is being made is
that education is being conflated with issues about training and these concepts are
used interchangeably and synonymously. Educators should reflect on this because
training specifically targets the job market and incorporates a significant component
of the acquisition of skills which have direct application to the field of work. The
role and function of education is different since economic systems are only one
aspect of social systems; and the applied economic and work dimensions are
subsidiary to the process of education in society writ large.
Education, knowledge and value creation with a societal focus on ‘humanitas’
and inculcation of civic virtues have an intellectual dimension. These values and
virtues can lead to civic engagement and active citizenship, which can help the
younger generation to lead fuller lives, because the intellectual and educational
values using the ancient concepts of ‘paideia’ and ‘bildung’ have deep goals and
values. It is not surprising that many young people are disenchanted with schooling
which relegates them to replicate and routine roles and jobs. There is, therefore, a
need to examine the Asian versions as well as intercultural versions of these Greek
and German ideas to ‘re-enchant’ and ‘re-invent’ a humanistic paideia as Kazamias
(2009) and Nussbaum (1997) have suggested.
References
Amin, S. (1989). Eurocentrism. London, UK: Zed Books.

Amin, S. (1997). Capitalism in the age of globalisation. London, UK: Zed Books.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflection on origins and spread of nationalism.
London, UK: Verso.
Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Blaut, J. M. (1993). The colonisers model of the world: Geographical diffusionism and
Eurocentric history. New York, NY: Guildford Press.
Frank, A. G. (1998). Reorient: Global economy in the Asian age. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Kazamias, A. (2009). Paideia and politeia: Education, and the polity/state in comparative
education. In R. Cowen & A. M. Kazamias (Eds.), International handbook of comparative
education (pp. 161–168). New York, NY: Springer.
Kung, H. (1991). Global responsibility: In search of a new world ethic. London, UK: SCM Press.
Kymlicka, W., & He, B. (2005). Multiculturalism in Asia. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lowe, K. (1991). Hong Kong’s missing history. History Today, 41(12), 8–10.
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Mazower, M. (2012). Governing the world: The history of an idea. London, UK: Allen Lane.
Naidu, V., Sahib, M., & Osborne, J. (2013). Fiji: The challenges and opportunities of diversity.
London, UK: Minority Rights Group International.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating huamnity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Prashad, V. (2007). The darker nations: A people’s history of the third world. New York, NY: The
New Press.
Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. London, UK: Chatto and Windus.
Taylor, C. (2011). Dilemmas and connections: Selected essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Chapter 6
Diversity and Citizenship Education
in Multicultural Nations
James A. Banks
Migration within and across nation-states is a worldwide phenomenon. The

movement of peoples across national boundaries is as old as the nation-state itself.
However, never before in the history of the world has the movement of diverse
racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, and language groups within and across
nation-states been as numerous and rapid or raised such complex and difficult
questions about citizenship, human rights, democracy, and education. Many
worldwide trends and developments are challenging the notion of educating stu-
dents to function in one nation-state. These trends include the ways in which people
are moving back and forth across national borders, the rights of movement per-
mitted by the European Union, and the rights codified in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
Assimilation, Diversity, and Global Migration
Prior to the ethnic revitalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the aim of
schools in most nation-states was to develop citizens who internalized national
values, venerated national heroes, and accepted glorified versions of national his-
tories. These goals of citizenship education are obsolete today because many people
have multiple national commitments and live in more than one nation. However, the
development of citizens who have global and cosmopolitan identities and com-
mitments is contested in nation-states around the world because nationalism
This chapter is a revised version of the author’s article: Diversity and Citizenship Education in
Multicultural Nations, Multicultural Education Review, Vol. 1, pp. 1–28, Banks 2009.
J.A. Banks (&)

University of Washington, Seattle, USA
e-mail: jbanks@u.washington.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_6
74 J.A. Banks
remains strong. Nationalism and globalization coexist in tension worldwide. The

number of recognized nation-states increased from 43 in 1900 to approximately 190
in 2000. The number of international migrants living abroad grew from 154 million
in 1990 to 244 million in 2015, which was 3.3 % of the world’s population of 7.4
billion (United Nations 2015).
Democratic nations around the world must deal with complex educational issues
when trying to respond to the problems wrought by international migration in ways
consistent with their ideologies and declarations. Researchers have amply docu-
mented the wide gap between democratic ideals and the school experiences of
minority groups in nations around the world (Banks 2009).1
When they are marginalized within school and treated as the “Other,” ethnic
minority students, such as Turkish students in Germany and Muslim students in
England, tend to emphasize their ethnic identity and to have weak attachments to
their nation-state. The four Muslim young men who were convicted for bombing
the London subway on July 7, 2005 had immigrant parents but were British citi-
zens. However, they apparently were not structurally integrated into British
mainstream society and had a weak identification with the United Kingdom and
non-Muslim British citizens.
Democratic nation-states and their schools must grapple with a number of salient
issues, paradigms, and ideologies as their populations become more culturally,
racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. The extent to which nation-states
make multicultural citizenship possible, the achievement gap between minority and
majority groups, and the language rights of immigrant and minority groups are
among the unresolved and contentious issues with which diverse nations and
schools must deal.
Nations throughout the world are trying to determine whether they will perceive
themselves as multicultural and allow immigrants to experience multicultural cit-
izenship (Kymlicka 1995), or continue to embrace an assimilationist ideology. In
nation-states that embrace Kymlicka’s idea of multicultural citizenship, immigrant
and minority groups can retain important aspects of their languages and cultures as
well as have full citizenship rights.
Nations in various parts of the world have responded to the citizenship and
cultural rights of immigrant and minority groups in different ways. Since the ethnic
revitalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many of the national leaders and
citizens in the United States, Canada, and Australia have viewed their nations as
multicultural democracies (Banks and Lynch 1986; Banks 2009). An ideal exists
within these nations that minority groups can retain important elements of their
community cultures and participate fully in the national civic community. However,
there is a wide gap between the ideals within these nations and the experiences of
1
The chapters in The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education describes
how students such the Maori in New Zealand, Muslims in France, and Mexican Americans in the
United States experience discrimination in school because of their cultural, ethnic, racial, religious,
and linguistic differences. In its 40 chapters written by scholars in various nations, the Companion
describes the educational experiences of diverse groups worldwide.
6 Diversity and Citizenship Education in Multicultural Nations 75
ethnic groups. Ethnic minority groups in the United States (Nieto 2009), Canada
(Joshee 2009), and Australia (Inglis 2009) experience discrimination in both the
schools and the wider society.
Other nations, such as Japan (Hirasawa 2009) and Germany (Luchtenberg 2009),
are reluctant to view themselves as multicultural. Historically, citizenship has been
closely linked to biological heritage and characteristics in both nations. However,
the biological conception of citizenship in Japan and Germany has eroded within
the last decade. However, it left a tenacious legacy in both nations. Castles (2004)
refers to Germany’s response to immigrants as “differential exclusion,” which is
“partial and temporary integration of immigrant workers into society—that is, they
are included in those subsystems of society necessary for their economic role: the
labor market, basic accommodation, work-related health care, and welfare” (p. 32).
However, immigrants are excluded from full social, economic, and civic partici-
pation in Germany.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, the French have dealt with immigrant groups in
ways distinct from the United States, Canada, and Australia. La laïcité is a tena-
cious concept in France, the aim of which is to keep church and state separate
(Lemaire 2009). La laïcité emerged in response to the hegemony the Catholic
Church exercised in France over the schools and other institutions for centuries.
A major goal of state schools in France is to assure that youth obtain a secular
education. Muslim students in French state schools, for example, are prevented
from wearing the hijab (veil) and other religious symbols (Bowen 2007; Scott
2007). The genesis of the rigid sanction against the veil is la laïcité and the
dominance of the Catholic Church in French history. In France the explicit goal is
assimilation (called integration) and inclusion (Castles 2004). Immigrant groups
can become full citizens in France but the price is cultural assimilation. Immigrants
are required to surrender their languages and cultures in order to become full
citizens.
Multicultural Citizenship and Cultural Democracy
Multicultural societies are faced with the problem of constructing nation-states that
reflect and incorporate the diversity of its citizens and yet have an overarching set of
shared values, ideals, and goals to which all of its citizens are committed (Banks
2007). Only when a nation-state is unified around a set of democratic values such as
justice and equality can it protect the rights of cultural, ethnic, religious, and lin-
guistic groups and enable them to experience cultural democracy and freedom.
Kymlicka (1995), the Canadian political theorist, and Rosaldo (1997), the U.S.
anthropologist, have constructed theories about diversity and citizenship. Both
Kymlicka and Rosaldo argue that in a democratic society, ethnic, and immigrant
groups should have the right to maintain their ethnic cultures and languages as well
as participate fully in the national civic culture. Kymlicka calls this concept
“multicultural citizenship;” Rosaldo refers to it as “cultural citizenship.”
76 J.A. Banks
In the United States in the 1920s Drachsler (1920) used cultural democracy to
describe what we call multicultural citizenship today. Drachsler (1920) and Kallen
(1924)—who were Jewish immigrants and advocates for the cultural freedom and
rights of the Southern, Central, and East European immigrants—argued that cultural
democracy is an important characteristic of a democratic society. They maintained
that cultural democracy should coexist with political and economic democracy, and
that citizens from diverse groups in a democratic society should participate freely in
the civic life of the nation-state and experience economic equality. They should also
have the right to maintain important aspects of their community cultures and lan-
guages, as long as they do not conflict with the shared democratic ideals of the
nation-state. Cultural democracy, argued Drachsler, is an essential component of a
political democracy.
Balancing Unity and Diversity
Cultural, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity exists in most nations
(Banks 2009). One of the challenges to diverse democratic nation-states is to
provide opportunities for different groups to maintain aspects of their community
cultures while constructing a nation in which these groups are structurally included
and to which they feel allegiance. A delicate balance of diversity and unity should
be an essential goal of democratic nations and of teaching and learning in
democratic societies (Banks et al. 2001). Unity must be an important aim when
nation-states are responding to diversity within their populations. Nation-states can
protect the rights of minorities and enable diverse groups to participate only when
they are unified around a set of democratic values such as justice and equality
(Gutmann 2004).
In the past nations have tried to create unity by forcing racial, cultural, ethnic,
linguistic, and religious minorities to give up their community languages and cul-
tures in order to participate in the national civic culture. In the United States,
Mexican American students were punished for speaking Spanish in school and
Native American youth were forced to attend boarding schools where their cultures
and languages were eradicated (Lomawaima and McCarty 2006). In Australia,
Aboriginal children were taken from their families and forced to live on state
missions and reserves (Broome 1982), a practice that lasted from 1869 to 1969.
These children are called “The stolen generation.” Kevin Rudd, the Australian
Prime Minister, issued a formal apology to the stolen generation on February 13,
2008. In order to embrace the national civic culture, students from diverse groups
must feel that it reflects their experiences, hopes, and dreams. Schools and nations
cannot marginalize the cultures of groups and expect them to feel structurally
included within the nation and to develop a strong allegiance to it.
Citizenship education must be transformed in the twenty-first century because of
the deepening diversity in nations around the world. Citizens in a diverse demo-
cratic society should be able to maintain attachments to their cultural communities
as well as participate effectively in the shared national culture. Unity without

diversity results in cultural repression and hegemony, as was the case in the former
Soviet Union and during the Cultural Revolution that occurred in China from 1966
to 1976. Diversity without unity leads to Balkanization and the fracturing of the
nation-state, as occurred during the Iraq war when sectarian conflict and violence
threatened that fragile nation in the late 2000s. Diversity and unity should coexist in
a delicate balance in democratic multicultural nations.
Nations such as France, the United Kingdom, and Germany are struggling to
balance unity and diversity. A French law which became effective on March 15,
2004 prevented Muslim girls from wearing the veil (hijab) to state schools (Bowen
2007; Lemaire 2009; Scott 2007). This law is a manifestation of la laïcité as well as
a refusal of the French government to deal explicitly with the complex racial,
ethnic, and religious problems it faces in suburban communities where many
Muslim families live.2 The French prefer the term integration to race relations or
diversity. Integration has been officially adopted by the state. Integration is predi-
cated on the assumption that cultural differences should be eradicated during the
process of integration (Hargreaves 1995). The London subway and bus bombings
that killed 56 people and injured more than 700 on July 7, 2005, deepened ethnic
and religious tension and Islamophobia in Europe after the police revealed that the
suspected perpetuators were Muslim suicide bombers (Richardson 2004). The
young men who were convicted for these bombings were British citizens but
apparently had weak identities with the United Kingdom and non-Muslim British
citizens.
Citizenship and Citizenship Education
A citizen may be defined as a “native or naturalized member of a state or nation

who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection.” This is the
definition of citizen in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the
English Language (1989, p. 270). This same dictionary defines citizenship as the
“state of being vested with the rights, privileges, and duties of a citizen” (p. 270).
Absent from these minimal definitions of citizen and citizenship are the rich dis-
cussions and meanings of citizen and citizenship in democratic, multicultural
societies that were presented by a group of scholars in a conference I organized and
chaired in Bellagio, Italy in 2002 (Banks 2004a).
2
The riots in France in 2005 indicated that many Arab and Muslin youths have a difficult time
attaining a French identity and believe that most White French citizens do not view them as
French. On November 7, 2005, a group of young Arab males in France were interviewed on PBS,
the public television in the United States. One of the young men said, “I have French papers but
when I go to the police station they treat me like I am not French.”
78 J.A. Banks
The scholars at this conference stated that citizens within democratic multicul-
tural nation-states endorse the overarching ideals of the nation-state such as justice
and equality, are committed to the maintenance and perpetuation of these ideals,
and are willing and able to take action to help close the gap between their nation’s
democratic ideals and practices that violate those ideals, such as social, racial,
cultural, and economic inequality (Banks 2004a).
Consequently, an important goal of citizenship education in a democratic mul-
ticultural society should be to help students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and
skills needed to make reflective decisions and to take actions to make their
nation-states more democratic and just (Banks 2007). To become thoughtful
decision-makers and citizen actors, students need to master social science knowl-
edge, to clarify their moral commitments, to identify alternative courses of action,
and to act in ways consistent with democratic values (Banks et al. 1999). Gutmann
(2004) states that democratic multicultural societies are characterized by civic
equality, toleration, and recognition. Consequently, an important goal of citizen-
ship education in multicultural societies is to teach toleration and recognition of
cultural differences. Gutmann views deliberation as an essential component of
democratic education in multicultural societies. Gonçalves e Silva (2004), a
Brazilian scholar, states that citizens in a democratic society work for the betterment
of the whole society, and not just for the rights of their particular racial, social, or
cultural group. She writes
A citizen is a person who works against injustice not for individual recognition or personal
advantage, but for the benefit of all people. In realizing this task—shattering privileges,
ensuring information and competence, acting in favor of all—each person becomes a
citizen (p. 197).
Gonçalves e Silva (2004) also makes the important point that becoming a citizen
is a process and that education must facilitate the development of civic con-
sciousness and agency within students. She provides powerful examples of how
civic consciousness and agency are developed in community schools for the chil-
dren of Indigenous peoples and Blacks in Brazil. Osler (2005) maintains that stu-
dents should experience citizenship directly within schools and should not be
“citizens-in-waiting.”
In the discussion of his citizenship identity in Japan, Murphy-Shigematsu (2004)
describes how complex and contextual citizenship identification is within a mul-
ticultural nation such as Japan. Becoming a legal citizen of a nation does not
necessarily mean that an individual will attain structural inclusion into the main-
stream society and its institutions or will be perceived as a citizen by most members
of the mainstream group within the nation. A citizen’s racial, cultural, linguistic,
and religious characteristics often significantly influence whether she is viewed as a
citizen within her nation. It is not unusual for their fellow American citizens to
assume that Asian Americans born in the United States emigrated from another
nation. They are sometimes asked, “What country are you from?”
Brodkin (1998) makes a conceptual distinction between ethnoracial assignment
and ethnoracial identity that is helpful when considering the relationship between
citizenship identification and citizenship education. She defines ethnoracial

assignment as the way outsiders define people within another group. Ethnoracial
identities are how individuals define themselves “within the context of ethnoracial
assignment” (p. 3). Muslims citizens of the United States who have a strong
national identity are sometimes viewed by other Americans as non-Americans
(Gregorian 2003).
Citizenship education needs to be changed in significant ways because of the
increasing diversity within nations throughout the world and the quests by racial,
ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious groups for cultural recognition and rights
(Banks 2004a; Castles 2004). The Center for Multicultural Education at the
University of Washington has implemented a project to reform citizenship educa-
tion so that it will advance democracy as well as be responsive to the needs of
cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and immigrant groups within multi-
cultural nation-states. The first part of this project consisted of a conference, “Ethnic
Diversity and Citizenship Education in Multicultural Nation-States,” held in
Bellagio, Italy, June 17–21, 2002.3
One of the conclusions of the Bellagio conference was that world migration and
the political and economic aspects of globalization are challenging nation-states and
national borders. At the same time, national borders remain tenacious; the number
of nations in the world is increasing rather than decreasing. The number of UN
member states increased from 80 in 1950 to 191 in 2002 (Castles and Davidson
2000). Globalization and nationalism are coexisting and sometimes conflicting
trends and forces in the world today (Banks et al. 2005). Consequently, educators
throughout the world should rethink and redesign citizenship education courses and
programs. Citizenship education should help students acquire the knowledge,
attitudes, and skills needed to function in their nations as well as in a diverse world
society that is experiencing rapid globalization and quests by diverse groups for
recognition and inclusion. Citizenship education should also help students to
develop a commitment to act to change the world to make it more just and
democratic.
Another conclusion of the Bellagio conference is that citizenship and citizenship
education are defined and implemented differently in various nations and in dif-
ferent social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. It is also a contested idea in
nations around the world. However, there are shared problems, concepts, and issues
across nations, such as the need to prepare students to function within as well as
across national borders. The Bellagio conference also concluded that these shared
issues and problems should be identified by an international group that would
formulate guidelines for dealing with them.
3
The conference, which was supported by the Spencer and Rockefeller Foundations, included
participants from 12 nations: Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Palestine,
Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The papers presented at this
conference were published in a book I edited, Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global
Perspectives (Banks 2004a)
80 J.A. Banks
Democracy and Diversity in a Global Age
In response to the Bellagio conference recommendations, the Center for

Multicultural Education at the University of Washington created an International
Consensus Panel, which was supported by the Spencer Foundation in Chicago and
the University of Washington. The Panel wrote a publication titled Democracy and
Diversity: Principles and Concepts for Educating Citizens in a Global Age (Banks
et al. 2005). The Consensus Panel constructed four principles and identified ten
concepts for educating citizens for democracy and diversity in a global age (see
Table 6.1). One of the important conclusions of Democracy and Diversity is that
diversity describes the wide range of racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious
variations that exists within and across groups that live in multicultural
nation-states. Democracy and Diversity presents a broad view of diversity.4
The community cultures and languages of students from diverse groups were to
be eradicated in the assimilationist conception of citizenship education that existed
in nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Untied Kingdom
prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. One consequence of
assimilationist citizenship education was that many students lost their first cultures,
languages, and ethnic identities (Wong Fillmore 2005). Some students also became
alienated from their families and communities. Another consequence was that many
students became socially and politically alienated within the national civic culture,
as many Muslim youth in French society are today (Lemaire 2009).
Members of identifiable racial groups often become marginalized in both their
community cultures and in the national civic culture because they can function
effectively in neither. When they acquire the language and culture of the main-
stream dominant culture, they are often denied structural inclusion and full par-
ticipation into the civic culture because of their racial, cultural, linguistic, or
religious characteristics (Alba and Nee 2003; Gordon 1964). Teachers and schools
must practice democracy and human rights in order for these ideals to be inter-
nalized by students (Dewey 1959).
When schools and classrooms become microcosms and exemplars of democracy
and social justice they help students acquire democratic attitudes, learn how to
practice democracy, and to engage in deliberation with students from other ethnic,
cultural, linguistic, and religious groups (Gutmann 2004; Osler and Starkey 2009).
As Dewey (1959) stated, “all genuine education comes through experience” (p. 13).
Kohlberg’s idea of democratic, just schools exemplifies the concept of democracy
in action in schools (Schrader 1990). Kohlberg created a cluster school within a
high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts that ran as a just community. Each
individual within the school— whether student or staff—had a vote in deciding
school policies. The just community school was characterized by “participatory
democracy with teachers and students having equal rights, emphasis on conflict
4
You can download a pdf of this publication at the Center for Multicultural Education website:
http://education.washington.edu/cme/.
Table 6.1 Principles and concepts for educating citizens in a global age
Principles
Section I. Diversity, unity, global interconnectedness, and human rights
1. Students should learn about the complex relationships between unity and diversity in their
local communities, the nation, and the world
2. Students should learn about the ways in which people in their community, nation, and region
are increasingly interdependent with other people around the world and are connected to the
economic, political, cultural, environmental, and technological changes taking place across the
planet
3. The teaching of human rights should underpin citizenship education courses and programs in
multicultural nation-states
Section II. Experience and participation
4. Students should be taught knowledge about democracydemocracy and democratic institutions,
and they should be provided opportunities to practice democracy.
Concepts
1. Democracy
2. Diversity
3. Globalization
4. Sustainable Development
5. Empire, Imperialism, Power
6. Prejudice, Discrimination, Racism
7. Migration
8. Identity/Diversity
9. Multiple Perspectives
10. Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
Reprinted with permission from Banks et al. (2005)
resolution through consideration of fairness and morality, and inclusion of devel-

opmental moral discussion in the curriculum” (Kohlberg et al. 1975).
A lot of work must be done in nations around the world before most teachers
actualize democracy and social justice in their curricula, attitudes, expectations, and
behaviors (Banks 2009). Multicultural democratic nations need to find ways to help
students develop balanced and thoughtful attachments and identifications with their
cultural community, their nation, and with the global community. In some cases,
such as in the European Union and in parts of Asia, it is also important for citizens
to develop a regional identification. Nation-states have generally failed to help
students develop a delicate balance of identifications. Rather, they have given
priority to national identifications and have neglected the community cultures of
students as well as the knowledge and skills students need to function in an
interconnected global world.
Nussbaum (2002) worries that a focus on nationalism will prevent students from
developing a commitment to cosmopolitan values such as human rights and social
justice, values that transcend national boundaries, cultures, and times. She argues
that educators should help students develop cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitans view
82 J.A. Banks
themselves as citizens of the world. Nussbaum states that their “allegiance is to the
worldwide community of human beings” (p. 4). Nussbaum (2002) contrasts cos-
mopolitan universalism and internationalism with parochial ethnocentrism and
inward-looking patriotism. She points out, however, that “to be a citizen of the
world one does not need to give up local identifications, which can be a source of
great richness in life” (p. 9).
Appiah (2006), another proponent of cosmopolitanism, also views local iden-
tities as important. He writes
In the final message my father left for me and my sisters, he wrote, “Remember you are
citizens of the world.” But as a leader of the independence movement in what was then the
Gold Coast, he never saw a conflict between local partialities and universal morality—
between being a part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community.
Raised with this father and an English mother, who was both deeply connected to our
family in England and fully rooted in Ghana, where she has now lived for half a century, I
always had a sense of family and tribe that was multiple and overlapping; nothing could
have seemed more commonplace. (p. xviii)
Nationalists and assimilationists in nations throughout the world worry that if

they help students develop identifications and attachments to their cultural com-
munities they will not acquire sufficiently strong attachments and allegiance to the
nation. Kymlicka (2004) states that nationalists have a “zero-sum conception of
identity.” However, identity is multiple, changing, overlapping, and contextual,
rather than fixed and static. The multicultural conception of identity is that citizens
who have clarified and thoughtful attachments to their community cultures, lan-
guages, and values are more likely than citizens who are stripped of their cultural
attachments to develop reflective identifications with their nation-state (Banks
2004b; Kymlicka 2004). They will also be better able to function as effective
citizens in the global community. Nation-states, however, must make structural
changes that reduce structural inequality and that legitimize and give voice to the
hopes, dreams, and visions of their marginalized citizens in order for them to
develop strong and clarified commitments to the nation and its goals.
The Development of Cultural, National, Regional,

and Global Identifications
Assimilationist notions of citizenship are ineffective today because of the deepening

diversity throughout the world and the quests by marginalized groups for cultural
recognition and rights. Multicultural citizenship and cultural democracy are
essential in today’s global age (Kymlicka 1995). These concepts recognize and
legitimize the right and need of citizens to maintain commitments both to their
cultural communities and to the national civic culture. Citizens must be structurally
included within their nation in order to develop a strong allegiance and commitment
to it.
Fig. 6.1 Cultural, national, regional, and global identifications
Students should develop a delicate balance of cultural, national, regional, and

global identifications and allegiances (see Fig. 6.1). These four identifications are
highly interrelated, complex, and contextual. Citizenship education should help
students to develop thoughtful and clarified identifications with their cultural
communities, nation-states, and regions (Banks 2004b). It should also help them to
develop clarified global identifications and deep understandings of their roles in the
world community. Students need to understand how life in their cultural commu-
nities, nations, and regions influences other regions and nations and the cogent
influence that international events have on their daily lives. Global education should
have as major goals helping students to develop understandings of the interde-
pendence among nations in the world today, clarified attitudes toward other nations,
and reflective identifications with the world community. I conceptualize global
identification similar to the way in which Nussbaum (2002) defines
cosmopolitanism.
Non-reflective and unexamined cultural attachments may prevent the develop-
ment of a cohesive nation with clearly defined national goals and policies (Banks
2004b). Although we need to help students develop reflective and clarified cultural
84 J.A. Banks
identifications, they must also be helped to clarify their identifications with their
nation-states. However, blind nationalism may prevent students from developing
reflective and positive global identifications. Nationalism and national attachments
in most nations are strong and tenacious. An important aim of citizenship education
should be to help students develop global identifications. They also need to develop
a deep understanding of the need to take action as citizens of the global community
to help solve the world’s difficult global problems. Cultural, national, regional, and
global experiences and identifications are interactive and interrelated in a dynamic
way (Banks 2004b).
A nation-state that alienates and does not structurally include all cultural groups
into the national culture runs the risk of creating alienation and causing groups to
focus on specific concerns and issues rather than on the overarching goals and
policies of the nation-state. To develop reflective cultural, national, regional, and
global identifications, students must acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills
needed to function within and across diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and
religious groups.
I have argued that students should develop a delicate balance of cultural,
national, regional, and global identifications and allegiances. I conceptualize global
identification in a way that includes cosmopolitanism, social justice, and human
rights. I believe that cultural, national, regional, and global identifications are
interrelated in a developmental way, and that students cannot develop thoughtful
and clarified national identifications until they have reflective and clarified cultural
identifications; and that they cannot develop a global or cosmopolitan identification
until they have acquired a reflective national identification.
Students from racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups
that have historically experienced institutionalized discrimination, racism, or other
forms of marginalization often have a difficult time accepting and valuing their own
cultural heritages. Teachers should be aware of and sensitive to the stages of
cultural development that all of their students—including mainstream students,
ethnic minority students, and other marginalized groups of students—are experi-
encing and facilitate their identity development.
I have developed a Stages of Cultural Development Typology which teachers can
use when trying to help students attain higher stages of cultural development and to
develop clarified cultural, regional, national, and global identifications (see
Fig. 6.2) (Banks 2006). I believe that students need to reach Stage 3 of this
typology, Cultural Identity Clarification, before we can expect them to embrace
other cultural groups, attain thoughtful and clarified national and global identifi-
cations, and internalize human rights values. The typology is an ideal-type concept.
Consequently, it does not describe the actual identity development of any particular
individual. Rather, it is a framework for thinking about and facilitating the identity
development of students who approximate one of the stages.
During Stage 1—Cultural Psychological Captivity— individuals internalize the
negative stereotypes and beliefs about their cultural groups that are institutionalized
within the larger society and may exemplify cultural self-rejection and low
self-esteem. Cultural encapsulation and cultural exclusiveness, and the belief that
Fig. 6.2 The stages of cultural identity: a typology. Copyright © (2009) by James A. Banks
their ethnic group is superior to others, characterize stage 2—Cultural

Encapsulation. Often individuals within this stage have newly discovered their
cultural consciousness and try to limit participation to their cultural group. They
have ambivalent feelings about their cultural group and try to confirm, for them-
selves, that they are proud of it. In Stage 3—Cultural Identity Clarification—
individual are able to clarify their personal attitudes and cultural identity and to
develop clarified positive attitudes toward their cultural group. In this stage, cultural
pride is genuine rather than contrived. Individual within Stage 4—Biculturalism—
have a healthy sense of cultural identity and the psychological characteristics to
participate successfully in their own cultural community as well as in another
cultural community. They also have a strong desire to function effectively in two
cultures.
Stage 5 individuals (Multiculturalism and Reflective Nationalism) have clarified,
reflective, and positive personal, cultural, regional, and national identifications and
86 J.A. Banks
positive attitudes toward other racial, cultural, ethnic groups, and religious groups.
At Stage 6—Globalism and Global Competency—individuals have reflective and
clarified national, regional, and global identifications, and internalize human rights
values. They have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to function effec-
tively within their own cultural communities, within other cultures within their
nation-state, in the civic culture of their nation, in their region, as well as in the
global community. Individuals within Stage 6 exemplify cosmopolitanism, believe
that people around the world should have human rights, and have a commitment to
work to attain those rights. The primary commitment of cosmopolitan individuals is
to justice, not to any particular human community (Gutmann 2004).
Strong, positive, and clarified cultural identifications and attachments are a
prerequisite to cosmopolitan beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, and the internalization
of human rights values. We must nurture, support, and affirm the identities of
students from marginalized cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups if we
expect them to endorse national values, become cosmopolitans, internalize human
rights values, and work to make their local communities, nation, region, and the
world more just and humane.
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Part II
National/Local Dynamics
in Multicultural Education
Chapter 7
Harmony and Multicultural Education
in Singapore
Li-Ching Ho
Multicultural education varies greatly in different countries because the social and
political norms of a given community and the different historical trajectories of
nations greatly affect curricular decisions, content, and values (Morris and Cogan
2001; Oommen 2004). Within many countries, furthermore, the definition, purpose,
and enactment of multicultural education has been greatly contested because
embedded within multicultural education are highly contentious issues, such as the
role of minorities, immigrants, national identity, and boundaries of the nation-state.
This chapter explores how Singapore, a young heterogeneous country with a history
of ethnic and religious conflict, approaches multicultural citizenship education. The
Singapore national curriculum is particularly interesting because of its emphasis on
harmony and its attempt to move beyond the traditional focus on national multi-
cultural issues and tensions. In this chapter, I critically examine the approach
toward multicultural citizenship education adopted by the Singapore government
through an analysis of national curriculum documents and texts, and semi-
structured interviews with students from three secondary schools.
Multicultural Education in Different Contexts
The definition, conceptualization, and enactment of multicultural education cannot

be divorced from wider historical and socio-political contexts because terms, such
as culture and multicultural are defined very differently from one national context to
another (Sleeter 2010). In general, multicultural education within the US context
has focused primarily on four foundational principles: cultural pluralism; social
L.-C. Ho (&)
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
e-mail: lho6@wisc.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_7
92 L.-C. Ho
justice and the elimination of prejudice and discrimination; cultural affirmation in

teaching and learning; and academic equity, and excellence for all students (Bennett
2001). Multicultural education, in contrast, is constructed very differently and
serves very different purposes in other national contexts. In South Korea, multi-
cultural education is defined largely in terms of assimilating non-Korean minorities
into mainstream Korean society by, either intentionally or not, requiring them to
give up their culture and language (Hong 2010; Kang 2010). In Japan, the term
“multicultural living-together” is frequently used by government authorities instead
of multicultural education because it emphasizes “peaceful coexistence of differ-
ences and social harmony” (Hirasawa 2009, p. 165). Multicultural education in
Japan is also emblematic of a controversy over the position of foreign nationals, and
the assimilative and socializing role of education (Murphy-Shigematsu 2004).
Globalization, in addition, has resulted in substantial increases in the transna-
tional movement of capital, ideas, people, technologies, and products (Ong 1999;
Sassen 1998, 2001). Worldwide developments such as migration and increasing
diversity have also resulted in debates over how nation-states can construct an
overarching set of common goals and ideals for citizens while recognizing diverse
perspectives (Banks 2008). Millions of people, for instance, move across borders
and possess multiple citizenships, commitments, and identifications. Studies of
Palestinian-American youth, for example, suggest that young people possess
complex and evolving transnational identities. The youths see themselves as
members of three communities—the United States, the Palestinian-American, and
the Palestine communities (El-Haj 2007). Conversely, large numbers of people are
disenfranchised and prevented from being citizens of their country of residence
(Castles 2004). Consequently, these concerns have raised complex questions about
citizenship, identities, and education.
In order to address these questions, states frequently utilize subjects such as
social studies to promote a particular vision of the nation-state, identity building,
and the creation of a sense of historical consciousness. Political leaders regularly
construct and modify stories and narratives in order to construct a form of social
reality and provide a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future
(Anderson 2003; Byman 2000; Gellner 2006). These narratives are then incorpo-
rated into education systems that have traditionally been used to promote or
legitimize national historical traditions, symbols, and values (Smith 1991;
Hobsbawm 1994). In the US, for example, the narrative of progress dominates the
history curriculum (Barton and Levstik 2004). The Singapore government, in
contrast, has constructed a narrative of national vulnerability and multicultural
harmony (Sim and Ho 2010).
The Singapore state’s focus on multicultural harmony is premised largely on
Confucian ideas and values. Confucian societies, for example, generally place great
emphasis on the goals of the collective. Consequently, membership of a community
provides an all-important context within which an individual operates. Ames
(1997), for instance, writes: “A human being is not what one is; it is what one does
in one’s relations with other doers” (p. 195). An individual’s rights, duties, and
7 Harmony and Multicultural Education in Singapore 93
responsibilities can therefore only be defined within the context of that individual’s
social roles and networks. This is because Confucianism recognizes rights attached
to individuals in specific social positions and not as autonomous and independent
beings. In a harmonious society, therefore, negotiation, mediation, and achieving
consensus, are generally preferred over direct confrontation because mutual
adjustment and accommodation is seen as a more productive way of solving
conflict between cultures. Tu (1996), for example, writes:
Consensus as a preferred way of decision-making, negotiation as a conventional method of
resolving conflict, informal arbitration as a frequent substitute for formal legal procedures,
and as a last resort, the common practice of mediation through third parties other than direct
confrontation between rivals are all symptomatic of an overriding concern for group
solidarity. (p. 27)
However, Li (2006) makes the case that the harmony does not always imply
passivity, meekness, or an avoidance of conflict. While Confucianism does promote
the values of unity and duty to the community, it also does not require unthinking
obedience and deference to authority (Angle 2008). In fact, diversity and differ-
ences of opinion are, according to Li (2006), actually necessary for the development
of a harmonious society.
Harmony and Public Policy in Singapore
Singapore is a relatively young nation-state with a very diverse population con-

sisting of mostly of first, second, and third-generation immigrants from China,
India, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Singapore’s resident population of 3.7
million consists of Chinese (74.1 %), Malays (13.4 %), Indians (9.2 %), and other
racial groups (3.3 %) (Department of Statistics 2010). From its inception, the young
state was faced with challenges to its existence, including high levels of unem-
ployment, as well as racial and religious riots between the Chinese majority and the
Malay minority. Despite the Singapore government’s attempts to implement
policies premised on the principles of economic pragmatism, multiracialism, and
meritocracy, these tensions between the national and the global, and unity and
diversity remain highly relevant.
The preferential migration and racially based policies instituted by the British
colonial administration greatly influenced racial relations in Singapore (Hefner
2001). The British divided the different ethnic groups into separate enclaves, such
as Chinatown for the Chinese, Kampong Glam for the Malays, and Serangoon Road
for the Indians, with each community having its own social structure, leadership,
and organizations (Lai 2004). The British also assigned the different racial groups to
specialized economic positions ranging from agriculture to the opium trade and, in
doing so, established and reinforced the distinction between indigenous
Malayo-Indonesian “children of the soil” (bumiputera) and the nonindigenous
others, including Indians and Chinese (Barr and Low 2005). This polarization was
94 L.-C. Ho
further exacerbated by the segregated vernacular school system run largely by

ethnic or religious organizations. Multicultural policy in Singapore has also been
greatly impacted by two episodes of racial tensions–the Maria Hertogh riots in 1950
and the Prophet Muhammad birthday riots in 1964. The Maria Hertogh riots
originated from a custody battle between the Malay-Muslim foster mother and the
Dutch-Christian biological mother of 13-year-old Maria Bertha Hertogh. The
resulting riots caused the loss of 18 lives (Ganesan 2004). The Prophet Muhammad
Birthday riots occurred in 1964 and involved a Malay procession that marked the
Prophet’s birthday.
The postcolonial Singapore government has therefore consistently implemented
policies aimed at promoting multicultural harmony through major developmental
programs, such as public housing and national education. Numerous scholars such
as Hill (2000), however, contend that the Singapore government introduced
Confucian values and the concept of harmony to suppress political dissent and to
legitimize their authoritarian style. The state has also been extremely proactive in
managing potentially emotive racial and religious issues such as the 2002 tudung
(headscarf) issue. This involved the parents of four Malay-Muslim girls who
insisted that their daughters should wear the Islamic headscarf to public school.
Consequently, the school suspended the three girls for not wearing the prescribed
school uniform (Ganesan 2004). In response to the furor, the Singapore government
argued that the public school should be a neutral and common space for all racial
groups and asserted that all public school children should conform to the school’s
dress code (Lee 2003). In addition, the Singapore government has used legal
instruments, such as the Sedition Act, the Internal Security Act, and the
Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act to limit racially or religiously intolerant
remarks or behavior. In 2005, the state prosecuted three bloggers who wrote dis-
paraging comments about Malay-Muslims in their blogs. Similarly, in 2009, an
evangelical Christian couple attempting to proselytize was convicted and jailed for
distributing pamphlets that characterized Islam and Catholicism as false religions
(Neo 2011).
These state imposed values and principles also serve as a basis for the devel-
opment of an overarching national identity, expressed in policies such as the
National Shared Values and National Education. Both policies emphasize values
such as harmony, consensus, and national unity. The national Shared Values, for
example, includes statements such as racial and religious harmony, “consensus not
conflict,” and “nation before community and society above self” (Parliament of
Singapore 1991, n.p.). Similarly, the second National Education message reads:
“We must preserve racial and religious harmony: We value our diversity and are
determined to stay a united people” (Singapore Ministry of Education 2007). In
addition, the Singapore government has consciously sought to reinforce the
importance of social harmony and integration in schools. Dr Aline Wong (2000),
the Senior Minister of State for Education, for example, argued that Singapore’s
future as a country depends on national cohesion and stability. Educators should,
according to Dr Wong, inculcate in students “the core national values and social
instincts so that they will remain committed to the country while being members of
the global community” (n.p.). Since 1997, therefore, the Singapore state has
attempted to incorporate the key elements of National Education into the official
school curriculum.
Research Method
This study was conducted in two parts. First, I analyzed documents such as the
official syllabi produced by the Curriculum Planning and Development division of
the Singapore Ministry of Education, two official textbooks, and the teacher’s
guides to provide the context for the study and triangulate the data. Second,
utilizing a qualitative instrumental case study framework (Creswell 1998, 2003;
Miles and Huberman 1994; Stake 1995; Yin 1989), I conducted semi-structured
student interviews at three Singapore secondary schools over the course of one
school term (10 weeks).
Considerations of representation, balance, variety, and accessibility, affected the
selection of cases (Stake 1995). For this study, I selected three Secondary Three
Social Studies classes in three government secondary schools identified by their
pseudonyms, Putih Secondary, Kuning Secondary, and Biru Secondary. These sites
were purposefully selected based on the schools’ national academic ranking, racial
composition, gender distribution, and access. All three selected classes were from
the Express academic track because this contained the largest proportion of
students. Based on the schools’ academic ranking, Kuning Secondary and Putih
Secondary represented the middle and lowest tiers respectively, while Biru
Secondary represented the top tier of schools. Kuning Secondary had a student
population that was largely representative of the racial population distribution in
Singapore while Putih Secondary had an above average proportion (45 %) of
Malay students. The third school, Biru Secondary, had an above average proportion
of Chinese students (more than 90 %).
For all three schools, I asked the Social Studies teacher to select nine students
that were representative of the gender and racial make-up of the class. With the
social studies teachers’ help, 24 students (11 male and 13 female) participated in the
interviews. In total, seven students from Kuning Secondary, eight from Putih
Secondary, and nine from Biru Secondary were interviewed. Sixteen of the par-
ticipants identified themselves as Chinese, four as Malay, and four as Indian.
During the semi-structured individual interviews, the students answered a series of
questions focusing on their conceptions of citizenship, the roles of citizens and the
meaning of citizenship.
96 L.-C. Ho
Harmony and Multicultural Education in Singapore
Given the historical legacy of ethnic and religious discord, the Singapore govern-
ment has consistently accorded great priority to the promotion of social cohesion
and harmony. The Singapore government considers multicultural issues essential to
social studies primarily because the government sees social cohesion as a necessary
precondition for economic development, political stability, and the survival of the
nation-state. This instrumental understanding of the purpose of multicultural edu-
cation has been constantly reiterated in state documents and official statements
made by government ministers. For example, Dr Aline Wong (2000), the Senior
Minister of State for Education, asserted in a speech that there was a greater need
for Singapore to maintain and sustain interracial harmony, intercultural under-
standing, national cohesion, and political stability as a country in a borderless
world.
The social studies curriculum for the majority of the students in secondary
schools is organized around the two core ideas – “Being Rooted” and “Living
Global.” The curriculum emphasizes concepts such as harmony and social cohe-
sion, and draws on numerous international examples and case studies to illustrate
these concepts. Notably, the curriculum also emphasizes the global interconnect-
edness and interdependence of nation-states, the need to adapt to the changing
world environment, and the development of responsible citizens with a global
perspective (Singapore Ministry of Education 2008, p. 3). The theme of national
survival and security is also constantly reiterated throughout the secondary social
studies course. The national social studies curriculum and textbooks regularly
highlight the citizen’s responsibility to promote racial and religious harmony, social
cohesion, and meritocracy in order to ensure the survival of the country (Ho 2009).
The unit titled “Conflict and harmony in multi-ethnic societies,” for example,
explicitly promotes social cohesion and uses this overarching question as a guide,
“Why is harmony in a multi-ethnic society important to the development and
viability of a nation?” (p. 11). Harmony is therefore, perceived to be useful because
it helped to manage diversity, avoid conflict, and consequently, ensure the survival
of the nation-state.
Moving away from the conventional strategy of emphasizing national examples
of ethnic and religious conflict, this curriculum draws attention to two case studies
of nations faced with internal strife - Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland. The causes
and consequences of these conflicts are explored, with the explicit intention of
drawing parallels to the Singapore situation and highlighting the importance of
shared values, such as harmony, respect, empathy, appreciation of differences, and
commitment. The Social Studies unit begins with this statement, “Differences
among people can also cause a society to fall apart” (Singapore Ministry of
Education 2007, p. 93) and goes on to cite examples of historical, political, and
social factors that undermined social cohesion and prevented the building of
common understanding in both societies. The authors place great emphasis on the
systemic and structural discrimination faced by the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the
Catholics in Northern Ireland. In the section titled “Why are the Sinhalese and
Tamils in conflict?” the textbook highlights numerous examples of policies that
appeared to discriminate against the Tamil minority. Similarly, in the case study of
Northern Ireland, the textbook points out the absence of a meritocratic system of
employment. The curriculum, in addition, emphasizes the economic consequences
of these conflicts by highlighting how both foreign and domestic investors were
discouraged from investing in the country resulting in high levels of
unemployment:
The case studies of Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland show us that it is important for people of
different races and religions to live in harmony. Conflict between people of different races
and religions destroys lives, homes and property. Everyone suffers. (pp. 130–131)
In the next chapter titled “Bonding Singapore,” the authors emphasize the
neutral, color-blind, and equitable nature of the Singapore system. The chapter also
reiterates the lessons of the past and reminds students about past instances of racial
conflict such as the 1964 race riots. The text focuses on the importance of managing
perceptions of different racial and religious groups, as well as the need to prevent
discord and division by strengthening social bonds and being vigilant in identifying
“threats” (p. 156). The Secondary Three Social Studies textbook also clearly
emphasizes the meritocratic state policies in Singapore:
The policy of multi-racialism promotes equality among the races, with no special rights
granted to any particular racial or religious group … Favouring a certain group of people
because of their race or religion is prohibited by the Constitution. (p. 145)
The textbook, in addition, lists other measures introduced by the state to manage
diversity, including the daily national flag raising ceremony in schools, the policy of
bilingualism, safeguarding the interests of minority groups, and developing com-
mon space through activities organized by grassroots organizations and schools.
Paralleling the state’s emphasis on multicultural harmony, a majority of students
argued that it was very important for Singapore citizens to promote “racial har-
mony” and to have knowledge of examples of racial conflict in Singapore’s history.
The students provided different reasons, including the importance of having equi-
table laws and processes, and not discriminating against minorities. For example,
Enling, a Chinese girl from Kuning Secondary, explained: “The event can teach us
that there must be racial harmony, and that it is important to be fair and impartial.”
Cheralyn, a Chinese girl from Putih Secondary, also made the same argument:
“This is important because it shows how racial discrimination causes conflicts, riots
and stuff … (and) destroys harmony between races.”
Numerous students, in addition, referred to these historical examples as lessons
for Singapore citizens to avoid actions or words that could harm social harmony.
For instance, Siti, a Malay girl from Putih Secondary, stated that it was important
for citizens to learn about the race riots because “they should know that the riots last
time, and how we are like right now, the difference between it, and … hopefully
that it will not happen again.” Interestingly, the majority of the students also
appeared to share the textbook’s position that the diverse Singapore population was
98 L.-C. Ho
a problem that had to be “managed” by the state and only two students felt that it
was an attribute worth embracing and celebrating.
During the interviews, nearly half of the students explicitly compared
Singapore’s geopolitical situation to that of other countries, including Britain,
Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka. The students demonstrated a keen awareness of
global issues and many were able to draw parallels to similar issues in Singapore.
For instance, Constance, an expressive Chinese girl from Biru Secondary, was able
to make an explicit link between the racial riots in Singapore and conflict in other
countries.
This racial tension between Chinese and Malays led to racial riots… these two groups are
something like what we learnt in… Social Studies. It’s like Tamil Tigers and the people in
Northern Ireland.
Her classmate, Junhui, added that the conflict in both countries “serves as a
reminder to Singaporeans not to be separated, or else we will be like these two
countries.” Likewise, Charlene compared the situation in Singapore to that of
Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka, noting that “although other countries have blacks
and whites, but in Singapore, (we are) all living together, (and) not fighting, like
Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka.” The comments made by Constance, Charlene, and
Junhui suggest that these students were acutely aware of different causes and
consequences of ethnic and religious tensions occurring in different national con-
texts and this understanding, consequently, affected their own perspectives of the
importance of social cohesion and multicultural harmony in Singapore.
Concluding Considerations
This study offers multicultural education scholars and teacher educators an

opportunity to better understand some of the ways in which multicultural education
is defined and conceptualized in non-Western countries. In general, the findings of
this study support Wu and Han’s (2010) contention that East Asian understandings
of multiculturalism are significantly different from how it is conceptualized in North
America. Instead of equity, the participants in this study placed a great emphasis on
harmony—defined largely in terms of membership of a community and decision-
making based on compromise and consensus – as a primary goal of multicultural
education. Notably, the concept of harmony has not been conventionally regarded
as a central goal for education, particularly in countries without a Confucian
tradition. Nor is the concept of harmony addressed in any substantive way in
discourses of multicultural education prevalent in North America or Europe.
The Singapore curriculum’s explicit links between multicultural and global ci-
tizenship education and its emphasis on the concept of harmony across national and
international case studies is also particularly useful, especially for nations struggling
to address group differences and affiliations. By making connections between local
and world events, the curriculum is able to help students perceive the world as
interrelated systems (Kirkwood 2001). The findings of this study, for instance,
suggest that the students recognized the importance of harmonious relations for
different countries and believed that it was their responsibility as citizens to
maintain social cohesion and promote diversity in Singapore.
The findings, however, also strongly suggest that the curriculum needs to focus
more on developing in students a critical understanding of global political, eco-
nomic, and social structures and issues, and to allow space for students to discuss
controversial public issues. The existing social studies curriculum lacks
counter-narratives and condenses these highly controversial and contentious inter-
national case studies into a simple linear narrative (Ho 2009). Notably, the inter-
views revealed that in spite of the prescriptive curriculum and the dominant national
narrative, several students, including Jack, Claudine, and Priya, questioned the
existence of harmony in Singapore society. “Is there actually racial harmony?”
Jack, a 15-year-old Chinese student asked during focus group discussion with
several of his Malay and Sikh classmates. In her interview, Claudine also echoed
Jack’s question: “Singapore is very good at covering up… I won’t say Singapore is
totally racial harmony.” There were, however, few opportunities for them to raise
these concerns in class. Furthermore, despite the numerous examples of structural
and institutional discrimination against the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Catholics in
Northern Ireland, none of the students appeared to be aware of any examples of
systemic or structural discrimination faced by minorities in Singapore. The students
focused exclusively on individual instances of racial prejudice and spoke of the
need for citizens not to discriminate against their fellow citizens. None of the
students made any reference to institutional causes of racial tension in Singapore
but instead chose to emphasize the meritocratic ideal promulgated by the Singapore
state.
Finally, the presence of a summative, high-stakes written exam at the end of the
social studies program constrains meaningful citizenship education as this hinders
teachers’ ability to select curricular content that meets students’ needs (Mathison
et al. 2006). Studies, for example, suggest that in Singapore social studies class-
rooms, there is a clear focus on teaching to the test and this inhibits in-depth and
thoughtful examination of controversial social issues (Ho 2010). Students, in
addition, do not have the opportunity to conduct an in-depth exploration of the
nuances of these highly relevant social and political issues because of the lack of
curriculum time.
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Yin, R. K. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods (Rev edition). Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications.
Chapter 8
Moving Beyond a Monotype Education
in Turkey: Major Reforms in the Last
Decade and Challenges Ahead
Zafer Çelik, Sedat Gümüş and Bekir S. Gür
Educational researchers and policy-makers all over the world have paid increased
attention to multicultural education in recent decades. This is because of the
changing social environment associated with, for example, the increasing number
of minorities/refugees in many developed countries, the renewed importance of
international economic relations, and the wider spread of cosmopolitan citizenship
as an important educational goal (see Banks; Cha, Ham and Yang; Ramirez,
Bromley and Russell, all in this volume). Indeed, multicultural education has, in no
small measures, emerged as a response to social dynamics induced by globalization
and democratization movements, and become one of the highly discussed education
trends in developed countries in particular. The understanding of multicultural
education is based on a hypothesis that students from some social groups and
cultures are disadvantaged in the current school systems, and defends the necessity
of restructuring schools in a way to provide equal opportunity to all students of
different genders, social classes, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures (Banks 2013).
Bennett (1999) states that multicultural education is a learning–teaching approach
that relies on democratic values, aiming to support social and intellectual devel-
opments of all students in societies cohabitated by different cultures.
Although most researchers have asserted that multicultural education is a
necessity for the countries populated with social–cultural diversities, there are also
others who see multicultural education as a threat. In many countries, particularly
nationalist circles assume that people of different social groups will be less com-
mitted to their host countries and the dominant culture if they remain attached to
their own cultural identities. However, advocates of multicultural education assert
that strong cultural identities will help people to integrate with the society they live
Z. Çelik B.S. Gür

Yildirim Beyazit University, Ankara, Turkey
S. Gümüş (&)
Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, Turkey
e-mail: gumussed@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_8
104 Z. Çelik et al.
in, and therefore, they will become better citizens (Banks 2008). In this context,
Banks (1999) argues that the melting pot metaphor frequently referred to in the past
is not much valid in defining cultural pluralism anymore, but instead the salad bowl
metaphor is in conformity with today’s world. The salad bowl metaphor empha-
sizes living together without ignoring the cultures and values of subgroups.
Turkey is a multicultural society that has hosted so many different cultural
groups throughout the history. The Ottoman Empire became a shelter to myriads of
ethnic and religious identities for centuries. The establishment of modern Turkey
followed a period of a multinational empire deprived of national identity and
awareness. Nonetheless, through bold reforms, leaders of the Republic tried to
create a rather monotype homogenous national identity. In order to do this, they
developed a new language and understanding of history, both of which were pro-
mulgated via educational institutions and media (Ahmad 1993; Lewis 2001;
Zurcher 2004). With reference to education, an understanding of homogenizing
different cultures and identities—even to a degree of denying other cultures—
dominated the society from the post-Republic period to the very recent past.
Although discussions about multiculturalism have been held in Turkey since the
1990s in line with the global trends, discussions about multiculturalism in education
have particularly come to the forefront in the 2000s. The main reason is that the
reformist Justice and Development Party (AK Party) coming to power in 2002 has
embarked upon many significant democratic transformations in education (Çelik
and Gür 2013). As we focus on it in detail below, significant steps have been taken
for the democratization of the education system, and therefore, the inclusion of
differences recently. Nonetheless, the legal framework, which defines the education
system in Turkey, considerably preserves its monotypical and monocultural
structure.
In this chapter, a general assessment of the education system in Turkey is made
from a multicultural perspective. With a focus on the developments in the last
decade, challenges in and expectations from Turkey’s education system are also
presented in the context of multiculturalism. First, we discuss the centralist and
monocultural structure of the education system in Turkey. We define monocultural
education system with three different domains: ethnolinguistic domain, religious
domain, and cultural domain (i.e., heavy emphasis on Atatürkism, nationalistic and
militarist discourse, exclusionary and discriminatory approach toward the
non-Turkish). We also discuss how multicultural education in Turkey has been
developing within the last decade by the implementation of new legislative reforms.
These reforms lead to the decline in monocultural understanding of education and
help development of multicultural education. Furthermore, we have tried to show
that how these legislative reforms reflected on the curriculum and textbooks. For
this aim, we have mostly benefited from existing studies on Turkish curriculum and
textbooks. We also sometimes refer directly to current textbooks to further sub-
stantiate our claim.
8 Moving Beyond a Monotype Education in Turkey … 105
Centralization and Monoculturalism
The structure of Turkish education system has been quite centralized. As a result,
involvement of local administrations and schools in decision-making processes is
very limited. From financing schools to appointments and rotation of teachers, from
curricula to textbooks, all major issues are centrally determined by the Ministry
National of Education. Moreover, placements of all secondary school students are
done centrally in accordance with a new implementation that has been launched in
2014. Similarly, students are selected and placed in higher education institutions
through national exams. The centralist structure of the education system in Turkey
is seen clearly when compared to that of the other countries. For instance, the PISA
2012 survey examines the decision-making processes in the participating countries
and it is seen that Turkey has a more central structure of education than almost all of
the other participating countries. The data obtained in the PISA 2012 survey
indicate that Turkish schools have almost no control over the employments and
layoffs of teachers; besides, school administrators have too little to say about the use
of school budgets. In the same vein, (together with Greece) Turkey is ranked at the
bottom among the participant countries in terms of schools’ autonomy in preparing
curricula and making evaluations (OECD 2013).
Excessive centralization of the education system in Turkey has also been
mentioned in international reports (OECD 2007; World Bank 2005). In addition, it
was emphasized in numerous official documents in the country that the transfer of
authority to provinces and schools are needed to choose their own teachers and
make their own curricula (e.g., 60. Hükümet Programı 2007; DPT 2000, 2006;
Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı 2009). Despite all these recommendations and projects
implemented, the Ministry of National Education has not shared the
decision-making and administrative authority. Curricula and textbooks are still
examined and approved by the Ministry. The list of courses to be offered is also
determined by the Ministry. Schools are not allowed to add or strike out courses
from the lists. Moreover, weekly hours of each course on these lists are fixed;
schools cannot have more or less of the weekly hours.
Why does the centralization, to the contrary of the trends and applications
around the world, still stand strong in Turkey—not a small country with a popu-
lation of 77 million? Because it is often considered that the central decisions pro-
vide more equality and justice, and prevent nepotism and clientelism. In addition to
this, the center’s distrust toward the locals about their capability and some political
fears (such as separation) keep the centralization alive. Lastly, the center’s
unwillingness to share its power is another factor for the continuation of centralist
policies (Çelik 2012). However, the excessively centralist education system, as is,
prevents different applications and restricts the understanding of multicultural
education to meet different needs of the locals as part of the education system.
In an examination of the education system in Turkey with regard to its founding
documents, i.e., the Constitution and laws regulating the education system, it is seen
that Turkish education system is based on a monocultural understanding.
A monocultural education is one in which pedagogical policies and curriculums are

representative of the dominant culture (Nieto 1994). The education system in
Turkey has a mono-typical and monocultural structure, and mostly excludes reli-
gious, cultural, and ethnolinguistic differences. It is emphasized in the Constitution,
the highest norm regulating education in Turkey, that education and teaching
should be based on modern science and education principles in accordance with
“Atatürk’s Principles and Revolutions” under the supervision of the State. It is also
stressed in the same article of the Constitution that even private schools abide by the
same principles. While millions of Kurds, Arabs, and other ethnicities whose
mother tongues are not Turkish live in Turkey (Ethnologue 2015); according to the
Constitution, the language of education is cited as Turkish and other languages
cannot be taught in schools as mother tongues.
In the Basic Law of National Education, the main purpose of education is given,
in accordance with the Constitution, as:
To raise all individuals of the Turkish nation as citizens; who are loyal to Atatürk’s
Principles and Revolutions, and to the Atatürk’s Nationalism as cited in the Constitution;
who adopt, protect and develop national, moral, human, spiritual and cultural values of the
Turkish nation; who love and always elevate their families, homeland and nation; who are
aware of their responsibilities and duties towards the Republic of Turkey, as a laic,
democratic and social state governed by the rule of law, based on human rights and main
principles given in the Preamble of the Constitution. (Milli Eğitim Temel Kanunu 1973)
This law stresses the awareness of democracy and citizenship. However, it is

stated that education shall be provided within certain limits: “Political and ideo-
logical inculcations against the Atatürk Nationalism, which is cited in the
Constitution, and involvement in such daily political incidents and discussions
cannot be allowed in educational institutions.” (Milli Eğitim Temel Kanunu 1973).
The main purpose of education is often referred to as “the Atatürk Nationalism,”
without any discussions or criticisms. Besides, notions such as Turkish Culture and
Turkish Nation are regarded as homogenous in the Constitution and in educational
institutions; and no reference is made to the cultures of local or different social
groups. In short, significant ethnolinguistic restrictions are found in the legal
documents of the education system.
As for private schools, it is underlined that general principles and guidelines
should be in harmony with that of public schools. In addition to private schools run
by Turkish citizens, there seem to be three different categories defined in the Private
Education Law: (1) Private schools opened by foreigners who do not have Turkish
citizenship; (2) Minority Schools run by Turkish citizens but belong to minority
groups defined in the Lausanne Treaty (i.e., Greeks, Armenians, and Jews);
(3) International private schools.
Citizens of other countries who reside in Turkey are granted the right to run
private schools in Turkey. Children of Turkish citizens are eligible to attend these
schools, which in principle are subject to procedures that are applied for public
schools. On the other hand, opening and running international private schools
requires permission of the Council of Ministers, and only children of foreign citi-
zens attend international private schools, which are also subject to procedures
applied for public schools. However, curricula and the list of weekly courses may
differ in such schools (Özel Öğretim Kurumları Kanunu 2007).
On the other hand, only children of minorities who hold citizenship of Turkey
attend minority schools. According to the Lausanne Treaty, non-Muslim groups
(i.e., Greeks, Armenians and Jews) are defined as minority in Turkey. The Principle
of Reciprocity is applied for the types of administration in minority schools.
Pursuant to the Lausanne Treaty, practices in minority schools are subject to reg-
ulations in accord with the rights of Turkish minorities living abroad, Greece for
example (Özel Öğretim Kurumları Kanunu 2007). It is also emphasized that cur-
ricula, courses and lists of weekly courses in public schools are applied in minority
schools. The language of a course to be taught, other than Turkish, is determined by
the Ministry in consideration of reciprocal procedures. Also, modifications in
curricula and lists of courses in minority schools are subject to the Ministry’s
permission (Özel Öğretim Kurumları Yönetmeliği 2012).
Therefore, a strong supervision is noticed regarding the type of administration,
curricula and lists of weekly courses applied in all categories of private schools. It is
underlined that curricula and lists of weekly courses to be offered in private schools
should be similar to those applied in public schools. However, it is possible to offer
modified curricula and lists of weekly courses by the permission of the Ministry.
There is also a restriction in the language of teaching. Schools opened by foreigners
have permission to provide education in other languages if Turkish is the language
of education in some of the courses (Özel Öğretim Kurumları Yönetmeliği 2012).
The language of education, whether Turkish or others, is determined by the law:
Turkish is the language of education and no permission is granted to teach some specific
courses in other languages, such as the Revolution History of the Republic of Turkey and
Atatürkism, Turkish Language and Literature, History, Geography, Social Sciences,
Religion and Ethics, and some other courses about Turkish Culture. In the courses men-
tioned, Turkish is the only language students are allowed to do homework, projects and
research in. (Yabancı Dil Eğitimi ve Öğretimi ile Türk Vatandaşlarının Farklı Dil ve
Lehçelerinin Öğrenilmesi Hakkında Kanun 1983)
In short, legal regulations designing a monotype public education system

introduce substantial restrictions on private schools as well. The same regulations
even restrict opening schools based on the culture of the majority in Turkey. For
instance, law restricts opening a private religious school. As a result, restrictions
prevent to meet the demands for religious education and contradict with articles of
international conventions in part. For instance, Article 2 in The European
Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Protocol 1 emphasizes that “the State shall
respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity
with their own religious and philosophical convictions” (Council of Europe 1950).
Similar remarks are also made in many other conventions including the Convention
on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The Convention against Discrimination in
Education and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
stress that the State should have respect for the liberty of parents to choose for their
children schools other than those established by the public authorities, and to ensure
the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own
convictions (The United Nations 1966; UNESCO 1960).
Examples mentioned so far show that the education system in Turkey is his-
torically based on a monotypical understanding. Therefore, various circles have
sternly criticized Turkish education system for not embracing cultural and religious
diversities in the society (e.g., Ayan Ceyhan and Koçbas 2009; Coşkun et al. 2014).
In this context, calls have been made repeatedly for comprehensive reforms in the
education system for a multicultural and multilingual structure more sensitive
toward differences. Although education system in Turkey is constitutionally and
legally based on a monotypical understanding, as we discuss in detail below, we see
a noteworthy progress toward the democratization of the education system in the
last decade.
Developments in the Ethnolinguistic Domain
As aforementioned, non-Muslim minorities defined in the Lausanne Treaty are

allowed to have education in a different language; however, the rights of different
minority groups living in Turkey (Assyrians, and Muslim communities such as
Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, and Lazs) to have education in their own language is
restricted. Article 42 of the Constitution emphasizes that no language other than
Turkish shall be taught as mother tongue to Turkish citizens at any institutions of
training or education. Similarly, the Law on Foreign Language Education and
Teaching, and Learning of Turkish Citizens in Different Languages and Dialects
still includes the clause “no language other than Turkish shall be taught as mother
tongue to Turkish citizens at any institutions of training or education.” An
amendment in the referred law added in 2003 allowed Turkish citizens to exercise
languages and dialects which they conventionally speak in daily life; the learning,
however, should take place in private language courses other than schools. The law
adopts a quite defensive language and states that in such courses education cannot
be in contradiction with the Principles of the Republic and the integrity of the State
and the Country. Minorities in Turkey were clearly restricted from learning their
own languages in public or private schools as a result of the constitutional and legal
procedures (Çeşitli Kanunlarda Değişiklik Yapılmasına İlişkin Kanun 2003).
The initial step has been taken in 2012 to partially meet the demands to exercise
non-Turkish languages in education and to have education in mother tongue in
schools. Accordingly, the Ministry of Education introduced a weekly two-hour
selective course titled the “Living Languages and Dialects.” Therefore, numerous
communities whose mother tongues are non-Turkish (such as Kurds, Circasians,
Lazs, etc.) have gained the right to learn their own language as a selective course.
Since 2012–2013, the course of “Living Languages and Dialects” in middle schools
has been taught in Kurdish (Kurmanchi and Zazaki dialects), Adygean, and
Abkhasian (Çelik et al. 2013). Shortly after, Laz language and Georgian were also
included in the list. In the 2013–2014 academic year, about 43,000 students in 5th
and 6th grades have begun to take the referred languages as selective courses.
On September 30, 2013, the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
announced a critical step in favor of education of different languages and dialects.
Thus, as part of the Democratization Package, education in different languages and
dialects in private schools were allowed. Although the communities who demanded
education in their mother tongue were not satisfied completely (e.g., “BDP’den”
2013; “Anadilde eğitimde” 2014), so far it is the single most important official step
taken to bring the mono-typical structure of Turkish education system to an end. As
it has been cited in the Democratization Package, education in different languages
in private schools has been provided legal guarantee on March 2, 2014:
Opening private schools to teach in different languages and dialects that Turkish citizens
use in daily life is allowed but subject to the statutes of the Private Education Institutions
Law. The language and dialect of teaching and learning in such institutions are determined
by Decrees of the Cabinet. Principles and procedures regarding the opening and supervision
of the referred schools are regulated by the Ministry of Education. (Temel Hak Ve
Hürriyetlerin Geliştirilmesi Amacıyla Çeşitli Kanunlarda Değişiklik Yapılmasına Dair
Kanun 2014)
Three different definitions of language are given in the referred law: Mother tongue,
foreign language, and the “languages and dialects conventionally spoken by
Turkish citizens in their daily lives.” As mentioned above, Article 42 of the
Constitution explicitly bans to teach non-Turkish languages as a mother tongue to
Turkish citizens. Thus, the amendment in the referred law, which may be consid-
ered as education in mother tongue, is defined as “languages and dialects con-
ventionally spoken by Turkish citizens in daily life.” By making an amendment in
the Private Education Institutions regulation in 2014, the Ministry also has stated
that the Council of Ministers shall determine the courses in different languages and
dialects, curricula and the list of weekly courses to be offered (Millî Eğitim
Bakanlığı Özel Öğretim Kurumları Yönetmeliğinde Değişiklik Yapılmasına Dair
Yönetmelik 2014). However, as of early 2015, the Cabinet has not yet determined
the language of education in such courses, neither has it determined when education
in non-Turkish languages nor when education in the second and the official lan-
guage will begin.
Amidst of these changes, how the education in different languages and dialects
are to be carried out has emerged as a critical problem in the second week of
September 2014, the beginning of the new academic year. As in the past, protests
and meetings were held for a week in the regions mostly populated by the Kurdish
community in particular. The protestors called for a week-long boycott in schools,
demanding the elimination of the obstacles for education in Kurdish (“Kürtler
‘anadilde’” 2014). Also, three schools in the southeastern provinces of Diyarbakır,
Cizre, and Hakkari launched the education in Kurdish. These schools, however,
were closed and interned by the Governors’ Offices. The Governor’s Office in
Diyarbakır stated that the schools were interned for the violation of Article 42 in the
Constitution (“Diyarbakırda Kürtçe” 2014). A spate of violent protests was held
against the school closedowns as many schools were set ablaze. The Ministry and
the Government responded that opening the schools in Kurdish in the current
academic year was officially impossible as no application was submitted for
opening a private school by the deadline set as September 1, 2014 (“Nabi Avcı”
2014).
Following the discussions, various civil society organizations supporting edu-
cation in Kurdish prepared the required infrastructure and education process, and
applied for opening a school to provide education in Kurdish (“Kürtçe eğitim”
2014). Following the inspections, the Ministry allowed the schools to be opened
after the elimination of deficiencies. Therefore, a school giving education in
Kurdish was opened in November 2014 at the end of heated debates and tension in
September 2014 (Aslan and Sunar 2014). Currently, however, adequate steps have
not been taken to open schools providing education in different languages and
dialects. A Cabinet decree is needed once the Ministry defines the required prin-
ciples and procedures for education in different languages and dialects.
Developments in the Religious Domain
The matter of multiculturalism in the religious area may be discussed on three basic
topics: (1) Wearing the headscarf in education institutions; (2) Offering different
courses with religious content; and (3) Compulsory “Culture on Religion and Moral
Knowledge” course, and how much the course content reflects the faiths of different
religious sects or religious communities in Turkey. In recent years, these three items
have become the topic of public discussions frequently.
According to the Dress Code Regulation, in effect since 1981, it was mandatory
for students in Turkey to wear school uniforms in all education institutions. One of
the critical points in the regulation was that female students must “attend classes
without wearing headscarf” (Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı ile Diğer Bakanlıklara Bağlı
Okullardaki Görevlilerle Öğrencilerin Kılık Kıyafetlerine ilişkin Yönetmelik 1981).
For years, many liberal and conservative people in Turkey have called for elimi-
nation of this code as it limits the freedom of girls who wear headscarves for
religious reasons. A new dress code was approved on November 27, 2012.
Accordingly, the mandatory requirement to wear school uniforms was eliminated
but the freedom of female students to wear headscarf in schools was still restricted.
A modification in the referred regulation in July 2013 followed public debates over
lifting the requirement for school uniforms. According to this, uniforms may be
allowed in a school only if approved by more than half of the parents. The headscarf
issue remained untouched during the amendments in the bylaw. Following the
public discussions about the regulation restricting headscarf in schools, via another
modification on September 27, 2014, the phrase of “bare headed” in the regulation,
which had effectively banned the headscarf in all middle and high schools, was
crossed out in the blue print. Therefore, students in such schools were granted the
freedom to wear headscarf. However, hair coloring, piercing, tattoos, and growing
beard are still banned in middle and high schools (Millî Eğitim Bakanlığına Bağlı
Okul Öğrencilerinin Kılık ve Kıyafetlerine Dair Yönetmelikte Değişiklik Yapılması

Hakkında Yönetmelik 2014).
As aforementioned, law bans the opening of religious private schools in Turkey.
Article 24 of the Constitution states that religious education is subject to the State’s
supervision in Turkey. The Culture on Religion and Moral Knowledge course,
however, is compulsory in primary and secondary schools. The content of the
course has caused heated debates. In general, it is claimed that such a course is in
violation of the laicism principle of the State and the freedom of religion. Some
citizens, Alevis, who are unorthodox Muslims, in particular, ask for the elimination
of the requirement to take the referred course (The Case of Hasan and Eylem
Zengin v. Turkey 2007).
As a matter of fact, the fundamental issue is not whether having a course on
religion is antidemocratic since similar courses on religion are also offered in many
European countries particularly during the primary education (Eurydice 2012).
Nonetheless, the central issue in Turkey is the referred course’s being compulsory
for all students (except for non-Muslims). Children of atheist families are forced to
take this course as well; this is considered as a problem by these families as far as
the freedom of religion and conscience is concerned. According to a governmental
decree in 1990, non-Muslim students were exempted from compulsory courses on
religion (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı 1990). The requirement for all students, except
non-Muslims, to take Culture on Religion and Moral Knowledge course has caused
objections on many occasions; however, the Ministry rejected these objections.
Afterwards, many citizens filed suits against the State of Turkey on the account of
the fact that the content of such courses imposes Sunni-Islamic belief and the rights
of Alevi families to raise their children in compliance with their own belief and
philosophy.
One of these suits ended up at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In
the referred case, known as Hasan-Eylem-Zengin vs. Turkey, Eylem Zengin’s
father resorted to the Ministry in 2001, asserting that he is entitled to make a
decision for his daughter’s education. He referred to international conventions on
the subject matter and requested his daughter’s exemption from the Culture on
Religion and Moral Knowledge course, claiming that the compulsory course is an
infringement of the principle of laicism. In response to the Zengin Family, the
Ministry referred to Article 24 of the Constitution and Article 12 of the National
Education Basic Law, and rejected the family’s request reasoning that the referred
course is compulsory. As both the upper court and the State Council rejected the
case, and all internal legal attempts failed, the Zengins resorted to the ECHR on
October 9, 2007. The ECHR, in the case, held unanimously that there had been a
violation of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 (right to education) to the European
Convention on Human Rights in the Hasan and Eylem Zengin vs. Turkey case (The
Case of Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey 2007). While the Zengin vs. Turkey
case continued at the ECHR, 14 adherents of the Alevi faith demanded, on June 22,
2005, a change in the content of the compulsory the Culture on Religion and Moral
Knowledge course in schools. The Ministry in response to the referred request
announced that “common moral and religious values of the public at large are given
priority” in textbooks, the programs are based on an approach beyond religious

sects, and information about Alevi-Bektaşi beliefs were also included in the cur-
riculum for different class levels in the 2005–2006 academic year.
Afterwards, a total of 1905 people filed a case at Ankara Administrative Court
for the cancelation of the aforementioned course. The defense council presented six
dossiers, prepared by experts, to prove that the Ministry violated impartiality and
pluralism criteria previously claimed in the content of the course named Culture on
Religion and Moral Knowledge. The court, in return, formed a delegation of three
experts who stated that the six reports submitted to the court were based on the
former curriculum prepared in 2000; however, the new one that was modified in
2005 included common religious and spiritual values, and adopted an approach
beyond religious sects by leaning on the Qur’an and the Sunnah. In the end, the
Court dismissed the case on October 1, 2009, reasoning that the Ministry complied
with the impartiality principle. With the rejection of the appeal, the internal legal
process came to an end on August 2, 2010. In the case, known as the Mansur Yalçın
and Others vs. Turkey, 14 Alevi Turkish citizens resorted to the ECHR on February
2, 2011 and the European court reached the verdict on September 16, 2014 (The
Case of Mansur Yalçın and Others/Turkey 2014).
After considering the claims and the demands of both parties, the ECHR
emphasized a few critical matters and reached the verdict. The ECHR states in the
ruling that “the changes had been chiefly intended to ensure the provision of
information about the various beliefs existing in Turkey, but the main aspects of the
curriculum had not really been overhauled since it focused predominantly on
knowledge of Islam as practiced and interpreted by the majority of the Turkish
population” (The Case of Mansur Yalçın and Others/Turkey 2014). The Court
stated that if the purpose of the course in question is to teach the religion of Islam,
then it should not be compulsory in order to protect the freedom of religion of
children and parents. The ECHR’s ruling clearly summarized the whole process,
relevant discussions, the views of the defendants in particular, and main problems
regarding the matter. As emphasized in the verdict, it is seen that chiefly Sunni
Islam understanding is included in the curriculum and textbooks. Indeed, the
examination of the Culture on Religion and Moral Knowledge textbooks reveals
that only 16 pages out of a total 1086 pages are allocated to Alevi-Bektaşi teachings
in a 9-year span; in other words, only 1.5 % of the textbooks focuses on
Alevi-Bektaşi faith (Çakmakçı 2014). However, the real question is the difficulties
and challenges purposely laid before the exemption from the referred class. Until
now, the Education Ministry and the Government do not wish to take a step toward
the cancelation of such course. It will be seen shortly how Turkey will be affected
by the ECHR’s decision. The most probable outcome seems to be revising the
textbooks and allocating more spaces to Alevi-Bektaşi faith.
Another development in the religious domain in education is the novelties
introduced by the law, publicly known as 4 + 4 + 4, which was passed in 2012. To
understand the importance of this development, some background info would be
useful. The education system in Turkey was pressurized when the military issued a
memorandum to the government during the February 28, 1997 military intervention
period. Immediately after the military intervention, Religious Middle Schools were
closed despite strong public objections. However, Religious Middle Schools were
reopened on the account of the referred law in 2012. Another key point regarding
the 4 + 4 + 4 regulation is that the Qur’an and the Life of Prophet Mohammed are
offered as selective courses in all middle and high schools, and this has passed into
law as the reflection of a large demand and wide social consensus. These changes
were adopted by the approval of most members of three (out of four) political
parties; i.e., the ruling AK Party as well as the opposition parties National
Movement Party (MHP) and the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). The opening
of religious middle schools is welcomed by the public at large since the vast
majority of the society had long demanded to have such schools (Çelik et al. 2013).
Some secular/laicist parties, teachers unions and various NGOs criticized that the
elective religious courses are infringements on laicism. To the more, the main
opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP) appealed to the Constitutional Court,
asking for the cancelation of the regulation. The court, however, dismissed the case.
About 240,000 fifth and sixth grade students were enrolled in a total of 1361
religious middle schools in the 2013–2014 academic year. The ratio equals to about
10 % of the total number of fifth and sixth grade students (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı
2014).
In addition to above mentioned courses, which are defined in the law, the
Ministry also introduced a new selective course, titled “Basics of Religion,” as
weekly two-hour classes in 2012. It has been proposed that Basics of Religion
course should not offer Islamic understanding only. The Ministry held talks
regarding different religious minorities to have their own courses of the same
nature. Following the consultations, various Christian groups prepared a joint
education program. The program titled “Basics of Religion for Middle Schools
(Christianity)” was approved by the Ministry of Education and adopted on
November 26, 2014. The Ministry emphasized that the referred curriculum will be
applied in a narrowed content in private schools within the scope of Article 5 of the
Private Education Institutions Law, numbered 5580 (Talim ve Terbiye Kurulu
2014). According to the Ministry officials, a similar program for Judaism is also
being prepared and that the draft curriculum will be submitted to the Ministry’s
approval in the near future.
Developments in the Cultural Domain
In this section, we will discuss how local and universal cultures are included in
curricula and textbooks. Three basic understandings all which are interrelated and
dominating the cultural domain in Turkish education system will be taken up:
(1) Atatürkism; (2) Nationalistic and militarist discourse; and (3) Exclusionary and
discriminatory approach toward the non-Turkish. Also, we will analyze how the
referred three dominant understandings are included in the education processes,
curricula and textbooks, and how they have changed in time.
As pointed out earlier, the education system in Turkey is defined mainly through
certain concepts, such as Atatürk’s principles and revolutions, Atatürkism, and
Atatürk nationalism. It is stressed that Atatürkism should be taught as a funda-
mental culture in related legislations, although the emphasis has been lessened after
2011. The best example may be seen in the change made in the regulation on
primary education institutions on July 26, 2014. In the new regulation, the emphasis
on Atatürkism has been reduced in the section about objectives and principles of
education. However, it is cited in the regulation that students are expected to remain
“loyal to Atatürk’s principles and revolutions” and “not to act otherwise.” In
addition, both the old and the new bylaws manifest that every school should have a
specific place to be dedicated to Atatürk (“Atatürk’s corner”) and in this corner
“Atatürk’s principles and revolutions” should be reflected correctly. Also, Atatürk
quotes should be visible on the walls of hallways; each classroom should include an
Atatürk portrait on the wall and an Atatürk corner (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı Okul
Öncesi Eğitim ve İlköğretim Kurumları Yönetmeliği 2014). Another legal docu-
ment emphasizes that Atatürkism should be referred as the most fundamental
cultural element in all education processes; in other words, in all classes, even in
extracurricular activities, in teachers’ meetings and any similar environments. The
directive defines that adopting Atatürkism should be an objective not only in his-
tory, social sciences, Turkish and literature classes, but also in foreign languages,
religion and ethics, mathematics, music and physical education (İlköğretim ve
Ortaöğretim Kurumlarında Atatürk Inkılap ve İlkelerinin Öğretim Esasları
Yönergesi 1982).
Such primary documents defining Atatürkism in education programs are also
directly reflected into textbooks. Most frequently visited statements are that Turkey
has “reached the level of modern civilization owing to Atatürk”, “made progress
thanks to him”; Atatürk also “saved the country from the enemies and led the
Turkish nation”, and “played a role to build the history of modern Turkey and the
Turkish language.” Such features are included in all textbooks from the first grade
to the twelfth. Besides, the frame of the understanding of citizenship has been
drawn by placing Atatürkism at the center, stressing duties and tasks rather than
rights, addressing problematic relations with the “other” and constantly empha-
sizing the presence of threats and danger, and by underlining Turkishness and
Turkish ethnicity (Altınay 2009; Bora 2009; Çayır 2014).
In elementary school textbooks, it is also seen that words and sentences used in
multiple remarks about Atatürk are excessively long for the age group pedagogi-
cally and that a biased approach belittling the past and traditional Turkish/Ottoman
costumes in course materials is adopted in the education (Çelik 2014). Even more
so, many errors are found in the materials. For instance, it is often emphasized that
Atatürk gave education rights to girls, while girls had already had the right to attend
school from 1869 (Kurnaz 1999). On top, efforts to create sympathy for Atatürk are
most of the time irrelevant, superficial and independent from the course materials.
For instance, in a reading piece on organ donation, the importance of organ
donation is asked and the following answer is given:
Cooperation and solidarity strengthen social bonds of our nation. Atatürk had given a great
deal of importance to national unity and social solidarity. As Atatürk says, “Turkish nation
have always known to overcome difficulties through national unity and togetherness,” he
expresses this belief. (Komisyon 2014, p. 57)
Another fundamental founding principle in the Turkish education system is the

existence of Turkishness, an extreme nationalist and militarist discourse. In the
Constitution and laws, expressions such as “Turkish nation” are frequently used.
Emphases on other peoples living in Turkey (e.g., Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians) are
almost absent. The nationalist and militarist discourses are exercised in different
stages of the education and textbooks. Studies analyzing how human rights are
covered in textbooks have revealed that exclusionary, extreme nationalist, and
militarist elements are included in the examined textbooks. Themes such as to
die/kill, bloodshed and war, with a militarist focus, are presented as inevitable in
textbooks as violence is affirmed, promoted and considered as ordinary (Altınay
2009; Bora 2009). Militarist notions promoting, affirming and regarding violence as
ordinary are seen in from music textbooks to those of history.
As pointed out earlier, many steps have been taken in the direction of achieving
further wider democratization in the area of education recently. The decisions
reached, first of all, aim to reduce extreme militarist and nationalist practices and
rituals. The first of these steps is the abolishment of mandatory “National Security”
course in 2012, which had been taught by uniformed ranking officers of the military
to all high school students. Besides, important steps have also been taken in the
direction to cut down rituals and ceremonies that had been mostly started in the
authoritarian periods following military coup d’états (Çelik and Gür 2013). In this
scope, the Ministry of National Education abolished, in 2012 again, ceremonies
organized to celebrate the May 19 Commemoration of Atatürk, the Youth and
Sports Festivity that were observed at city stadiums after a few month long
preparations, and the ceremonies were ordained to be held only in schools disal-
lowing any other activities in this regard. Another critical step to lessen the rituals
and ceremonies followed as part of the Democratization Package, dated September
30, 2013, and the oath taking ceremony in primary schools was abolished as well.
The wordings of the oath ceremony had nationalist incantations such as “I offer my
existence to the Turk[ish] existence as a gift” and had been the subject of a severe
criticism from non-Turk[ish] citizens of Turkey for many years.
One of the benchmarks of the education system in Turkey had been the
exclusion of all others except Turks and Turkishness. The exclusionary and dis-
criminatory style adopted in textbooks and education programs has been clearly
visible. To illustrate, the history textbook for the 10th grade that was taught during
the 2009–2010 academic year reads that the Assyrians revolted against the
Ottomans after instigated by Russians and the European states. In the same text-
book, the Assyrians migrating to the West were bad-mouthed again as “They
become an instrument for political and religious interests of (foreign) states in order
to live in economic prosperity of the West” (Komisyon 2011). Following the
objections of the Assyrian community in Turkey, the referred expressions were
revised in the textbooks. In the history textbook that was taught during the 2012–
2013 academic year, not the entire Assyrian community but “some” or “a group of
Assyrians” were referred in the same topics (Komisyon 2012). Assyrians were
unsatisfied by such revisions in the textbooks and in the next academic year the
Ministry made a second revision and crossed out multiple discriminatory and
exclusionary remarks against Assyrians. As information was given about Assyrians,
the sentences were changed to read “the Assyrians remained loyal to the Ottoman
State”, “did not approve the minority status (given to them) as cited in the Treaty of
Lausanne” and that “Assyrians supported the National Independence struggle”
(Komisyon 2013, pp. 67–68).
The most positive remark about different communities mentioned in the
Citizenship and Democracy Education class for the 8th grade students in the 2013–
2014 academic year was:
Turks, Assyrians, Yazidis, Kurds and Arabs live together in many villages of Mardin,
particularly Midyat, Nusaybin and İdil … Many different languages are spoken in Mardin.
Even an illiterate housewife in downtown Mardin speaks at least three different languages,
Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish. (Aşan 2014, p. 53)
Briefly, other communities/peoples living in Turkey, other than Turks, had been
either ignored in the textbooks or defined as harmful (Tarih Vakfı ve Türkiye İnsan
Hakları Vakfı 2009). After 2011 in particular, more positive statements about
different communities living in Turkey are found in textbooks when compared to
the past.
Conclusion
In this chapter, a general assessment of the education system in Turkey has been
made from a multicultural perspective. As it is argued here, the education system in
Turkey is traditionally based on both centralist and monocultural structure. From
the Constitution to textbooks, Atatürkism is presented as the fundamental principle
of the education. Despite many developments in the education system, Atatürkism
is still used as an instrument of indoctrination, and students are not encouraged to
critically ponder about Atatürk, therefore, about the history of Turkey. In addition,
textbooks still include negative remarks about cultural elements of the traditional
times as well as other communities/peoples living in modern Turkey. Albeit a
regulation on the education in mother tongue has been passed, there seems to be
problems in practice. The decision to provide education in mother tongue is valid
only for private schools; therefore, such education will only be available to a more
affluent group of students. Accordingly, there is still a great demand for having
education in mother tongue in public schools. Allowing mother tongue in selective
courses and in private schools may not seem to be a significant step in terms of
similar practices around the world. However, considering the history of Turkey, it is
of historic importance and a very positive step toward an education system that is
sensitive to different cultures and ethnic groups.
As the religious education is examined from a multicultural perspective, it is

observed that the Sunni Muslim majority in Turkey has more options about reli-
gious courses, after 2012 in particular. In this sense, the demand of the Sunni
Muslim community is met considerably through religious middle and high schools
as well as selective religious education courses. Considering the demands from
different religious groups and the aforementioned ECHR rulings, the Ministry of
National Education will probably either transform the compulsory course of the
Culture on Religion and Moral Knowledge into a selective one or change its
content. This change will be an important step toward meeting the demands of
different religious groups and sects, particularly Alevis, living in Turkey.
In conclusion, on account of many reforms made in recent years, a process of
pluralism is observed in religious, ethnolinguistic and cultural domains of the
education system in Turkey. However, it is a fact that discussions on all three
subjects still continue and there are critical steps that should be taken. Besides,
some militarist and nationalist elements are still included in textbooks. We are still
far away from a multicultural education system to completely meet the demands of
the various ethnic, cultural, and religious groups in Turkey. However, all data used
in this study clearly show that the objective of raising mono-typical people is
gradually fading away in the Turkish education system. For these reasons,
democratization reforms of recent years should continue in order to build an edu-
cation system where living cultural differences are accepted and supported, and
where an emphasis is made on the common culture, thereby, exerting efforts to
create a strong social unity. To this end, an open dialogue must be maintained with
the participation of all of the relevant and involved parties.
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Chapter 9
Multicultural Community Development,
Social Capital and Social Disorganization:
Exploring Urban Areas in the United
States
Na’im Madyun and Moosung Lee
Introduction
Since the classic social capital research of Bourdieu ([1986] 2002) and Coleman
(1988), a sizable body of literature on social capital has been conducted not just in
sociology but also in various disciplines such as public health, communication, political
science, economy, and business, to name a few (cf. Halpern 2005; Portes 1998). As
Portes (1998) pointed out, social capital has been one of the most successful socio-
logical concepts exported to other disciplines. Although there were studies acknowl-
edging the downside of social capital such as gang organizations or political nepotism
in government institutions (e.g., Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Narayan and Cassiday
2001), a vast majority of social capital studies has found positive functions or effects of
social capital on individual or community outcomes (cf. Halpern 2005).
Education research is not an exception. Particularly provoked by Coleman’s research
(1988), a considerable number of studies have been conducted in different societal
contexts. A vast majority of these studies have reported several positive structural and
functional effects of social capital on educational outcomes (e.g., Portes and
Fernandez-Kelly 2006; Ream 2005; Gibson et al. 2004; Stanton-Salazar 1997; Gandara
1995; cf. Lee 2010). More specifically, in their comprehensive meta-analysis of 34
studies on social capital and educational outcomes, Dika and Singh (2002) reported
consistent research findings from social capital research—i.e., positive associations of
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the
Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044609).
N. Madyun
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA
M. Lee (&)
University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia
e-mail: moosung.lee@canberra.edu.au

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_9
122 N. Madyun and M. Lee
social capital with educational attainment (e.g., reducing dropout rates and increasing
college enrolment), academic achievement (e.g., increasing standardized test scores) and
psychological factors which have been predictive of educational outcomes (e.g., edu-
cational aspirations).
Considering social capital has certain positive social functions derived from social
relationships, the overall results noted above are not surprising. In other words, given
that social capital in education research is conceptualized as resources that are accessed
and utilized for conferring benefits, the benefits stemming from social capital seems
straightforward (Lee 2009, 2010). Rather what we wish to note here is that those
benefits could be either individual or collective. A majority of social capital studies in
education places more emphasis on the individual-level of benefits garnered from social
capital—that is, individual’s access to and/or mobilization of others’ resources. The
focus on the individual level is conceptually influenced by Bourdieu ([1986] 2002) who
argued that the volume of social capital possessed by an individual depends on the
number of his or her direct relationships to other individuals. This approach to con-
ceptualizing social capital has been reflected in recent social capital research utilizing
network analysis through which researchers analyze the volume of social capital
possessed by individuals by focusing on “who is connected to whom” in social net-
works (Johnson and Knoke 2005; Lee 2010, 2014).
Aside from this individual-focused social capital research, Putnam (2000), who
elevated social capital in the arena of public policy dialogs, highlighted the
community-level of social capital such as how civic engagement and associational
life influence social integration and community development (cf. Lee 2010). With
larger scale data (i.e., Social Capital Benchmark Survey), he demonstrated the
positive relationship between community social capital and other societal or com-
munity development indicators including community-level educational outcomes.1
Aside from social capital research, social disorganization theory has been developed
over last decades largely by community or criminology researchers. Back in the 1940s,
Shaw and McKay developed the foundation for social disorganization theory when
they noticed high crime rates persisting in some Chicago neighborhoods despite high
population turnover (cited in Sampson 1997). They identified four factors that under-
mined social control. Firstly, family composition (single-parent households) was found
to be an important factor in influencing high crime rates. When there are more
single-parent families, there is less supervision of others, fewer role models, and less
social capital (Sampson 1997; Madyun and Lee 2010b). Secondly, high residential
mobility was also seen as a contributing factor to social disorganization because it
reduces the existence of long-standing relationships (Bursik 1999). This could reduce
both the quality and quantity of resources, reducing social capital and consequently
social control (Warner 1999). Thirdly, racial diversity was the third factor included in
1
We are aware that there is a growing criticism of Putnam’s conceptualization of social capital as
community social capital since he simply operationalized aggregates of individuals’ possession as
community social capital (cf. Johnson 2012). Despite this issue in Putnam’s research, it is hard to
deny his contribution to explaining societal or community development in connection with social
capital.
9 Multicultural Community Development … 123
the model using the same residential mobility logic. Individuals from different back-
grounds may not acknowledge the same goals or the same method of goal attainment.
Even if the groups acknowledge both of these, cultural barriers may weaken social
networks, thus reducing social capital (Sampson and Groves 1989) and ultimately the
social control. Finally, one of the most important factors in Shaw and McKay’s theory
was poverty (Warner 1999). They argued that poor communities included many res-
idents that lacked the money and resources (social capital) necessary to maintain
positive social control (Colemen 1988; Sampson and Groves 1989). Because of limited
money and resources, it would be difficult for residents to participate in the organi-
zations necessary to generate resources, thus maintaining a low level of social capital.
In short, Shaw and McKay (1942) argued that a high number of single-parent
households, a high rate of residential mobility, a high degree of diversity, and a high
concentration of poverty undermined a community’s ability to pool the resources
necessary to enforce social norms. This lack of social control was called social
disorganization (cf. Madyun and Lee 2008).2
Conceptual Linkage Between Social Capital and Social

Disorganization
According to Sampson (1997), socially organized communities reinforced healthy

community and family management practices through the collective socialization
process regardless of the personal characteristics of individuals and families. Social
disorganization theory posits that individuals within communities are develop-
mentally influenced by the degree to which community factors promote or disrupt
collective values and social support. The ability of a community to promote and
maintain collective values reflects and indicates its level of social control (Janowitz
1991). There is a direct relationship between the degree of social disorganization
and the degree of social control, which can be regarded as a social capital function.
In other words, the more socially organized a community is, the more it is able to
control the development and maintenance of certain social values that are deemed
healthy for the community.
Jencks and Mayer’s (1990) model shed further light on the relationship between
social capital and social disorganization. According to Jencks and Mayer (1990),
community disorganization can be understood in terms of the combination of
collective socialization, institutional, and epidemic models. These models work on
the premise that positive members of the community promote positive development
while negative members undermine it.
Institutional models focus on how adults from outside of a community serve as
role models by working at the various schools, businesses, and agencies (i.e.,
2
Some parts of this section were adapted from our previous work (Lee 2010; Madyun and Lee
2008, 2010a).
police) within a community. The effects of these factors are less direct, but work to
shape the microsystems of the youth and their image of success. A youth’s view of
the ethnic composition, attitudes, and behaviors of the neighborhood police can
significantly influence her desire to work in law enforcement, respect law
enforcement, and honor the morals and values that laws are designed to maintain.
Epidemic models work on a contagion principle of peers influencing the behavior
of peers. Behaviors and attitudes are spread throughout the community by peer
acceptance and pressure. The quality of the majority peer culture is viewed as the
most powerful socialization force within the community. These models operate on
the premise that positive/successful community members promote successful
development and “disadvantaged” adolescents have the most to gain from affluent
neighbors (Duncan 1994). Adolescents living in high SES neighborhoods would
probably have higher educational and occupational aspirations, and neighborhood
members could provide more information about acquiring higher quality jobs and
careers (Loury 1976). However, more influential in this model is the presence or
absence of low-SES neighbors. Crane (1991) argued that there is a nonlinear
relationship between the percentage of workers who hold professional positions and
social problems. As this percentage decreases, the incidence of social problems
gradually increases until a critical point is met where a very sharp increase occurs.
Collective socialization describes the process by which children are guided by all
members of the community to follow expected norms. William Julius Wilson
(1987) first brought this to the attention of researchers when he noticed an exodus
of Black middle-class neighbors in the early 1980s and subsequently poorer out-
comes in their former neighborhoods. Through collective socialization, young
people develop goals and expectations based on the quality of the individuals
within their community and the number of options they perceive the adults having.
Therefore, affluent, involved communities use social capital to expose young people
to many resources and networks.3
Purpose of the Study
As Shaw and McKay observed, a socially disorganized community allowed

unwanted cultural values to emerge (cf. Warner 1999). These values lead to an
attenuation of the culture, which dissolves many of the social ties. The dissolution
of social ties results in a reduction of social capital. The reduction of social capital is
important because of its critical connection to adolescents’ educational outcomes
(Coleman 1988; Yan 1999; Allard 2005; Lee and Lam 2016). The purpose of this
study was to empirically explore the conceptual link between social capital and
social disorganization from which we sought implications for multicultural
community development.
3
Some parts of this section were adapted from our previous work (Madyun and Lee 2008, 2010a).
Method
Data Collection
In order to navigate the conceptual link between social disorganization theory and
social capital in an urban setting, data were collected from two different sources.
First, social capital data were extracted from the 2001 Social Capital Benchmark
Survey, which is focused on community social capital in the U.S. This data set
includes a national sample of 3000 respondents as well as 40 regional samples
across 29 states covering 26,200 respondents (Saguaro Seminar Report 2001). The
four most significant social capital indicators consistent with the purpose of our
study were drawn from the data set: social trust, diversity of friendships, informal
socializing, and social capital equality (i.e., equality of civic engagement across the
community).
Another data set used in this study came from the U.S. census data. Social
disorganization factors (mobility, poverty, racial diversity, and proportion of
female-headed households) were gathered and organized from www.census.gov
using the tract finder system. In particular, 24 cities which can be identified from the
Social Capital Benchmark Survey were selected to merge the two datasets.4 As
such, data on social disorganization factors of the cities were collected from the
national census data set.
Measures
There were eight measures; four measures for social capital (i.e., social trust,
diversity of friendship, informal socializing, and social capital equality) and four
measures for social disorganization (i.e., mobility, poverty, diversity, and
female-headed households), respectively. Social trust, the core of social capital, is
for gauging the extent to which people trust other people. The concept of social
trust places more emphasis on “generalized social trust” than specific social trust
(which is often forged with specific people through common participation in
groups, organizations, and activities) because generalized trust of “most people” is
extraordinarily valuable in generating social capital (Saguaro Seminar Report
2001). Diversity of friendships, based on social trust, is one of the key measures for
how diverse people are interconnected with others. This is a cumulative indicator
4
The cities involved in this study are as follows: Atlanta Metro (GA), Baton Rouge (LA),
Birmingham Metro (AL), Bismarck (ND), Boston (MA), Chicago Metro (IL), Cincinnati Metro
(OH), Cleveland (OH), Denver (CO), Detroit Metro (MI), Fremont (MI), Grand Rapids (MI),
Greensboro (NC), Houston (TX), Lewiston-Auburn (ME), Minneapolis (MN), Phoenix (AZ),
Rochester Metro (NY), San Francisco (CA), Seattle (WA), St. Paul (MN), Syracuse (NY),
Winston-Salem (NC), and Yakima (WA).
based on whether people have personal friends in each of 11 categories: business

owner, LGBTQ, a manual laborer, White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, a community
leader, etc. (Saguaro Seminar Report 2001). Informal socializing is defined as a key
indicator for measuring the degree to which individuals “had friends over to their
home, hung out with friends in a public place, socialized with coworkers outside of
work, played cards or board games with others …” (Saguaro Seminar Report 2001,
pp. 9–10). Although social capital is somewhat accumulated by the formal social
ties through associational involvement or formal memberships, informal socializing
is much more important in producing social capital because most people are more
likely to produce social capital by sharing their day-to-day life through informal
friendships. Last, social capital equality measures the degree to which communities
have more egalitarian civic engagement for public good. Since social capital is also
accumulated by a variety of civic involvement, the social capital equality index is
important to measure social capital (Saguaro Seminar Report 2001).5
With respect to social disorganization factor, residential mobility was calculated
by subtracting the proportion of individuals in residence at least 1 year (stability)
from the number 1. For instance, if 40 % (.40) of the residents were living in the
neighborhood for the past 1 year, the neighborhood mobility would be 0.60.
Community poverty refers to the proportion of families within a neighborhood
living below the poverty line in the past 12 months. Female-headed households in
community were represented as the total number of female householders with
children younger than 18, divided by the total number of families. Racial diversity
was calculated by summing each racial group’s squared population proportion and
then subtracting this sum from 1. The formula for this calculation is represented by
(1 − Rp2), where p is equal to the population proportion (Blau 1977).
A neighborhood that is 80 % Caucasian American and 20 % African American will
have a diversity score of 0.32 {1 − (0.802 + 0.202)}. A more diverse neighborhood
that is 50 % Caucasian American, 25 % African–American, and 25 % Asian
American will have a diversity score of 0.63 {1 − (0.52 + 0.252 + 0.252)}.
Data Analysis
Given the small size of our samples (24 cities), it was not appropriate to employ
inferential statistical modeling. As such, we used descriptive statistics and
correlation analysis.
5
For details of social capital related measures such as scale, see Saguaro Seminar Report 2001.
Results
In Table 9.1, social disorganization factors (mobility, poverty, diversity, and

female-headed households) were represented by %. Approximately 81 % of people
in the 24 cities were living in their neighborhood for the past 1 year. Put differently,
19 % of the residents were relatively new in their neighborhood. In terms of
poverty, 19 % of the total families in the sample cities within a neighborhood lived
below the poverty line in the past 12 months. Also, 5 % of the total households in
the sample cities were female-headed households.
Regarding the dimensions of social capital (social trust, diversity of friendship,
informal socializing, and social capital equality), it should be noted that a city
quotient shows a city’s performance on this dimension of social capital. A city
quotient above 100 indicates that a city shows more social capital than its demo-
graphics would suggest. Overall, the sample cities showed average scores (i.e., 100)
across the four social capital sub-dimensions whereas they showed relatively higher
standard deviations compared to social disorganization factors. This suggests that
there may be more variation in social capital across the cities, whereas there is less
variation in social disorganization factors, except racial diversity (SD = 0.17),
across the cities. Indeed, the cities indicated a wide gap of racial diversity ranging
from 7 to 64 %.
The Pearson correlation coefficients in Table 9.2 indicate a significant rela-
tionship between social disorganization factors: mobility and diversity (−0.443*),
poverty and female-headed households (0.528**), and mobility and poverty
(−0.643**). The positive correlation between poverty and female-headed house-
hold is straightforward, given that households with a single income are more likely
to suffer from economic hardship. The negative correlation between mobility and
diversity indicates that the higher communities have residential mobility, the lower
communities have racial diversity. A typical case applied to this residential pattern
is “white flight”—i.e., white city loss and suburban gain (cf. Frey 2014).6 By
observation, we know that communities in inner city areas in the sample cities have
been fluctuated by racial minority families (looking for affordable housing) and
those communities are often racially ethnically segregated (i.e., low diversity within
communities/neighborhoods).7 At the same time, white people move out to rela-
tively affluent suburban communities where racial diversity is relatively low due to
predominantly white composition. Both cases are the flipsides of white flight,
indicating relatively high mobility with low diversity.
Notably while there were no significant correlations between social disorgani-
zation factors and social capital dimensions, there was a significant, negative cor-
relation between diversity and informal socializing (−0.622**). In the following
6
However, Frey (2014) also indicates that despite the traditional pattern of White flight, there has
been a growing number of suburban areas where ethnic minority people either substantially or
predominantly reside.
7
See Madyun and Lee’s (2010a) study for more details.
Table 9.1 Descriptive Variables M SD Min. Max.

statistics
Mobility 0.19 0.03 0.14 0.26
Poverty 0.19 0.06 0.08 0.34
Diversity 0.44 0.17 0.07 0.64
Female-headed 0.05 0.02 0.02 0.09
households
Social trust 99.8 12.5 81.0 131.0
Diversity of 100.0 17.0 59.0 148.0
friendship
Informal socializing 101.4 15.4 77.0 133.0
Social capital 98.5 13.0 73.0 116.0
equality
Note n = 24, Min. Minimum, Max. Maximum
section, the meaning of the negative correlation between racial diversity and
informal socializing will be further discussed because the negative association is the
venue where we can identify the conceptual linkage of social disorganization factor
to the formation of social capital.
Limitations
Before moving onto discussing the implications of our finding, we acknowledge

that there are several limitations in this study particularly in terms of data.
Admittedly, the sample size is small and was not randomly chosen from a pool of
cities, but restricted to cities with available social capital data aligned to the
Putnam’s social capital survey. It would be interesting to identify the most diverse
urban areas nationally, according to both the measures of racial diversity, and the
level of informal socializing with a focus on racial lines. Also the aggregate data at
the city-level may mask substantial variation of informal socializing by individuals’
demographic characteristics. We also admit that the correlation analysis does not
provide any causality information.
Discussion
Findings indicate that there was a significantly negative correlation between poverty
and mobility, and a significantly positive correlation between poverty and the
number of female-headed households. This suggests that as the income decreased,
neighborhoods were less likely to have a transient residential and single-parent
household population, or vice versa. There was also a significantly negative
Table 9.2 A correlation matrix
Variables Mobility Poverty Diversity Female-headed Social Diversity of Informal
households trust friendship socializing
Mobility
Poverty −0.643**
9 Multicultural Community Development …
Diversity −0.443* 0.296

Female-headed households −0.310 0.528** 0.397
Social trust 0.383 −0.375 −0.172 −0.087
Diversity of friendship 0.097 0.028 0.220 0.131 −0.159
Informal socializing 0.182 −0.034 −0.622** −0.301 0.401 −0.121
Social capital equality 0.150 0.165 −0.054 0.164 0.201 −0.214 0.252
Note *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01
129
correlation between diversity and mobility. That is, the residents less likely to leave
pockets of poverty were the ones who lived in diverse, one-parent neighborhoods.
An interesting finding emerged when the social disorganization factors were
covaried with social capital indicators. Inconsistent with the literature, poverty,
mobility, and the number of single-parent households were not significantly asso-
ciated with social capital dimensions. However, there was a significantly negative
association of diversity and informal socializing. This suggests that not all disor-
ganization factors were associated with social capital indicators. We await further
investigations on such insignificant associations whereas we pay special attention to
the fact that the only significant association emerged from racial diversity and
informal socializing. Specifically, as diversity increased, informal socializing sig-
nificantly decreased, or vice versa. The inverse relation between racial diversity and
informal socializing can be interpreted as the situation that communities with high
racial diversity rates are likely to display low levels of informal socializing within
or between racial groups. Given the meaning of the measure of informal socializing
(i.e., inviting friends home, hang out with friends in a public place, socializing with
coworkers outsider of work, play cards or games with others), the finding suggests
that there is a lack of the aforementioned social interactions/relationships between
different racial groups. Put differently, the negative correlation suggests a lack of
bridging social capital, which is formed by intergroup network ties (e.g., between
different race or ethnic groups or cultural groups). This may further suggest that
there exists more “race-segregated” informal socializing. If this is the case,
excessive racial group closure in a community would function as hindering people
from having opportunities to experience other racial groups’ cultures through
informal socializing. Notably, informal socializing seems to be more critical than
other social factors to forming multicultural perspectives because informal social-
izing refers to people’s day-to-day life interactions or relationships rather than
formal memberships or associational involvement. In this regard, race-bound
informal socializing may further marginalize racial populations such as
African-Americans, Hispanics or sub populations of Asian racial groups by con-
fining them to contexts with less access to immediate resources or potential sup-
ports from the majority group (i.e., White Americans) or other racial groups in their
communities. As such, racial minority groups may have limited opportunities to
interact with the racial majority group and vice versa, in the informal contexts (e.g.,
hanging out, visiting homes, recreational games) which are important social
channels for understanding other cultures. In short, the lesser opportunity for
building multicultural perspectives seems to be associated with the more
race-segregated informal socializing in their communities.
Previous studies echo our finding. For example, although conducted in an
organizational setting, Oh et al.’s (2004) found that individual group member’s
contact with diverse other groups is often limited by strong closure groups. In a
similar vein, Narayan and Cassidy (2001) reported that the influence of social
capital “is most profound when relationships are among heterogeneous groups”
(p. 60). Through their empirical research in developing countries, they highlighted
“the importance of heterogeneity in group membership [as] a gauge of positive
social capital” (p. 60). Indeed, research demonstrates the fact that despite high
ratings in community solidarity in indigenous communities in Latin America, the
strong closure-communities remain poor unless they have connections outside the
community. In other words, without outside allies, social capital in poor indigenous
communities is vulnerable to a vicious cycle of excessive closure-informal
socializing within the community (Narayan and Cassidy 2001). Likewise, isolated
informal socializing based on the same race can easily lock a particular racial group
into a restricted cultural spectrum in understanding other racial groups. That is,
people with race-bound informal socializing are neither likely to access resources of
other racial groups’ culture nor likely engage in new cultural experiences through
inter-racial interactions. As such, their race-bound informal social ties would
undermine their navigational capacity across cultures. This interpretation can be
also supported by Jencks and Mayer’s (1990) model, which was discussed earlier,
on the link between social capital and social disorganization. As their epidemic
model suggests, the quality of the majority peer culture is a very strong socialization
force for adolescents. Thus, if adolescents are locked into racially identical peers’
culture due to a dearth of informal socializing with other racial groups, their view of
racial composition and their attitudes and behaviors to other racial groups in their
community would not be multicultural. This detrimental process of community
development is not just applied to racially minority groups, but also is disadvan-
tageous to racially majority groups in that they also lose opportunities to enrich
their multicultural perspectives due to homogenous informal socializing—further-
ing misperceptions and racial divides
Concluding Remarks
Community and neighborhood effects on individual development have gained more

attention over the past few decades (Jencks and Mayer 1990; Duncan and
Raudenbush 2001). Recent research has identified the concept of social capital as
explanatory factor for differences in developmental outcomes (Coleman 1988;
Putnam 2000) while simultaneously identifying the role of social disorganization in
undermining a community’s ability to generate social capital (Sampson and Groves
1989; Sampson 1997; Bursik 1999). Because of the emergence of social capital in
education research coupled with changing national demographics, we intended to
explore the connection between social disorganization and social capital.
The finding of our study reinforces the growing concern of racial lines in
communities in the U.S. This racial (possibly confounded with ethnic line) line
continuously locks racial/ethnic minorities into disadvantaged schools and neigh-
borhoods (Lee and Madyun 2009; Madyun and Lee 2010a; Lee et al. forthcoming).
Conversely, this implies that as long as this line exists, racial diversity would more
often function as a negative community factor to both minority and majority groups
in terms of forming social capital and also understanding cultural differences across
racial groups. Few would disagree that racial diversity could serve as a positive
contextual factor when racial integration in communities is authentically made.

However, with the strong presence of an exclusive racial border, racial diversity in a
resident’s everyday life would be negatively associated with the developmental
process by limiting access to the social resources and opportunities to understand
cultures of other racial groups beyond one’s own racially identical group (Madyun
and Lee 2010a). Based on our finding, we wish to raise the issue that the inability to
form informal social ties across racial lines is a critical problem facing U.S. urban
communities. We believe that building the ability to form informal, healthy social
ties across racial (and ethnic) lines is critical to moving toward building multi-
cultural perspectives.
Finally, given the limitations of this study noted earlier, we wish to highlight the
nature of this study as an exploratory investigation from which future studies may
benefit. Specifically, future research benefits from studying informal socializing
relationships at the census tract or neighborhood level possibly utilizing social
network theory in order to better translate the data into the language of social
capital. In addition, another logical next step would be to gather data on the
informal social ties of student populations from different ethnic groups and correlate
the findings with specific developmental outcomes such as multicultural compe-
tency or multicultural sensitivity. More studies should be conducted on the systemic
mechanisms necessary to increase informal socializing of racially diverse and
ethnically diverse (by implication, culturally diverse) communities.
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Chapter 10
Multicultural Practice for Cultural
Heterogeneity and National Cultural
Homogeneity: Immigrant Youth’s
Experience in Osaka, Japan
Yuko Okubo
Introduction
The notion of multiculturalism has been discussed by scholars since the number of
immigrant workers and residents increased in the 1980s in Japan. Compared to
other countries, Japan is relatively homogeneous with a small portion of racial and
ethnic minorities. However, Japan has always been multiethnic and this represen-
tation of homogeneity is a construct of the postwar period (Denoon et al. 1996;
Graburn et al. 2008; Lie 2001; Oguma 1995). I am making this statement recog-
nizing the roles that ethnic minorities played in Japan’s modernization process.
Although an increasing number of ethnic minorities have lived in Japan for gen-
erations, migrated to Japan as children (1.5 generation), were born in Japan (second
generation), were born out of international marriages (one Japanese parent), or
identify themselves as being Japanese or hybrid, how the dominant members
perceive them has a strong impact on their formation of a sense of themselves as
Japan’s minorities. Thus, experiences of ethnic/racial minorities need to be taken
seriously to shed light on the issue of Japan’s multiculturalism. This construction
also characterizes the nature of social institutions for one thing, which prepares
unique cultural arrangements of being an ethnic minority in Japan and the issue of
the cultural construction of self (Lamont and Small 2008; McDermott and Varenne
2006).
Influenced by the social location of each person, subjectivities cannot be cap-
tured solely by the beliefs and understandings of the dominant ideology and culture.
Subjectivities are shaped by everyday experiences and practices, generated around
the state discourses and its counter-hegemonic discourses as well (Okubo 2013). In
Y. Okubo (&)
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, USA
e-mail: yokubo@berkeley.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_10
136 Y. Okubo
that sense, this chapter is an attempt to ethnographically demonstrate the cultural

construction of agency and cultural shaping of subjectivities. Culturally produced
subject is defined not only by a particular position in a social and economic matrix,
but also by a complex subjectivity, i.e., a complex set of feelings, such as fears,
desires, and motives through everyday experiences (Ortner 2006, p. 115). Within a
world of “complex forms of social relations,” culture is both “constraining” and
“enabling” (Ortner 2006, pp. 14–15, 129).
This chapter discusses how institutional settings condition the representation of
various cultures, and thus, shape the notion of “multiculturalism” (tabunka kyōsei)
in Japan. This constitutes the social relations for people to shape their subjectivities,
develop a sense of identity, make choices, and take actions utilizing available
resources in everyday life. The institutionally constructed and culturally shaped
notion of “multiculturalism” is both constraining and enabling/empowering to
people, social actors, in a particular time/space.
The target population is Japan-born Vietnamese, recently returned migrants from
China, those who migrated to Japan from China, Vietnam, and other Asian coun-
tries in their childhoods (1.5 generation immigrants), and third- and
fourth-generation resident Koreans—all having ethnic backgrounds different than
those of mainstream Japanese. In this sense, they do not completely fit into the
mainstream Japanese culture. Despite some adjustments made to “transform dif-
ferences into richness” (chigai o yutakasa ni) (Osaka Prefecture Resource Council
for Education of Foreign Children in Japan 1996) in the public sphere (society,
school, etc.), Japanese society, and culture as a whole remains structured for
mainstream Japanese. To “transform differences into richness” is regarded as a goal,
rather than a descriptive phrase of the status quo. The positive attitude toward
cultural differences can be captured by the term, tabunka kyōsei, or a more localized
notion of “multiculturalism” in each region.
This study is based on my long-term research in Osaka since September 1998.
The ethnographic descriptions and interview data discussed here are from my
follow-up research in September–November 2009 and January–February 2010. The
institution that I discuss is school, an educational system. Although my study is
ethnographically limited, the phenomenon that I observed in Osaka may be
applicable to other parts of Japan, suggesting cultural and institutional ways of
managing differences in Japan.
In the chapter, I first discuss the historical background and development of the
notion of multiculturalism in Japan and in my field site in Osaka. Then, I move on
to the section of institutions to address local multicultural practice at school in
Osaka, and lastly, in the section of culture, I present the experiences of immigrant
and ethnic minority youths in terms of multiculturalism in and outside school. As
such, this chapter attempts to bring the scholarship of multiculturalism, institutions,
and culture (material and symbolic dimensions of culture) into the discussion of the
identity formation and subjectivity of immigrant youth in Japan.
10 Multicultural Practice for Cultural Heterogeneity and National … 137
Multicultural Settings and Multiculturalism
The term tabunka kyōsei denotes the state-sponsored notion of multiculturalism.

Because of a sudden increase in “newcomers,” i.e., foreigners who were linguis-
tically and culturally different from the Japanese including those who had migrated
to Japan since the late 1970s (unlike long-present non-Japanese such as resident
Koreans) terms such as kyōsei and tabunka kyōsei spread. These concepts or terms
are actualized and implemented locally as various tabunka kyōsei programs.
Because the distribution of foreign population is uneven, how the concept of
tabunka kyōsei is interpreted and actualized varies across regions.
The popularizing of the concept of kyōsei (co-living) reflected the state’s desire
to accommodate foreigners into Japanese society. Kyōsei implies support for the
state’s claims that foreigners required adjustment but also preconditioned the
relationship between foreigners and national society (Kato 2008, pp. 246–247).
Some say that Japan’s multiculturalism attempts to “manage diversity by the
strategic inclusion of difference” (Chapman 2006, pp. 100–101), or it aims to
“assimilate” foreigners under the discourse of “support” (shien)1 instead of pro-
moting diversity (Kajita et al. 2005). Another stream of thought, following a
neoliberal view of multiculturalism (Hage 1998), argues that there is a political
imperative to reduce multicultural social welfare policies in Japan by adopting
policies based on neoliberalism, deconstructing collective units of ethnic groups
into individuals (Song 2005). More recently, reviewing the framework of tabunka
kyōsei expressed in policy documents such as the report by the Ministry of Internal
Affairs and Communications report in 2006, Nakamatsu (2014) argues that the
condition for inclusion of immigrants/foreigners remain in favor of cohesion over
their rights (p. 140). Despite popularity of the concept of “kizuna,” emotional bonds
between people, after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, whether
“‘multiculturalization’ that ensures a more sustainable form of mutual assistance”
has been proceeding in Japan is being questioned (Lee 2014, p. 118).
Although the state version of tabunka kyōsei may be described as rather con-
servative with more emphasis on individuals, the notion of kyōsei became more
politicized by those who saw in it the implication to correct social inequality.
Grassroots activists, educators, and progressive intellectuals promoted this partic-
ular understanding (Tai 2005). I describe the regional version of Japanese multi-
culturalism in my field site in Osaka as “difference” multiculturalism, which
essentialize culture as timeless and unchanging, and reduces it to a means to an end,
namely as taken-for-granted representations of ethnic and national identity. This
happens despite the original grassroots’ emphasis on “critical” or “transformative”
1
Kajita et al. (2005) cited in Kato (2008). Being aware of this trend, Kato (2008) suggests the
limitations of policies of multiculturalism and coexistence (tabunka kyōsei) for assisting for-
eigners, and questions the notion from the perspective of “the person concerned” as an “indi-
vidual,” and not as an object to be supported.
138 Y. Okubo
multiculturalism to create a more inclusive and democratic society (Eller 1997;

Goldberg 1994; Kincheloe 2002; Turner 1993).
Because of the history of grassroots social movement to correct social inequality
and injustice by communities such as the caste-like Buraku and resident Koreans,
my field site in Osaka was more “accepting” of different cultures than other regions
in Japan. The city’s emphasis on internationalization (for resident Koreans) founded
on the concept of human rights was the direct result of earlier grassroots social
movements of the above-mentioned communities.
In local societies, sites for celebrating different cultures were labeled as “mul-
ticultural” or “international,” but in many cases, the sites lacked interactions or even
contacts with ordinary Japanese. When something “ethnic” was planned and carried
out, such as New Year’s Tet Festival and Moon Festival for Vietnamese and Lunar
New Year Festival for Chinese, the events were usually for the communities and a
small number of Japanese supporters who were involved with the communities, but
not for other Japanese. It could have been the result of a language barrier between
the community members and a local society, but this shows that these immigrant
communities were not quite integrated into Japanese society.
Institutions and Institutional Settings
In discussing institutions, Douglas (1986) argues that institutions are “conventions”

(p. 46) and “legitimized social groupings” (p. 46) which function under legitimating
authority and provide individuals in institutions with templates for conduct.
Organizational decisions are largely shaped by the institutional “thought-world,”
people in the institution accept and function based on this “thought-world,” and
they are shaped by the institution as a whole. To this understanding of “institu-
tions,” I add an approach from social practice theory and what Holland and Lave
(2001, 2009) call “history in person,” a “set of relations between intimate,
embodied subjectivities and local practice” (2009, p. 4). In studying the historical
production of persons in practice, Holland and Lave (2001, 2009) attend to local
practice, which is “significant for the continuing formation of institutional
arrangements in sociohistoric time/space” (2009, p. 5). In this chapter, local practice
is the multicultural practice for cultural heterogeneity or tabunka kyōsei that I
observed at high school in Osaka. These practices are contentious in a sense that the
ways in which teachers envision, design, and implement programs to assist foreign
students (or students with foreign roots) are counter-hegemonic to Japan’s history;
however, to examine the implication of these programs, we need to evaluate them
within the institution, a larger sociohistoric time/space, and look at the persons
produced by local practice. The discussion of the persons here, i.e., foreign students
in and out of the special programs in Osaka, follows in the section of culture.
Multicultural Education in Japan and Osaka
Multicultural education in Japan is located at the intersection of the education for

marginalized communities in Japan, initiated locally by the communities and
teachers, and the national education for the children of foreigners, administered by
the Ministry of Education Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. This national
education had a focus on teaching the Japanese language and culture to these
children. Okano (2006) examined the “global-local” interface in the educational
arena in Japan; how the central government’s educational policies toward recent
immigrants developed in response to changes in local educational policies. These
changes were implemented to address the ethnic and cultural diversity in schools
and were developed in cooperation with grassroots professional groups, activists,
and schools. To these two, I would add three other influences that made society
more accepting of differences: the nation’s push to “internationalize” education,
such as education for international understanding associated with UNESCO, human
rights education influenced by the United Nations Decade for Human Rights
Education in 1995, and theories of multicultural education mainly from the U.S.
(Okubo 2000, 2009). These forces constitute a space for education in Osaka, where
I encountered immigrant students. The localized version of U.S.style multicultural
education was introduced to educational practitioners and teachers in Osaka,
blended with their own tradition of the local minority education with a focus on the
concepts of collective “ethnic identity” and “co-existence/co-living.”
As a localized version of the education for ethnic minorities and immigrants in
Osaka, Osaka Prefecture Resource Council for Education of Foreign Children in
Japan (1996) proposed multicultural education and education for co-living that
reflected the reality in the schools, where diversification was a result of increasing
international marriages, newcomers, and naturalization of resident Koreans.
Newcomers are different from ethnic minorities according to their historical rela-
tionship with the nation; however, they are also cultural minorities in terms of
having non-Japanese cultural backgrounds.
In all these educational programs that address cultural differences, there is a
tendency to classify students according to host countries or countries of origin
(Nukaga 2003; Tsuneyoshi 2004; Tsuneyoshi et al. 2010). Therefore, in education
for ethnic and cultural minorities, in contrast to the ideal of nurturing a personal
identity of each child, in practice, categorization of children based on collective
identities cannot be easily removed. Children are categorized based on collective
identities of ethnic groups who are minorities among the Japanese nationals, or of
nationals who are different from Japanese nationals. As such, Japanese nationals as
a collective are always the foundation. The immigrant children grow up imagining
themselves living in Japan and being Japanese, rather than a citizen of their parents’
countries; however, educational practices derived from multiculturalism place them
as cultural “others.” This may produce further marginalized ethnic “others” and
reproduce the concept of “otherness” by associating it with both citizenship and
ethnicity.
140 Y. Okubo
“Special Measures” and “Special Admission Quota” for High

School Entrance Examinations
How was the philosophy to assist newcomers for coexistence, represented by Osaka
Prefecture Resource Council, reflected in the educational policy in Japan? The five
prefectures with the largest number of foreign nationals were Aichi, Kanagawa,
Shizuoka, Tokyo, and Osaka. Among these five prefectures, Kanagawa, Tokyo, and
Osaka had “special measures” (tokubetsu sochi) for public high school entrance
examinations for students who were in need of the Japanese language assistance,
and all five prefectures had certain “special admission quotas” (tokubetsu
nyūgakuwaku) for these students. However, there was no standard selection process
or condition regarding these measures (Inui 2008).2
As for Osaka, the special measures for foreign nationals, i.e., Chinese returnees
and refugees from Indochina, were introduced in March 1988 to those for physi-
cally challenged students, the definition of which was established in 1978. “Chinese
returnees and foreign students who have transferred to (Japanese schools) in 1st
grade and beyond” were given (1) 1.3 times the regular examination time for
completing the exam; (2) permission to use two dictionaries (one for their native
language to Japanese and the other for vice versa); (3) kana reading (rubi-uchi) for
kanji (Chinese characters)3 of examination questions; (4) translations to their native
language of key words in essay questions; and (5) an option to write an essay in
their native language if they applied for this arrangement (Inui 2008, p. 39).
Osaka had the special measures for Chinese returnees, foreign nationals, and
those who returned from abroad, under four categories. (1) Students who returned
or entered Japan in the first grade4; (2) students who lived abroad for more than 2
years and returned to Japan within 2 years; (3) students who returned from China or
foreign nationals who transferred in the fourth grade and beyond (in some cir-
cumstances those who transferred in the third grade); and (4) those who lived
abroad for more than 2 years, and returned to Japan within 2 years (Osaka
Prefectural Education Board 2009). Since 2001, students who fell in categories 3
and 4 could take the examination using “special admission quotas.” Students in the
category 3 went on to one of five public high schools (approximately 12 students for
each), while those in category 4 went to one of nine public high schools with
2
For example, in Aichi, the prefecture with the largest number (3057) of foreign nationals who
required the language assistance (in 2008), three schools offered “special admission quota” for a
couple of foreign nationals who had transferred to Japanese schools in the 4th grade and beyond
(ijō) or before the 4th grade with special circumstances, and two schools offered the quota for 40
Chinese returnees (chūgoku kikokusha) who had transferred to Japanese schools in the 4th grade
and beyond (ijō). In both quotas, interviews were offered in addition to reading (kokugo), math,
and English, and kana reading (rubi-uchi) was added to all exam questions.
3
To kanji other than those they learned in elementary school.
4
Literally translated as follows: Students who returned or entered Japan, with his/her intention or
one’s guardian’s intention to permanently stay in Japan (when the student transferred in the 1st
grade).
courses such as “International Culture” or “English” (approximately 8 students in

each course or 10 % of the total students in each course). The teacher at Osaka
Prefectural Education Board mentioned that the category 4 was originally for
Japanese “elites” who lived in English-speaking countries and who had difficulty
with the Japanese language after their return; however, some foreign students and
Chinese returnees were admitted to courses/schools because they fell in category 4
under an “adjusted interpretation” (kakudai kaishaku). Although exams were the
same for those in categories 3 and 4—math, English, and essay in Japanese or
native language—it was understood by the Education Board and teachers that
category 3 was for those who were doing poor academically, while category 4 was
for those who were doing well academically.
Not all foreign students resorted to these special measures or special admission
quotas. A naturalized Japanese girl, who was born in China and came to Japan as a
grandchild of a Chinese returnee, successfully entered one of the International
Culture courses (listed under category 4), which was for the top students in Osaka
Prefecture. Kim (pseudonym), a Vietnamese girl who came to Japan in the second
grade, whom I discuss later, used the special measures, but went to a regular class in
one of the schools listed under category 3.5 Another Vietnamese boy, Kim’s former
classmate from elementary school, who came to Japan in the first grade, was not
eligible for special measures or the special admission quota, but went to another
school listed under category 3 taking the exam as other students did.6 As such,
students with foreign backgrounds, either naturalized Japanese or foreign nationals,
went through multiple paths after compulsory education with these options; some
applied for special admission quotas/courses in one of 14 public high schools
(among 179 Osaka Prefectural High Schools), some used the special measures to go
on to other pubic high schools, and others did not utilize the special measures and
system or went to private high schools.
In Osaka, the five schools with a special course and admission for foreign
students were not regarded as academically good. Only one school among the five
was average according to the deviation value (hensachi). When I visited one of
these schools, a teacher in charge of foreign students said, “Foreign students at our
school are stars. They are the ones who actively participate in club activities and go
on to college using a special system.” As his remark suggests, not many of the
students at these high schools pursue college education, and they are not involved
in school activities, either. This was also observed at other schools with a special
course for foreign students; the university’s attendance rate from each school
became higher as a result of the foreign students in the special program, for many of
them go to college using a special college entrance examination system for foreign
students.
5
Kim was not eligible for the special admission quota/course because she came to Japan in the 2nd
grade.
6
When they took the entrance exam, the special measures were only for those who came to Japan
in the 2nd grade and beyond. Kim qualified, but the other student did not.
142 Y. Okubo
Cultural Settings
Programs in schools or festivals organized by local governments (either City Hall or

the City’s Center for International Exchange) present a picture of “multicultural
society” with all cultures placed next to one another, but without a strong presence
of the mainstream Japanese culture as neighbors; a small number of Japanese are
there as the organizers of the events (teachers, city officials, and some volunteers).
Under these circumstances, youths with non-Japanese backgrounds were encour-
aged to participate in “multicultural” events at school and in the local community,
and were advised to keep pride in their ethnic backgrounds in my field site in
Osaka. During my research in 2010, a school in Toyonaka, a northern part of
Osaka, which was regarded as progressive, started asking Japanese children to join
newcomer children in presenting their cultures to a whole school. This was a new
initiative in Japan where the education practice described as multicultural was
functioning as a label or a marker for ethnic others, rather than integrating them into
society.
In conducting research on multicultural practices in high school, I observed
events organized by teachers assisting foreign students in special courses at the five
high schools. Anything cultural, or multicultural, was usually for these courses. On
the other hand, foreign students at these schools who were born in Japan or
immigrated as a child were not involved in their activities. Moreover, teachers and
schools were not aware of them if they were going by their Japanese names and had
no difficulty with the Japanese language.
Subjectivity Within Japan’s Multicultural Education
“Accepting” different cultures in Japan, however, allows members of the

non-Japanese communities to respond in a unique way. For example, one of my
informants, a junior in college, born in Japan to a Vietnamese family and a Japanese
citizen of Vietnamese background, after sharing his responses to my inquiry, stated,
“I am not ashamed of myself for being Vietnamese or for holding Japanese citi-
zenship (as a member of non-Japanese community).” This phrase was commonly
heard among immigrant youth as a response to the encouragement from teachers
and educators. While some educators and activists consider expressions of ethnic
pride as essential for being members of ethnic minorities in Japan, I observed that
this was not necessarily an easy thing to do or a natural thing to do for the young
people who grew up under the influence of multiple cultures in contemporary
Japan. Therefore, I have argued that the expectations of some educators and acti-
vists reflected their own beliefs and wishes regarding how ethnic minorities should
be, instead of how the communities actually were. Their understandings and
expectations of what ethnic minority members should be and those of these youth
were derived from their take of the notion of multiculturalism or its more localized
notion of tabunka kyōsei in my field site in Osaka. In this context, the practices to
promote multiculturalism developed in my field site in Osaka. I have discussed
different versions of the discourses of multiculturalism in Japan—the official ver-
sion promoted by the state and the more localized one with regional flavors—taking
my field site as a case study in my previous work (Okubo 2013). Either an official
or a more regional Osaka version, a boundary between each culture, in particular,
between the Japanese mainstream culture and other cultures (i.e., foreigners) always
exists, and that a program to promote “accepting” different cultures, which is
implemented based on this notion, redraws this boundary.
Under these circumstances, what were students at these schools learning about
themselves, friends, and the Japanese under the framework of multiculturalism? I
discuss the experience of five students with foreign backgrounds, including the one
who is now in a regular class in a high school with a special program and another
who is a college student who graduated from a special program at another high
school. Their responses are constructed in everyday experience in school and
society, which is shaped by the institutional “thought-world” (Douglas 1986) and
“mediated through contentious local practice” (Holland and Lave 2001, 2009).
Subjectivity of Immigrant Youth
Sachi: Sachi (pseudonym) was a Chinese female, second year student in regular
high school, 17-years old at the time of the interview in 2009. She came to Japan
from Jilin when she was 4 as a great-grandchild of a Chinese return
migrant/war-displaced Japanese (her great-grandmother on her father’s side was
Japanese). The rest of her family was Chinese. At home, they spoke both Japanese
and Chinese (Mandarin). With her brother and mother Sachi spoke Japanese, but
with her father and grandmother she spoke Chinese. She could speak Chinese but
not read or write it, similar to other Chinese children who migrated to Japan at an
early age.
All of Sachi’s relatives switched to Japanese names upon their arrival, as did she.
Some of her relatives naturalized and became Japanese nationals, but because she
considered living in China in the future, she did not become a Japanese national. In
Japan she was a Chinese national with permanent residency. Every year, she went
back to China for a week with her family or with her mother. “That’s the reason
why I still remember the Chinese language,” she said. She also listened to Chinese
popular music from Taiwan and Hong Kong, and enjoyed watching Chinese dra-
mas made in Taiwan and China via satellite broadcasting. “If the drama is inter-
esting, I will watch if it is not made in China.” She mentioned that she liked the
Taiwanese version of Hana yori Dango (Boys over Flowers), based on a comic for
Japanese girls, more than the Japanese version.
Because she used her Japanese name and she spoke Japanese fluently, it was
hard to tell that Sachi was Chinese unless she shared the information with others.
To my question as to when she tells others that she is Chinese, she said, “When I
144 Y. Okubo
am given an opportunity to introduce myself, I will say I am Chinese, and ask

others not to say anything bad (iyana koto) about China.” After introducing herself,
she said that her friends would usually not believe her and would reply, “Are you
joking?” Some would ask her to teach them the Chinese language. This gave an
impression that she was more attached to the Chinese side of her background;
however, to my question regarding her identity, she said, “I am not Japanese but I
am not Chinese, either. I do not know what Japanese families are like. The food we
eat at home is mostly Chinese cuisine. I have never tried osechi (Japanese New
Year’s food), for we celebrate Chinese New Year.… I may be Japanese to people
when I return to China, but to the Japanese, I am Chinese.” This showed that Sachi
could identify strongly with either her Chinese or Japanese side depending on the
dominant forces at a certain time-place where the negotiation took place.
When I asked her to reflect on activities for Chinese children at elementary
school, she said, “We had to perform at an ethnic cultural festival. The activities
were held three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The teachers
who had originally taught us had changed, and the activities changed, too.” She
remembered more about the school than did the other children I interviewed. She
said she stopped attending special instruction with the Japanese language when she
was in fifth or sixth grade. “The person in charge was a young female teacher. I had
a fight with her. She gave us a handout of easy Japanese questions, and I did not
like it [because it was so easy]. When I explained that to her, she said, ‘You have to
do this assignment as you don’t understand,’ or something like, because I am
different from other (Japanese) children. That’s why, I stopped attending the class.”
At junior high school, she was in chōbunken, an ethnic club to study the culture
of resident Koreans. But more than her experience at school, it was through her
experiences at the neighborhood’s education center that she learned not to hide her
ethnic background. “I do not think I should hide my Chinese background. I don’t
want to hide it, either. I want to voluntarily (mizukara susunde) introduce myself as
Chinese.”
Compared with other youth of her age, Sachi had a strong sense of identity as a
Chinese in addition to nurturing a sense of being Japanese. This was partly because
she had been participating in educational activities for children with “foreign roots”
organized by a nonprofit education center in the neighborhood. While some of her
friends, who had been participating in these activities in elementary school, stopped
attending as they became older, she remained an active participant of the activities
at the center. She kept attending weekly tutorial session during junior high school to
prepare for high school and college entrance examinations and participated in
another group activity to find interesting stories and reports at the center’s news-
papers club with ethnic Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese junior high and high
school students. This club trained junior high and high school students who could
be good role models for the communities. She mentioned in the interviews in 2009
and 2010 that her dream was to find a job in an organization such as the education
center that provided activities for ethnic minorities, but with a little higher salary.
I heard that she was admitted to a well-known private university in Kansai in
interdisciplinary studies after graduation.
Kim: Kim (pseudonym) was a second year student in 2010 of what I call A High
School, one of the five schools with a special program for foreign students, but she
was not in the program. She came from Da Nang, a city in the central part of
Vietnam, in February 2001, when she was in the second grade. As such, she was a
1.5 generation immigrant. Because she did not know the Japanese language, she
spent most of her school day studying the language for the first year. It took her a
few years, until the fourth and fifth grades, to be able to understand classes. Because
the school had a Vietnamese club for Vietnamese children, she participated in the
club activities—cooking Vietnamese food, performing in ethnic cultural festivals in
the city, and practicing lion dance even during summer vacation. Despite many
cultural activities in elementary school, she did not remember anything cultural,
except for the Vietnam War in a social studies class in junior high school. “I
remember learning about the war, A-bomb, and the discrimination against the
Buraku in my homeroom class.” The association of ethnic with peace education and
human rights was common among the high school students I interviewed.
Her grade was not great, but good enough to choose from several schools in her
district. She decided to go to A High School because she heard that the school was
more fun than other schools that she could have attended. She took the entrance
examination using the special measures, which she learned from her homeroom
teacher. A High School offered several courses, and she chose an International
Course, especially English, for her concentration. She was going to take the Korean
language in the third year, but she mentioned that she wanted to study English in
junior college, and hopefully study abroad and visit her relatives in California. Her
dream was to become an interpreter for Japanese, English, and Vietnamese. She
said it must have been an influence from her father, who was a Japanese and
Vietnamese interpreter for tourists in Vietnam. Kim was one of the few immigrant
students that I interviewed who could read newspapers and write Emails in heritage
language.
The special program for foreign students at A High School was called “Tabunka
Kyōsei Kyōshitsu.” According to Kim, “tabunka kyōsei” was “people from various
cultures share with each other (tomoni wakachiau, mitaina).” She continued, “We
(students in our grade) don’t touch on the issue of tabunka kyōsei, for we are all
friends no matter where we are from (nanijin de arōto). We don’t care about a small
thing.” Kim also mentioned that she did not participate in cultural activities orga-
nized by the special program, and did not know any of “those in the special
programs” (tabunka kyōsei no kotachi), although she was the president of the
student council of the school. It may have been because of a language difficulty
these students had, or because of their curriculum; the special program’s emphasis
on learning the Japanese language tended to shelter them from the rest of the
students. Whatever the reason, Kim understood that the special program called
tabunka kyōsei was for studying the Japanese language, and that she and other
Japanese-speaking students were not part of the tabunka kyōsei of the school
because they did not have any language issues. Despite cultural differences, Kim
saw a commonality among students at A High School—the sameness transcended
cultural differences, but not language differences. Kim’s understanding of tabunka
146 Y. Okubo
kyōsei was also observed among other Japan-born students or those who migrated
to Japan as children, who were culturally assimilated to Japanese. This view is
supported by another student, whom I call Maki, a graduate of a special program at
B High School and who was a freshman of a private college in Kyoto at the time of
the interview in 2010.
Maki: Maki (pseudonym) was born in Japan from a Japanese father and a Thai
mother. Her family moved to Thailand soon after her birth, and lived in Thailand
until fourth grade. During her stay in Thailand, she went to a Japanese school in
Bangkok. She spoke Japanese fluently unlike other students in the special pro-
grams. She went back to Thailand in the second year of junior high and went to an
international school. She returned to Japan right before a high school entrance
examination. She took the examination under condition 3 of “special admission
quota,” foreign nationals who transferred to a Japanese school in fourth grade and
beyond. In her case, she was also eligible for the other category for “elites,” but she
decided to take the examination for a special program in B High School because she
was not prepared. “Other students in the special program were struggling with
Japanese, but I did not have that problem,” she said. Because she did not understand
terms in math and other subjects, she studied in the special program. Many of the
students in the special program were Chinese, and she felt as if she was left behind
when the students in the special program communicated in the Chinese language.
She became close to a student from Peru, the only other non-Chinese student in her
grade in the special program.
Although Maki spoke Japanese fluently, she remembered spending more time
with foreign students during her high school days. It was because Japanese students
were shy, while Chinese and Peruvians were more open like the Thai. Unlike Kim’s
experience, Maki remembered foreign students in her grade not always sticking
together, but foreign students who entered 1 year later stayed together. It was
because not many of them spoke Japanese well, according to her.
She had many good memories of B High School; she found Chinese friends,
studied the reading and writing of the Thai language, and met with another Thai
student and teachers who were very supportive of foreign students. Because she
wanted to work in the service industry in the future, she decided to study English in
college.
To my question what tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence) means to her,
she said, “At B High School, they use the term tabunka rikai (multicultural
understanding), not kyōsei. It means to learn cultural differences, to understand how
people from different countries associate with each other (sesshikata, kakawar-
ikata).” But she added that Japanese students were not interested in learning about
different cultures, and they may have regarded foreign students as different. It was
because Japanese students thought they had to be like others, while foreign students
were not afraid of expressing their opinions even if their ideas were different.
At the time of the interview in February 2010, she was taking a Chinese class at
college because of the influence of her friends from high school. She said, “Students
were not interested in Asia at high school, even now at college. In high school,
Japanese students could also take a Chinese class, but no one took the class.… As
an international language, I want to learn English, and other Japanese students

probably think the same way.” After entering college, she started spending more
time with her friends in her major, English, who were mainly Japanese. It was new
and challenging for her to hang out with Japanese. Because she used her Japanese
name and she spoke Japanese fluently, unless she told others that her mother was
from Thailand, no one noticed her half-Japanese/-Thai background. “Mother is
from Thailand” was how she identified herself. Although she entered college using
the self-nomination system appealing to examiners that she could speak the Thai
language, that she won several speech contests making speeches on her experience
in Thailand and returning to Japan, that she wanted to study English, etc., she has
also learned that Japanese would prefer to be the same, and not so interested in
other cultures. This understanding helped her make a transition from a “foreign”
student at B High School to a “Japanese” college student studying English, still the
most popular “international” language in Japan.
In the special multicultural programs, students and teachers were engaged in
cultural activities. Outside these special programs, not many teachers and students
showed interest in Asian cultures, which was the actual multiculturalism for these
schools. Sachi was able to keep her identity as Chinese and her interest in cultural
differences because of her involvement with the educational program for resident
Koreans and newcomers in the neighborhood. Without the program, Sachi might
have become indifferent to her ethnic origin, as illustrated by the experiences of
Kim and Maki, and Kim’s attitude toward other foreign students in the special
program, as well as their understanding of Japanese students.
At the end, I would like to share the experiences of two Korean females, fourth-
and third- generation resident Koreans. As other scholars have studied, the resident
Korean community captures the issues of ethnicity/race, relations with the state,
culture, and identity in Japan more explicitly, for they have been in Japan over
generations. I had known both students since elementary school, and conducted
interviews separately in September and November 2009. One person was a second
year high schooler and the other just entered college at the time of the interviews.
The former, a fourth-generation resident Korean, had Korean nationality (both her
parents were Korean nationals), and the latter, a third-generation resident Korean,
had both Japanese and Korean nationalities (through her half-Japanese half-Korean
mother who maintained a Korean identity). Because both went by Korean names,
they were from families with strong awareness of being resident Koreans in Japan.
I was particularly interested in their understandings of multicultural programs in
schools in my field site.
To my question regarding her experiences in the multicultural educational
program in the elementary school, junior high school, and now, the former, who
was going to a top high school in the district and who went to an elementary school
and junior high school in the field site and one of the leaders of a neighborhood
education center for “people with different cultures,” said that she hated the peo-
ple’s views toward her for being a member of multicultural club. Although she was
teased by older students a couple times, her experience was better in elementary
school, and she did not feel ashamed of joining the club. It was because the
148 Y. Okubo
teachers were working hard to present an image of a “multicultural” school, “ap-

pealing as a multicultural school.” Once she entered junior high, the attitudes
around her changed. Being a member of the club was regarded as “not cool”
(dasai) in junior high school. She analyzed this remark as an expression of prej-
udice and a backfire of human rights education in school. Even close friends told
her that the club was “bad.” A teacher in charge of the club wanted to support the
members, but because of “poor handling by the school” (according to a staff
member of the neighborhood education center), the club members were ostracized.
After this experience in junior high school, she participated in multicultural
activities only in the neighborhood.
The latter, a third-generation resident Korean female who was in college at the
time of the interview, was also raised in a resident Korean family with a strong
awareness of their ethnic background. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her
father was an activist. Her experience with multicultural programs was through her
parents, outside the neighborhood. Since her elementary days, she stopped doing
anything multicultural. In elementary school days, she and her older brother were
teased of their ethnic background despite the school’s effort for multiculturalism. In
her high school days, her activist father went to her school to give a lecture on
minorities’ experiences in Japan. “Students equate multiculturalism with discrimi-
nation. Some understand it as a festival for international exchange,” she said.
Talking with other Chinese and Vietnamese youth who had gone through
multicultural programs at school, their sense of belonging was more toward Japan,
or in-between their parents’ cultures (or cultures that Japanese teachers associate
them with) and Japanese cultures. Because they had lived in Japan for a large part
of their lives, Japan was their home. But at the same time, they had some attach-
ment to their ancestral heritage through their ties with parents and families. In that
sense, a hybrid identity seems to be emerging in Japan in the twenty-first century.
The multicultural programs based on the local Japanese understanding of the
concept, however, had negative implications, as suggested by the experiences of the
two resident Koreans. Both stories revealed that people associate the term, “mul-
ticulturalism,” with prejudice and discrimination, which affected their everyday
experiences despite their initial participation in multicultural activities.
Discussion
Compared with other prefectures, public high schools in Osaka were progressive in
introducing a systemic way to assist foreign students and to promote multicultural
practice. Teachers working with these students were engaged with them, dedicated
to make sure that the students enjoyed their school life, performed well academi-
cally, graduated, and moved on to the next stages of their life (Shimizu 2008).
Despite these teachers and the system, foreign students were often assimilated into
Japanese culture under the homogeneous national cultural environment infiltrating

into schools even with multicultural programs. Unless they used their ethnically
distinct names and revealed their backgrounds, teachers were not aware of their
foreign roots. With the institutional arrangement to give assistance only to the
students in special courses, these high schools created an uneven condition for
foreign students in Japan. The less-supported foreign students did not want to, or
could not see themselves as being part of Japan’s multiculturalism. Some ended up
not going to high school or dropped out of high school in their first year.7 Taking
part in “local contentious practice” supporting multiculturalism in Osaka since their
elementary school days, these foreign students resulted in shaping differing sub-
jectivities regarding multiculturalism through their everyday experiences under
Japan’s macro political-economic and cultural-historic structure (Holland and Lave
2001, 2009).
Although people are culturally constructed as particular kinds of social actors
within a world made of complex social forms based on unequal power relations,
some transform the culture that made them, others reproduce the culture, and
usually some of each through their everyday experiences (Ortner 2006, p. 129). As
for the immigrant youth in this study, some dropped out of high school as they
could/did not apply for the systematic support in education or as they were reluctant
to identify themselves with foreigners to use the system, and others actively used
the system as “cultural others” to advance themselves. As for the ethnic minority
youth, third- and fourth-generation resident Koreans who went by their ethnically
distinct names, despite their initial involvement in the school’s multicultural edu-
cation programs, they became distant from multicultural education at school due to
insufficient support in school, but one remained active in multicultural activities in
the neighborhood. During my research at high schools in Osaka in 2009–2010,
immigrant youth, who arrived in Japan relatively late in elementary school and in
junior high school, were the participants of institutionalized multicultural education
at high schools, but not 1.5 generation and second generation immigrant youth.
Two conflicting dimensions of multiculturalism are proceeding among immi-
grant and ethnic minority youth in Japan as a result of institutionalized multicultural
practice—those who are actively engaged in cultural activities, and those who are
assimilated and becoming indifferent to anything cultural (except for English and
internationalization) even in the schools with these programs. As such, multicultural
practice for enhancing cultural heterogeneity remains fraught with challenges
against national cultural homogeneity.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank my field site and the participants in my research who
generously shared their experiences with me during my field research. The field research for this
study was assisted by a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program administered by the Social
Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in cooperation with and
with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
7
There are some immigrant students working for nonprofits supporting foreign residents in Japan,
but the number of these students remains small, reflecting a lack of these organizations.
150 Y. Okubo
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Chapter 11
Education for Population Control:
Migrant Children’s Education
Under New Policies in Beijing
Jiaxin Chen, Dan Wang and Yisu Zhou
China’s economic success in the past decades has been partly fueled by the
unprecedentedly large-scale internal migration of the rural labor force to urban
areas. The rapid development in urban areas is paralleled by a large population
living in poverty-stricken rural areas. The low return to agricultural production
drives rural men and women to leave their villages and seek jobs in cities. In the
meantime, the booming urban economy, especially in Beijing, Shanghai, and other
coastal cities, has been in dire need of cheap labor for their manufacturing, con-
struction, and many other low-end service industries. Both forces “push and pull”
millions of rural peasants to work in cities, making this unprecedented phenomenon
of internal migration in China.
Official statistics show that the population of rural migrant workers (waichu
nonmin gong)1 has grown steadily in recent years, from 114 million in 2003 to 132
million in 2006, 153 million in 2010, 163 million in 2012, and 168 million in 2014
(National Bureau of Statistics of China 2014). Approximately half (47 %) of the
total rural labor migration takes place across provinces, mainly from the
less-developed central and western regions to the economically more advanced
regions (ibid.). Notably, a substantial number of rural migrant workers, 35.8 million
in 2014 (ibid.), have settled permanently in cities together with their families,
despite the label of “migrant” or “floating” workers.
1
According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2013), “rural migrant workers” or
waichu nongmin gong (外出农民工) are defined as rural laborers who work and live in areas
outside the towns or townships of their residential registration (hukou, 户口) for a period longer
than six months in the survey year.
J. Chen D. Wang
University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong SAR
Y. Zhou (&)
University of Macau, Zhuhai, Hong Kong SAR
e-mail: yisu.zhou@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_11
154 J. Chen et al.
The increasing rural migrants have taken up a wide range of low-end jobs in
cities. At the national level, 53.6 % of rural migrant workers work in manufacturing
and construction industries, while 42.9 % in tertiary industries, such as wholesale
and retail services (11.4 %), neighborhood services, repair services and other ser-
vices (10.2 %), transportation, storage and post services (6.5 %), and hoteling and
catering services (6.0 %) in 2014 (ibid). In Beijing, the city under study in this
chapter, the population of rural migrant workers grows from 1.51 million in 1999 to
2.87 million in 2004, 3.7 million in 2009, and 4 million in 2010 (Lai 2011; Lv and
Wang 2010; Wu 2006). In 2004, around 84 % of rural migrant workers, repre-
senting at least 2.4 million people, worked in construction, manufacturing, and
service industries (Wu 2006). It is estimated that, in 2010, the total migrant pop-
ulation, among which 78.2 % (3.13 million) holding rural household registration,
provides over 65 % of the entire labor force in Beijing’s construction and service
industries (Ga and Hong 2013). Apparently, rural migrant workers have become an
indispensable force for the nation’s economic development (Wu 2006).
Despite their remarkable contribution to the urban economy, rural migrants are
denied access to many social benefits because they do not possess local household
registration (hukou) in the receiving cities. This means that children of the rural
migrant workers are not entitled to public education in the host cities.
The number of rural migrant children in urban areas has grown continuously
over the past decades. The latest statistics from the census of 2010 estimate the total
population of migrant children at 35.8 million nationwide, a 41 % increase from the
year 2005 (All-China Women’s Federation 2013). More than 80 % (28.8 million)
of these migrant children hold rural household registration, and 41 % (14.7 million)
have reached compulsory school age (6–14 years) (ibid.). By this estimation, the
number of school-aged migrant children from rural origins may have been 11.8
million in 2010. The migrant children are highly concentrated in a few eastern,
developed provinces such as Guangdong (4.34 million children), Zhejiang, and
Jiangsu (more than 2 million each). Megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and
Shenzhen have a particularly high density of migrant children. Four out of ten
children in Shanghai and three out of ten children in Beijing are migrant children
(ibid). As educational funds and resources are managed and allocated by local
governments according to the number of registered hukou holders within each local
jurisdiction, the local governments lack incentives to accommodate migrant chil-
dren in their public school systems. As a result, a significant proportion of migrant
children, mostly from the countryside, are left with the choice of either entering an
unlicensed migrant school of extremely poor quality or attending no school at all.
This phenomenon is especially conspicuous in large cities, including Beijing,
Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Even after repeated policy mandates from the
central government urging local governments to grant equal treatment to migrant
children in the provision of education, more than 40 % of migrant children in
Shanghai and 34 % in Beijing continued to stagnate in under qualified, dilapidated
migrant schools in 2008 (Wang 2010b).
This chapter documents the latest trends in Beijing regarding rural migrant
children’s access to education. Our observations show that the educational
11 Education for Population Control: Migrant Children’s Education … 155
opportunities of migrant children in Beijing have been further reduced by new

policies launched in the past few years. Not only has their access to public schools
been further narrowed; even worse, attending unlicensed migrant schools is no
longer a sustainable option. Ultimately, many migrants will have to leave Beijing
for the sake of their children’s education. We argue, therefore, that the Beijing
municipal government is exploiting educational policies as a means of population
control.
Education for Migrant Children in Beijing
As Beijing is the capital city of China, migrants have always been visible in
Beijing. But education for migrant children did not enter the public policy discourse
until the early 2000s (Pong 2015). Beijing’s stand toward migrant children was
ambivalent in the early years and has remained defensive in recent times. The fact
that there was no official policy guidelines created excuses for local education
authorities to refuse to provide any public education to migrant children. As a
result, though the total number of migrant children quadrupled in the early 2000s,
most migrant children attended privately run, unlicensed migrant schools.
The number of migrant children attending public schools actually decreased
consistently.
The Beijing municipal government addressed the issue for the first time in 2001.
In that year, the State Council issued a “Decision over Basic Education Reforms
and Developments,” which mandated that host governments and their public
schools take primary responsibility for providing compulsory education for migrant
children (State Council 2001). This document laid out the general guidelines for
resolving the issue of migrant education. Beijing responded to the Decision by
allowing migrant children to study in its public schools as temporary students
(jiedu), but only under stringent conditions (Beijing Municipal Government 2001).
To enroll in a public school as a temporary student, migrant children in Beijing
are required to present a considerable amount of paperwork, notoriously known as
the “five certificates” (wu zheng):
• temporary residence permit
• household registration (hukou) booklet
• proof of parental employment
• proof of residency
• certificate verifying a lack of guardianship in the place of origin.
It is not easy in the first place to collect all these five certificates, and this
difficulty deters many migrant families from sending their children to public
schools. Based on a recent survey of 2425 rural migrant parents in Beijing, it is
estimated that a mere 2.76 % of such families are able to procure all five permits
(Wang 2010b, p. 83).
156 J. Chen et al.
On top of these obstacles, in 2013 and 2014, several Beijing districts started to
demand additional documents. For instance, Chao Yang District requires proof of
social security payments by the parents (Education Commission of Chao Yang
District 2014). Since China has not established a nationwide social security system
and migrant families rarely make social security payments in their host cities
because of their mobility, this additional requirement can effectively keep more
migrant children away from public schools.
New Population and Education Policies
In 2013 and 2014, migrant children’s education in Beijing was steered in a new
direction because of three national policies: the new unified hukou system, the new
national student electronic ID, and the ban on cross-district school enrollment.
The Unified Hukou System
Until 2014, China had a two-track (rural and urban) residential registration (hukou)
system. Individuals’ entitlement to public services, including education, was based
on the type of hukou. The variety and quality of public services were better for
urban hukou holders than for those holding rural hukou. However, in 2014 the
Chinese central government abolished the separate hukou tracks and launched a
unified hukou system (State Council 2014). The aim of this move was to accom-
modate large-scale domestic migration amid the rapid urbanization process. The
State Council ordinance allows conditional hukou relocation from one place to
another, making it possible for migrants to receive public services regardless of
their original place of residence. It eliminates the rural and urban categorizations of
hukou, aiming to provide universal public services to all citizens no matter where
they live.
Under the unified hukou system, megacities such as Beijing, with their high
concentration of resources, can be expected to attract more migrants, thus inten-
sifying the problem of high population density in these cities. Therefore, the
ordinance also stipulates that hukou relocation should take the host city’s size into
account. In the largest cities with populations greater than five million, such as
Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the population level needs to be “tightly con-
trolled” (State Council 2014). In other words, although the new hukou ordinance
potentially opens up urban public services to the migrant population in general, in
cities such as Beijing, the migrant population may face population control measures
that are even harsher than those used previously.
The National Student Electronic ID
The unified hukou system has been accompanied by a newly established national
student registration system. Before this reform, each student received an ID issued
by the provincial government of the student’s hukou of origin. This ID was asso-
ciated with school promotion, matriculation information, financial aid, and other
public education resources within the province. The student ID systems in different
provinces do not communicate with one another. Therefore, when a child migrates
to another province and enrolls in a public school there, she will receive another
registration ID. Given high mobility, a child may hold several student IDs from
various provinces.
The Ministry of Education initiated a singular student registration system in
2013 (Ministry of Education 2013). Its purpose is to ensure that each student
receives only one unique ID, which accompanies the student to any school that he
or she attends, regardless of location. This unique student ID will thus follow the
student through the entire educational process from elementary school to tertiary
education. The national student registration system will be maintained electroni-
cally and through online, permitting student information to be shared among local
governments nationwide. However, for migrant children, it remains unclear which
government, that of the place of origin or of the host city, should issue this singular
student ID. The central government policy does not specify an answer to this
question.
The Ban on Cross-District School Enrollment
In 2014, the Ministry of Education (MoE) released a new policy aiming to equalize
educational opportunities among schools. This policy, titled “Notice on Test-Free
Admission to Compulsory Education in the Major Large Cities,” prohibits public
schools, particularly elite schools, from using test-based screening and charging
high school choice fees to recruit students from outside the school districts they
serve. The policy targets the widespread phenomenon of school choice in large
cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, a practice that seems to allow well-off families
to enjoy higher quality educational services through payment of school choice fees.
According to the MoE timetable, by 2015 school districts must draw clear
boundaries for their service areas in large cities, Beijing included. All school-aged
children, including migrant children, must enroll in the schools designated to serve
their residence districts. The goal is to achieve a 100 % within-district enrollment
rate at the elementary level and a 90 % rate in middle schools. Little room is left for
cross-district enrollment.
Drawing on fieldwork in two elementary schools (one public school and one
unlicensed migrant school), the following sections demonstrate how these new
158 J. Chen et al.
population and educational policies diminish migrant students’ educational

opportunities in Beijing.
Methods
This research is based on observations, interviews, and school documents collected

between June 2014 and January 2015 in two elementary schools, one public school,
and one unlicensed migrant school, located in the same district in Beijing.
The public school is located on the outskirts of Beijing, more than 20 km away
from the city center. From downtown Beijing, it takes nearly an hour by subway to
get to the school. More than 80 % of students at this school are rural migrant
students. Their parents hold a wide range of jobs, including as factory workers,
street peddlers, office clerks, salesmen, waiters and waitresses, drivers, teachers, and
engineers.
The unlicensed migrant school is located more than 30 km away from the city
center, even farther than the public school. The nearest subway station is more than
10 km from the school. Reaching the school from the city center takes about one
and a half hours by subway followed by another half hour by bus. Currently, the
school has 484 students in 12 classes from first to sixth grade. The surrounding
community has a high concentration of rural migrant workers, many of whom have
lived and worked in Beijing for a long time. Most of the parents of the students at
this school are rural migrant workers who work in construction, menial services, or
manufacturing and have meager monthly incomes. Without financial support from
the government, the migrant school charges each student 1000 Chinese Yuan per
semester to cover its operational costs.
We carried out semistructured, face-to-face interviews with school principals,
middle managers, teachers, and students from both schools. We also conducted
telephone interviews with parents about their children’s access to public schools in
Beijing. In addition, we observed school activities such as the school opening
ceremony as well as daily interactions among the teaching staff and between
teachers and students to triangulate the interview data. Finally, we collected school
documents such as school policies, regulations, and student registration records
from both schools to verify policy information and the enrollment situation.
Findings
Our data reveal that in 2014 it became more difficult than before for rural migrant
children to access public schools. This is demonstrated by the enrollment statistics
in the public primary school in our study. As Table 11.1 shows, 82 migrant children
were newly enrolled in the school for the school year 2014–15, accounting for
approximately half of the total grade 1 enrollment for that year. This figure is far
Table 11.1 Student Grade Local students Migrant students Total

enrollment by grade and
student origin in the public Grade 1 83 82 165
primary school in 2014–2015 Grade 2 27 207 234
Grade 3 22 151 173
Grade 4 15 122 137
Grade 5 7 147 154
Grade 6 9 121 130
Figures of student enrollment from second grade to sixth grade
are based on school statistical reports issued in the second
semester in 2013–2014, and may change slightly in 2014–2015
due to the transfer of students
lower than the figures for past years, as indicated by the enrollment breakdown of
higher grades, in which close to 90 % of the admitted students are migrant children.
There seems to have been a significant reduction in the enrollment of migrant
students in public schools. There are two reasons for the change in 2014–2015.
First, many local Beijing students who might previously have attended better
schools in downtown areas now had to come back to this school because of the ban
on cross-district school choice, as evidenced by the larger grade 1 intake of local
students for 2014–2015 compared with previous years. Second, the government
raised the bar for migrant children to access the public school system, which closed
the door to public schools for many rural migrant children.
The Backflow of Local Beijing Students
Understandably, public schools in Beijing give admission priority to local students

since they are financed by local government funds and obliged to satisfy the edu-
cational needs of local residents first. Each year, the places that remained in the
public school after the recruitment of local children would be opened to migrant
children. The principal in the public school under study told us that before the ban
on school choice, most local children in the community chose to attend schools in
downtown Beijing, where school quality and resources were usually better than in
the school on the outskirts of the city. As a result, this school had a hard time filling
up its seats with enough students. The large number of rural migrant children in the
neighborhood helped the school solve the problem of decreasing enrollment.
Indeed, the practice of school choice is common among Beijing parents. It is
widely acknowledged in the media that families in peripheral regions of Beijing
prefer key-point schools in downtown districts over their neighborhood schools,
first, because they believe the latter to offer higher quality education, and second,
because they want to avoid the increasing numbers of migrant children in peripheral
public schools (China Youth Net 2010). In order to send their children to downtown
schools, these parents have to rent or purchase an apartment in a downtown area,
160 J. Chen et al.
which represents a significant expense (Beijing Evening Newspaper 2008). Because

of the inward flow of local students toward central Beijing areas, peripherally
located public schools, like the one in our study, have a higher incentive to take in
rural migrant children.
However, the ban on cross-district school choice in 2014 forced local students
back to their own district schools. In the public school, we observed the backflow of
local students occupied half of the school’s seats in grade 1. In effect, the ban on
school choice decreased the number of seats available to rural migrant students
almost by half. On the other hand, it can be inferred that the public schools in
downtown Beijing experienced a sudden student loss and thus had more vacancies.
Ideally, the rural migrant children could consider applying to the downtown
schools, as suggested by a vice principal we interviewed in the public school. In
reality, however, this is not a viable option for most rural migrant families. The
primary deterrent is the cost of housing: rents in downtown Beijing are too
expensive for rural migrant workers to afford. In 2013, the average monthly income
of rural migrant workers was 2609 Yuan (National Bureau of Statistics of China
2014). Fifty percent of migrant workers in the construction industry in Beijing earn
a monthly salary between 1500 and 2500 Yuan (Che 2010). In contrast, the rent for
a small single room in downtown Beijing is no less than 1500 Yuan per month, not
to mention the price of an apartment for a whole family. Their meager incomes thus
confine rural migrant families to the more remote regions and schools in Beijing.
With the backflow of local students, one would expect that the public school in
our study would have recruited enough first graders to fill up its capacity. But to our
surprise, the school had unfilled vacancies. In the past years, when there were more
school places available to migrant children, the supply of seats was not sufficient to
admit all qualified migrant children. Yet in 2014, the vice principal admitted: “We
have a few more seats available, but there are not enough migrant children who are
qualified to enroll.” In other words, migrant children’s shrinking access to public
schools was only partially caused by the backflow of local students. The increased
requirements for qualification seem to have played another important role.
Raised Bars to Enter Public Schools
As mentioned earlier, for a migrant student to enroll in a public school, the key is to
obtain all of the “five certificates.” With all five certificates, the student can obtain a
“temporary study permit” (jiedu zheng) issued by the district educational bureau in
Beijing. Without this permit, a public school is not allowed to admit the migrant
child.
It was already very difficult for rural migrant workers to collect all five certifi-
cates, because that obtaining each certificate required extensive documentation. For
instance, to apply for a temporary resident permit, the migrant worker needs to
present to the local police station his or her ID card, a rental contract, the landlord’s
ID card, and the landlord’s ownership certificate for the property in question.
The rental contract, in particular, could be a big problem. Since many migrant
workers rent shoddy apartments on flexible terms, and since many landlords want to
avoid taxes there is often no formal contract of the rental arrangement. Even when
the application for a temporary residence permit is successful, the permit is valid for
one-year only and thus needs to be renewed every year. Another example is the
requirement regarding proof of parental employment. The migrant worker is
required to present a legal employment contract and a photocopy of the business
license of the company he or she is working for. However, an investigation of 615
rural migrant workers in 31 provinces showed that 73.28 % of the workers were
employed without a legal contract (Yu 2014). The lack of legal protection for rural
migrant workers thus further jeopardizes the educational opportunities of rural
migrant children.
The situation worsened in 2014 because the district education bureaus in Beijing
added proof of social security payments to the already onerous list of requirements.
For instance, in Chao Yang District, proof of social security payments made in
Beijing by both parents for a minimum of three consecutive months is required.
Chao Yang District is not the only one to have added new requirements on top of
the “five certificates.” In Tong Zhou District, migrant parents need to prove that
they have paid for social security in the district continuously between January 2013
and March 2014 (Southern Weekend News 2014). This is a significant hurdle since
it is rare that migrant workers pay for social security in their host cities, because in
China social security is tied to local governments and is not transferable between
regions.
In addition, migrant parents were given a ridiculously short time to obtain this
newly required document. According to the official schedule, migrant parents
wanting to enroll their children in public schools had to obtain a temporary study
permit and sign up in the national electronic student information system to apply for
a student ID. The online system was open only for one month between May 1
and 31, 2014. However, the rural migrant parents we interviewed reported that the
official announcement about required proof of social security payments was pub-
licized on the school district’s official website only in late-April 2014. Before that,
the parents were not informed of the sudden change in the requirements and were
left with little time to prepare for it.
Moreover, the process of verifying the documents became much more rigorous
in 2014. For example, the certificate verifying a child’s lack of guardianship in his
or her hukou of origin has to bear official stamps from both the township gov-
ernment and the village committee of the migrant student’s hometown. A migrant
parent we interviewed described his experience with the district educational bureau:
The requirements [for documents] are extremely strict this year…. We collected both
stamps, from the township and the village. The stamp from the village committee is not
very clear, but the one from the township government is very clear. We were asked to go
back to get the village stamp again. It costs a lot of time and money for us to take a trip back
and forth to our hometown in Hunan Province [1,000 miles from Beijing]. But they didn’t
approve our certificate so we had to go back to our home village again to get another stamp.
162 J. Chen et al.
Obviously, the local governments in Beijing reduced access to public schools for
rural migrant children in 2014 by raising the bar for admission. These measures
effectively exclude more rural migrant children from public schools. Therefore, the
public primary school we investigated still had spare seats, even with a reduced
capacity to accommodate migrant children.
The Singular Student ID and a Blow

to Unlicensed Migrant Schools
Where can migrant children who are excluded from public schools go for their
education? Until 2014, there were three basic options: licensed migrant schools,
unlicensed migrant schools, and, finally, public schools in the children’s home-
towns should they return there. In 2009, there were 139,000 school-aged migrant
children attending migrant schools in Beijing (Wang 2010a). By June 2014, there
were 130 migrant schools in Beijing. Of these 67 were licensed, that is, recognized
by the government, with an enrollment of around 50,000 migrant students (New
Citizen Program 2014). More than 40,000 additional migrant students were served
by the 63 other, unlicensed migrant schools (ibid.).
Before 2014, licensed and unlicensed migrant schools had few differences from
the perspective of rural migrant children in terms of school quality or future edu-
cational prospects. Migrant children educated in either type of school still had the
chance to get into a public middle school after the completion of primary education,
so a pathway to the public education system remained open. The migrant school in
our research was not licensed by the government. Even so, most of its graduates had
been admitted by the public middle school in the district in recent years. The school
principal testified:
It was quite easy in the past. Even for students with mediocre academic performance, we
could negotiate with the public middle school for admissions. We could provide the stu-
dents with good recommendation letters from the principal. In that way, the public middle
school was willing to accept the students.
That was the story in the past. But in 2014, with the initiation of the singular
student registration ID system nationwide, unlicensed migrant schools in Beijing
faced a new disadvantage. The district education authorities did not grant unli-
censed migrant schools access to the online electronic student information system.
This meant that the 40,000 or more students currently studying in the 63 unlicensed
migrant schools could not obtain a national student ID in Beijing. Further, any new
students admitted to these schools would have no chance to get singular student IDs
in the future, at least not in Beijing. Without a national student ID, a student would
be basically eliminated from the formal educational system. Therefore, the Beijing
government literally closed the pathway from unlicensed migrant schools to its
public schools.
What was the situation for migrant schools with licenses? Not much better. First,
the district education authorities forbade licensed migrant schools from recruiting
migrant children without the “five certificates” (Xinhua Net 2014). Therefore, the
entrance requirements for these schools were raised as high as those for public
schools. Even if the licensed migrant schools accepted migrant children without the
proper certificates in violation of government regulations, they could not give these
students the electronic student IDs (Gong et al. 2014).
Without the electronic student ID, the connection between elementary migrant
schools and public middle schools was broken. This is why only two out of more
than 70 graduates of the unlicensed migrant school in this study managed to gain
admission to a public middle school in Beijing in 2014. To acquire a student ID, the
child had to leave Beijing to attend school either back in his or her hometown or in
another city where acquisition of a national student ID was possible.
Our interviews showed that some migrant parents did send their children back
home for public education in order to obtain legal student status for them. In the
unlicensed migrant school under study, parents of children in all grades had pulled
their children out of the school and sent them back home. Some migrant parents had
left Beijing together with their children. In a phone interview with a migrant family,
we found out that the whole family had moved from Beijing to another city, where
the public education system was not as inimical as in Beijing.
Still, some migrant parents decided to keep their children in Beijing and in this
migrant school even without a national student ID. Often the plan was dictated by
expediency. One parent said in an interview:
[My son] is too young to take care of himself at home at this moment. He is attending this
migrant school without the national student ID. I will let him go back to our home village
and attend school there when he is older.
As long as the migrant children expect to go to public high school or university,

they will ultimately need the ID to participate in the entrance examinations.
Therefore, sooner or later they will be forced to leave Beijing, and in some cases
they will do so together with their parents. Such loss of students would cause
additional financial difficulties for unlicensed migrant schools. But more impor-
tantly, the Beijing government could achieve its population control goal by driving
out some migrant families through its educational policies.
Conclusions
Rural migrant children have always had to overcome many hurdles to receive
education in public schools in Beijing. This research shows that in 2014 the situ-
ation was aggravated, unexpectedly, by three new policies, namely, the unified
164 J. Chen et al.
hukou system, the national electronic student ID system, and the ban on
cross-district school enrollment. None of the three policies was meant to target the
migrant population. However, the Beijing government has employed these new
policy initiatives to launch a silent movement that in effect has driven many migrant
children and their families out of the city.
With the ban on cross-district school enrollment, local Beijing students who
would prefer to attend schools in downtown districts flow back to their neighbor-
hood schools on the outskirts of the city. The returned local students occupy a
significant proportion of public school places in peripheral regions of Beijing, thus
narrowing the space available to migrant children in these public schools. The
reduced access to public schools is coupled with additional requirements on doc-
umentation. On top of the “five certificates,” migrant families are required to
provide proof of social security payments in order to obtain the temporary study
permit necessary to enroll in a public school. This additional requirement effectively
excludes many rural migrant children from the public education system.
To serve better those migrant children who could not be admitted into public
schools, the local government could have strengthened the migrant schools, both
licensed and unlicensed, in terms of instruction, facilities, and staffing. However, the
government manipulated the new student ID policy to make another assault on
unlicensed migrant schools. It refused to issue national student IDs to children who
studied in such migrant schools, thus forcing them to leave Beijing. Our interviews
with migrant parents clearly show the fate of these migrant children. Some have
returned to their hometowns for schooling, while others have left Beijing altogether
with their whole families. Those migrant families who have kept their children in the
unlicensed migrant schools are aware that sooner or later they will have to leave, too,
because the children cannot go far in their education without a national student ID.
Beijing, with its 13 million residents, is one of the megacities that are mandated
by the central government to control their population size, according to the new
hukou reform. It seems that educational policies in Beijing have lost much of their
humanistic purpose, at least for migrant children, and have become a tool of
population control. Population control is a reasonable goal for Beijing, given its
massive consumption of resources and its heavy pollution levels. However, the
question is why rural migrant families should be the primary target of population
control measures. Our investigation reveals how eager the local government is to
get rid of the poor, marginalized rural migrant children and their families. They are
the group that has benefited the least from the economic growth of the city. And
now they are the first to bear the costs of the blind urbanization and the frenzy of
expansion that have resulted from the city’s shortsighted policies over the past
decades. It is a shame on Beijing, the capital city of China, to drive out rural
migrant workers by denying migrant children a proper education.
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Part III
Global and Local Possibilities in
Multicultural Education
Chapter 12
Multicultural Policy and Ethnolinguistic
Minority Learners’ Academic Engagement
Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham, Hara Ku and Moosung Lee
Introduction
As an integral component of the multicultural policy scheme, multicultural edu-

cation has been receiving more attention from educational policymakers and
researchers around the world (Banks 2008; Cha and Ham 2014; Grant and Lei
2001). Despite the concerted attention given to multicultural education as a policy
agenda, systematic research on how effectively such policy effort has achieved the
intended goals is less extensive than might be expected. As an attempt toward
filling this void in research, this study aims to develop an empirical knowledge base
that provides insight into how student learning varies depending on multicultural
policy contexts. A particular analytic attention is given to examining the effect of
multicultural curriculum policy on student engagement in learning by analyzing
extensive international data from the TIMSS 2011 survey.1
An earlier version was presented in the 2014 annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, Philadelphia, PA. Another version was prepared in Korean for
Multicultural Education Studies, Vol. 7, pp. 123–142. The work on the current version was
supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government
(NRF-2014S1A3A2044609).
1
TIMSS is the abbreviation of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study con-
ducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.
Y.-K. Cha S.-H. Ham (&) H. Ku

M. Lee

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_12
170 Y.-K. Cha et al.
The focus of the present study centers on the academic engagement of ethno-
linguistic minority learners.2 Specifically, the following questions are examined:
(1) How does ethnolinguistic minority learners’ academic engagement differ across
countries in comparison to that of nonminority students? (2) How is such
cross-national variation associated with multicultural curriculum policy arrange-
ments? As an exploratory cross-national analysis of the effect of multicultural
curriculum policy, this study hopes to make a unique contribution to the evolving
debates on the institutionalization of multicultural education and yield implications
for policy development and evaluation.
Background
A large body of research suggests that the adoption of multicultural curriculum

policies around the world can be seen as an institutionalized routine whose legit-
imacy is closely associated with an evolving reconceptualization of citizenship and
personhood in the context of a diverse society.3 The growing emphasis on multi-
cultural education across national education systems in recent decades may be
understood largely as a phenomenon that is deeply embedded in the wider insti-
tutional environment, where the collective meaning and value of multicultural
citizenship is taken for granted as an integral element of educational policy (Cha
and Ham 2014; Ramirez et al. 2009). It appears in an increasing number of
countries that multicultural or intercultural competence has gained substantial
legitimacy as another type of basic literacy that is required of tomorrow’s world
citizens; the major goals of multicultural education are frequently elaborated in
terms of how to help school children grasp a deep understanding of multicultural
human diversity, so that they can develop their identities as citizens of the global
community (Cha et al. 2012).
Such structural legitimation and discursive elaboration of multicultural education
implies that the institutionalization of multicultural curriculum policies around the
world is largely based on highly rationalized public discourse. Such discourse
usually posits that education should empower all future citizens to become more
capable and responsible members of society regardless of their sociocultural group
memberships; the usefulness of policies based on such discourse is rarely ques-
tioned in most education systems (Meyer et al. 2010; Sutton 2005). Multicultural
education as a policy agenda epitomizes such discourse, as it is frequently
2
The term “ethnolinguistic minority learners” is operationalized in this study as the group of children
who meet both of the following conditions: Children (1) who have at least one foreign-born parent
and (2) whose primary language at home differs from the language of assessment in school.
3
In this respect, Sutton (2005) has noted that although each national debate on cultural diversity in
education reflects the aspects of diversity that are unique to a given particular country, the uni-
versal purpose of schooling as incorporation of future citizens into civil society renders a common
framework for the formulation of multicultural education policies across different countries.
12 Multicultural Policy and Ethnolinguistic Minority Learners’ … 171
conceptualized as a tool to prepare future citizens to develop the knowledge and

skills needed to live in a culturally diverse society, where the global and the local
constantly intersect rather than constituting a polarized dichotomy (Cha et al. 2012).
Despite the spread of multicultural education as a policy agenda around the
world, little systematic effort has been made to understand whether such policy
development has really contributed to effectively supporting diverse children’s
engagement in learning. We suspect that such a lack of research is largely due to the
very nature of multicultural policy as a discursive practice that has been institu-
tionalized to the degree to which the significance of multicultural education is rarely
questioned. In particular, the effect of multicultural curriculum policy has never
been explored in a systematic manner on an international scale, notwithstanding the
considerable accumulation of research on the importance of culturally responsive
and multicultural curriculum design as a means of addressing the learning needs of
diverse students in different parts of the world (Eldering 1996; Ladson-Billings
1995; Phillion et al. 2011). As an exploratory attempt to fill this void in research,
this study intends to empirically examine if multicultural curriculum policy has
achieved its intended results, particularly in terms of the academic enjoyment, and
performance of children from families with ethnolinguistic minority backgrounds,
who have been reported to face various challenges in their learning experiences
(Mahalingam and McCarthy 2000; Miller et al. 2009; Zhou 1997).
Data and Method
The primary data for this study came from the TIMSS 2011 eighth-grade mathe-
matics dataset. The sample design of this survey dataset was intended to provide
accurate estimates of the nationally representative eighth-grade student population
within each participating country. In addition to data on sampled students, a large
amount of information about their learning environments was also gathered in this
dataset. The hierarchical nature of the dataset necessitated a two-stage sample
design, whereby a systematic probability proportional-to-size sample of schools
was selected at the first sampling stage, and one or more intact classes of students
were sampled per school with an equal probability of selection at the second stage.
Since the focus of the present study lies in examining the academic engagement of
ethnolinguistic minority students, countries that are extremely homogeneous in terms
of the ethnolinguistic composition were excluded from our sample.4 Consequently,
our sample included 157,458 students across 32 countries for which complete data
4
Countries having less than .5 % of ethnolinguistic minority students in the TIMSS 2011
eighth-grade mathematics dataset were excluded from our sample.
necessary for this study were available.5 Based on the data, a hierarchical linear
modeling analysis was first conducted within each country in order to estimate the
effect of ethnolinguistic minority status on student engagement in learning in terms of
both academic enjoyment and performance; then, a series of cross-national regression
analyses was performed to examine how this effect varied depending on the level of
multicultural curriculum policy development in each country.
Academic enjoyment was measured by five survey items answered by individual
students. (1) “I enjoy learning mathematics,” (2) “I wish I did not have to study
mathematics” (reverse-coded), (3) “Mathematics is boring” (reverse-coded), (4) “I
learn many interesting things in mathematics,” and (5) “I like mathematics.” The
variable, the mean of the five items, ranged from one for the lowest level of enjoyment
to four for the highest level, which was then transformed to a z-score within each
country with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. For the academic
performance measure, mathematics achievement scores of individual students were
used. This variable was also transformed to a z-score within each country analyzed.
Using a hierarchical linear modeling analysis (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002), both
student-level and school-level variables were simultaneously considered to explain
individual students’ engagement in learning. At level-1, for ith student in jth school,
student engagement in learning, StuLearnij, is expressed as follows:
StuLearnij ¼ b0j þ b1j ðMinorStatusÞij þ b2j ðParentEdÞij þ b3j ðEdCapitalÞij

þ rij ; rij N 0; r2 ;
where b0j is the intercept for school j, and baj for 1 a 3 is the slope for each
level-1 variable, whereas rij is a random error. MinorStatusij is a dichotomous
variable indicating whether studentij is from a family with an ethnolinguistic
minority background or not. Two level-1 control variables are included in the
model, including ParentEdij, which is the parental education level of studentij, and
EdCapitalij, which captures the amount of educational capital available to studentij
as measured by education-related possessions at home. At level-2, the intercept, b0j,
is specified as follows:
b0j ¼ c00 þ c01 ðSchoolPovertyÞj þ u0j ; u0j N ð0; sÞ;
where c00 is a constant, and c01 is the slope for SchoolPovertyj, which is a level-2
control variable measuring the level of school poverty. This variable is included in
the model as a proxy for the overall socioeconomic status of schoolj. A random
error, u0j, has been added to the model in light of the possibility that the mean of
5
The 32 countries were as follows: Armenia; Australia; Bahrain; England; Finland; Georgia;
Ghana; Indonesia; Iran, Islamic Rep. of; Israel; Italy; Jordan; Kazakhstan; Lebanon; Lithuania;
Macedonia, FYR; Malaysia; Morocco; New Zealand; Oman; Qatar; Russian Federation; Saudi
Arabia; Singapore; Slovenia; Sweden; Syrian Arab Republic; Thailand; Tunisia; Turkey; Ukraine;
United States.
StuLearnij may vary randomly between schools due to some factors unique to
individual schools. Regarding the slopes in the level-1 equation, all slopes were
treated simply as fixed, specified as follows:
bpj ¼ cp0 for 1 p 3:
All variables in the model, except MinorStatusij, were standardized into z-scores
with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one; MinorStatusij, the only dummy
variable in the model, was grand-mean centered.6
The effect of ethnolinguistic minority status on academic engagement, expressed
as c10 in our within-nation hierarchical linear model presented above, was regressed
against the extent to which each country developed a multicultural curriculum
policy. It should be noted that the statistical significance level for c10 cannot be
compared across countries because the sample size for this study varied consider-
ably, ranging from 3105 for Ukraine to 9587 for the United States. Thus, for each
country, the p-value for c10 was standardized conservatively to sample size 3000, as
expressed as follows:
pstan ¼ p ðnc = 3000Þ0:5 ;
where is nc is the student sample size for country c.7 The standardized p-value of
0.05 was used as the threshold for statistical significance; an insignificant c10 was
treated as zero, while the c10 coefficient was retained where significant.
Finally, for a dependent variable Yc = c10c for both academic enjoyment and
performance, it was modeled as shown below:
Yc ¼ b0 þ b1 ðMulticulPolÞc þ b2 ðProporMinorÞc þ b3 ðGiniÞc þ ec ;
where MulticulPolc is an index of the degree to which multiculturalism has been

integrated into the national curriculum standards of countryc (x̄ = .71, SD = .70).8
Two control variables were included, which were ProporMinorc and Ginic, the
former being the proportion of ethnolinguistic minority students in countryc
(x̄ = .47, SD = .49), and the latter the Gini coefficient of countryc (x̄ = 3.74,
SD = .72). ɛc is the error term.
6
Detailed results of the hierarchical linear model for each country are presented in Appendix.
7
See Good (1992) and Woolley (2003) for details about standardizing p-values from different
sources with varying sample sizes.
8
MulticulPol, constructed based on data from the TIMSS 2007 Curriculum Questionnaire, is also
highly correlated with the MIPEX education policy index (Cha and Ham 2014). The MIPEX, or
the Migrant Integration Policy Index, is an ongoing project led by the British Council and the
Migration Policy Group to create a range of cross-national comparative indices measuring migrant
integration policies in EU member states and some other countries. The MulticulPol values for
Finland and Macedonia, missing in the original index, were imputed by using a linear regression
for MulticulPol predicted by the MIPEX education policy index. The results reported in this study
did not meaningfully change, regardless of inclusion of the two countries in our data.
Results
Ethnolinguistic minority students’ academic engagement varied substantially across

the 32 countries analyzed. Such cross-national variation is clearly shown in
Figs. 12.1 and 12.2, which report our hierarchical linear model’s coefficients for the
effect of individual children’s ethnolinguistic minority status on their academic
engagement in terms of academic enjoyment (c10c_enjoy) and performance
(c10c_perform) in each country. For example, ethnolinguistic minority students’
engagement in learning was fairly high in Australia, England, New Zealand, and
Singapore with respect to both enjoyment and performance, while ethnolinguistic
minority students were significantly disadvantaged in Ghana and Morocco in both
measures. The results reported in Table 12.1 show that the effect of students’
ethnolinguistic minority status on their academic engagement depends considerably
on the level of the institutionalization of multicultural curriculum policy in a given
country. This finding gives credence to the possibility that the level of ethnolin-
guistic minority students’ academic engagement is less likely to be lower than that
of nonminority students if they attend school in a country where a set of curriculum
standards is present into which multiculturalism has been effectively integrated.
This cross-national pattern remains statistically significant after controlling for the
proportion of ethnolinguistic minority students and the Gini coefficient in each
country.
Fig. 12.1 The effect of ethnolinguistic minority status on academic enjoyment, by country. Note
Regression coefficients (c10) from hierarchical linear modeling analyses were reported, where
significant at p 0.05; p-values were standardized to sample size 3000 in each country
Fig. 12.2 The effect of ethnolinguistic minority status on academic performance, by country.
Note Regression coefficients (c10) from hierarchical linear modeling analyses were reported, where
significant at p 0.05; p-values were standardized to sample size 3000 in each country
Discussion
In recent decades, multiculturalism has emerged as an important policy issue in an

increasing number of national education systems. With the evolving globalization
processes that involve the rapid increase in international migration on a global
scale, policy circles around the world have paid sustained attention to multicultual
policy and its significance in education. Despite the spread of multicultural policies
across countries, little has been done for systematic evaluations of those policies.
Given the rising popularity of multicultural education around the world, reflective
evaluations of current curricular policies on multicultural education are necessary to
better assess their intended and unintended effects on student engagement in
learning. Without such reflective procedures, multicultural education might remain
only as a hortatory policy element whose impact on lived experiences in the
classroom might be limited in many ways.
As an exploratory attempt in this direction in research, this study empirically
examines the effect of multicultural policy on ethnolinguistic minority children’s
academic engagement. Our analysis of extensive data from approximately 157
thousand students across 32 countries indicates that the degree of institutionalization
of multicultural curriculum policy in a national education system is fairly strongly
associated with the level of ethnolinguistic minority children’s engagement in
learning.9 This finding provides a piece of suggestive evidence that multicultural
9
For similar findings, see immigrant integration policy evaluations conducted by Yang et al.
(2015) and Yang and Ham (2015).
Table 12.1 Multicultural curriculum policy and its effect on the academic engagement of
ethnolinguistic minority students as compared to that of nonminority students: OLS regressions
I Academic enjoyment (n = 32)
I-a I-b
Coeff. (SE) Coeff. (SE)
MulticulPol (b1) .114† (.058) .117* (.055)
ProporMinor (b2) .127 (.078)
Gini (b3) −.096† (.053)
Intercept (b0) .029 (.057) .266 (.205)
R2 .113 .263
II Academic performance (n = 32)
II-a II-b
Coeff. (SE) Coeff. (SE)
MulticulPol (b1) .172** (.052) .159** (.049)
ProporMinor (b2) .170* (.068)
Gini (b3) .032 (.047)
Intercept (b0) −.210*** (.051) −.400* (.180)
R2 .266 .408
†p .10; *p .05; **p .01; ***p .001
policy, if firmly institutionalized and successfully implemented in an education

system, may really work toward educational equity in multicultural contexts.
Sustained shared efforts should be undertaken to ensure that all school children,
regardless of their sociocultural group memberships, are provided with meaningful
learning opportunities to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to live
in a culturally and ethnolinguistically diverse society.
The findings from the present study call for more extensive research to evaluate
various intended and unintended effects of diverse forms of multicultural policy in
varying contexts. A potentially fruitful area of future research would be to examine
how varying types and combinations of policy instruments have been used in
different countries to support diverse students and how their learning opportunities
and outcomes vary depending on the resulting policy context of each country.
12
Appendix: HLM Analyses of Academic Engagement: A Summary of Regression Coefficients
Academic enjoyment
Level-1 Level-2 Level-1 Level-2
MinorStatus ParentEd EdCapital SchoolPoverty df df
Coeff. (SE) Coeff. (SE) Coeff. (SE) Coeff. (SE)
1 Armenia −.311 (.197) .119*** (.018) .083*** (.018) .055 (.039) 5060 151
2 Australia .548*** (.066) .083*** (.017) .084*** .019) −.056 (.033) 6750 275
3 Bahrain .154** (.059) .062*** (.016) .047** (.018) .037 (.029) 4116 93
4 England .461*** (.065) .101*** (.017) .053* (.022) .014 (.060) 3614 116
5 Finland .427*** (.106) .183*** (.018) .076*** (.018) .006 (.032) 4050 143
6 Georgia −.081 (.243) .076*** (.020) .097*** (.023) .133 (.084) 3659 170
7 Ghana −.223** (.078) .010 (.016) −.009 (.018) −.010 (.035) 5570 159
8 Indonesia −.342 (.239) .011 (.018) .069*** (.020) .081* (.039) 5238 151
9 Iran −.429* (.219) .003 (.018) .103*** (.019) .032 (.025) 5283 236
10 Israel −.208* (.095) .041** (.016) .037* (.017) .038 (.030) 4013 149
11 Italy −.063 (.095) .101*** (.017) .034* (.017) .017 (.033) 3721 195
12 Jordan −.081 (.085) .066*** (.015) .065*** .016) .094* (.039) 6533 228
Multicultural Policy and Ethnolinguistic Minority Learners’ …
13 Kazakhstan .019 (.209) .081*** (.020) .107*** (.023) .055 (.040) 3833 145
14 Lebanon −.100 (.072) .066** (.021) .028 (.022) .032 (.038) 3223 143
15 Lithuania .130 (.202) .072*** (.017) .045*** (.013) .048 (.033) 4472 139
16 Macedonia, FYR −.197 (.140) .075*** (.021) .006 (.022) .078* (.039) 3145 148
17 Malaysia −.067 (.105) .032* (.017) .059*** (.015) .000 (.032) 5423 178
18 Morocco −.409** (.163) −.002 (.015) .094*** (.018) −.026 (.022) 7165 276
19 New Zealand .492*** (.065) .061*** (.015) .049** (.016) .120*** (.033) 4811 156
(continued)
177
(continued)
178

20 Oman −.126* (.059) .044** (.015) .134*** (.017) .005 (.026) 7837 321
21 Qatar −.005 (.068) .023 (.020) .107*** (.024) .021 (.025) 3978 107
22 Russian Fed. .064 (.148) .072*** (.020) .067*** (.018) −.006 (.031) 4655 208
23 Saudi Arabia .130 (.071) .036 (.020) .067*** (.020) .036 (.039) 3876 151
24 Singapore .200*** (.034) .034** (.013) .054*** (.016) −.013 (.022) 5809 163
25 Slovenia .054 (.096) .042** (.016) .073*** (.014) .017 (.032) 4089 184
26 Sweden .545*** (.060) .127*** (.015) .085*** (.019) .020 (.033) 4925 151
27 Syrian Arab Republic −.437* (.195) .027 (.020) .070*** (.021) .018 (.028) 3257 132
28 Thailand −.302 (.191) −.030 (.016) .083*** (.018) .061 (.036) 5719 170
29 Tunis ia .015 (.110) .022 (.017) .062*** (.018) .016 (.029) 4440 204
30 Turkey −.135 (.227) .075*** (.016) .005 (.017) .032 (.028) 6352 237
31 Ukraine −.108 (.074) .073*** (.022) .059** (.020) .058 (.043) 3100 146
32 United States .206*** (.039) .017 (.011) .073*** (.015) .066** (.025) 9582 499
*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001
Y.-K. Cha et al.
Academic performance
12

1 Armenia −.277 (.160) .174*** (.017) .075*** (.016) −.120* (.052) 5060 151
2 Australia .250*** (.061) .074*** (.012) .079*** (.013) −.323*** (.059) 6750 275
3 Bahrain .032 (.044) .144*** (.013) .090*** (.019) −.165** (.063) 4116 93
4 England .180*** (.047) .076*** (.011) .059*** (.010) −.225** (.081) 3614 116
5 Finland −.150 (.163) .186*** (.015) .087*** (.017) −.051 (.037) 4050 143
6 Georgia −.506 (.289) .172*** (.018) .112*** (.019) −.073 (.056) 3659 170
7 Ghana −.189** (.059) .013 (.014) −.033* (.014) −.135* (.061) 5570 159
8 Indonesia −.672*** (.109) .103*** (.015) .012 (.018) −.237*** (.050) 5238 151
9 Iran −.365* (.167) .111*** (.016) .113*** (.015) −.252*** (.040) 5283 236
10 Israel .070 (.053) .156*** (.014) .107*** (.017) −.277*** (.033) 4013 149
11 Italy −.409*** (.091) .184*** (.017) .062*** (.016) −.216*** (.045) 3721 195
12 Jordan −.188** (.074) .166*** (.013) .114*** (.016) −.158*** (.037) 6533 228
13 Kazakhstan .106 (.113) .086*** (.015) .084*** (.017) −.015 (.067) 3833 145
14 Lebanon −.013 (.052) .114*** (.016) .041* (.021) −.330*** (.048) 3223 143
15 Lithuania .052 (.131) .160*** (.017) .141*** (.017) (.043) 4472 139
Multicultural Policy and Ethnolinguistic Minority Learners’ …
−.164***
16 Macedonia, FYR .124 (.157) .209*** (.018) .141*** (.017) −.171*** (.040) 3145 148
17 Malaysia .147* (.066) −.013 (.010) .078*** (.010) −.156** (.063) 5423 178
18 Morocco −.311*** (.086) .121*** (.014) .129*** (.015) −.156*** (.035) 7165 276
19 New Zealand .165** (.065) .116*** (.011) .134*** (.019) −.308*** (.048) 4811 156
20 Oman −.033 (.045) .137*** (.013) .190*** (.012) −.108*** (.029) 7837 321
(continued)
179
(continued)
180

21 Qatar .180*** (.048) .134*** (.017) .050** (.019) .017 (.061) 3978 107
22 Russian Fed. −.247* (.102) .128*** (.015) .031* (.014) −.149** (.055) 4655 208
23 Saudi Arabia .158 (.101) .140*** (.015) .080*** (.018) −.055 (.048) 3876 151
24 Singapore 172*** (.027) .095*** (.013) .114*** (.013) −.293*** (.052) 5809 163
25 Slovenia −.643*** (.085) .200*** (.019) .069*** (.016) −.074* (.032) 4089 184
26 Sweden −.191*** (.056) .207*** (.015) .120*** (.015) −.130*** (.036) 4925 151
27 Syrian Arab Republic −.100 (.133) .097*** (.021) .018 (.020) −.083 (.047) 3257 132
28 Thailand −.324 (.197) .040*** (.012) .042*** (.012) −.181** (.059) 5719 170
29 Tunisia −.313*** (.071) .117*** (.016) .108*** (.019) −.140*** (.033) 4440 204
30 Turkey −.430** (.160) .179*** (.015) .162*** (.017) −.188*** (.039) 6352 237
31 Ukraine −.009 (.061) .185*** (.019) .153*** (.023) −.020 (.056) 3100 146
32 United States .012 (.032) .058*** (.009) .055*** (.009) −.278*** (.039) 9582 499
*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001
Y.-K. Cha et al.
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Chapter 13
Culturally Responsive Leadership
for Community Empowerment
Lauri Johnson
Multiculturalists have long advocated for an education that is both culturally

diverse and equitable, one that incorporates culturally responsive curriculum and
instructional methods, equitable assessment practices, and organizational structures
that promote interaction across racial and ethnic lines and facilitate academic
achievement for all students (Nieto and Bode 2011). Multicultural education asserts
that “all students—regardless of their gender, social class, and their ethnic, racial,
and cultural characteristics—should have an equal opportunity to learn in school”
(Banks and Banks 2009, p. 3; see also Banks in this volume).
Strategies to implement multicultural education in schools have emphasized
culturally relevant or culturally responsive practices. Ladson-Billings coined the
term culturally relevant pedagogy twenty-years ago in The Dreamkeepers (1994),
her now classic study of eight exemplary teachers of African American students.
This instructional approach arises from previous anthropological work that noted a
cultural mismatch between students from culturally diverse backgrounds and their
white middle class teachers, particularly in terms of language and verbal partici-
pation structures. In Ladson-Billings’ (1995a, b) original view, culturally relevant
pedagogy rests on three propositions: (a) students must experience academic
success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence, and
(c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the
status quo of the social order. Gay (2002, 2010) defines the essential elements of
culturally responsive teaching as developing a knowledge base about cultural
diversity; using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of
This chapter is a reprinted version of the author’s article: Culturally Responsive Leadership for
Community Empowerment, Multicultural Education Review, Vol. 6, pp. 145–170, Johnson,
2014.
L. Johnson (&)
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Boston, USA
e-mail: lauri.johnson@bc.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_13
184 L. Johnson
ethnically diverse students in the curriculum; demonstrating culturally sensitive

caring and developing learning communities; using effective cross-cultural com-
munication; and responding to ethnic diversity in the delivery of instruction.
In their model of culturally responsive teaching, Villegas and Lucas (2001)
describe culturally responsive teachers as those who: (a) have a sociopolitical
consciousness; (b) affirm views of students from diverse backgrounds; (c) are both
responsible for and capable of bringing about educational change; (d) embrace
constructivist views of teaching and learning; and (e) build on students’ prior
knowledge and beliefs while stretching them beyond the familiar (p. xiv). Gay and
Kirkland (2003) emphasize the critical consciousness aspect of culturally respon-
sive teaching, arguing that teachers must know who they are as people, understand
the contexts in which they teach, and question their knowledge base and assump-
tions. They posit that these qualities are as important as developing effective
instructional techniques (p. 181). In sum, most approaches to culturally relevant or
culturally responsive instruction not only utilize students’ culture as a vehicle for
learning, but also advocate teaching students how to develop a broader sociopo-
litical consciousness that enables them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores,
and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities (Ladson-Billings 1995b,
p. 162).
New Approaches
Recently, in an effort to embrace a more dynamic view of culture (youth culture/s in

particular), some researchers have extended assets-based pedagogies to include
culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014), culturally
revitalizing pedagogy (McCarty and Lee 2014), and community responsive
pedagogy (Tintiangco-Cubales et al. 2014). Paris (2012) argues that culturally
sustaining pedagogy“seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate,
and culturalpluralismas part of the democratic project of schooling.” (p. 95). In his
view, instruction should do more than relate to a student’s culture; it should
“support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their
communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural compe-
tence” (Paris 2012, p. 95). McCarty and Lee’s (2014) vision of critical culturally
revitalizing pedagogy sustains linguistic and cultural continuity for Native students
and employs an “inward gaze” that counters colonization within and outside the
school setting and deconstructs cultural essentialisms. Tintiangco-Cubales et al.
(2014) use the term community responsive pedagogy in their discussion of effective
teachers of ethnic studies programs. They describe these practices as developing
critical consciousness, developing agency through direct community experience,
and growing transformative leaders. In response to these critiques, Ladson-Billings
(2014) has acknowledged that the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy needs to
evolve and be “remixed” to meet the needs of this century’s students (p. 76).
13 Culturally Responsive Leadership for Community Empowerment 185
Culturally Responsive Leadership
While most assets-based approaches to multicultural education have focused on

classroom teaching, some researchers have used a culturally responsive framework
in relation to school leadership. Culturally responsive leadership, derived from the
concept of culturally responsive pedagogy, involves those leadership philosophies,
practices, and policies that create inclusive schooling environments for students and
families from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Common practices
include emphasizing high expectations for students achievement, incorporating the
history, values, and cultural knowledge of students’ home communities in the
school curriculum, working to develop a critical consciousness among both stu-
dents and faculty to challenge inequities in the larger society, and creating orga-
nizational structures at the school and district level that empower students and
parents from diverse racial and ethnic communities (Johnson 2007). Similar terms
to describe this approach to leadership include culturally proficient leadership,
culturally relevant leadership, culture-based leadership, cultural competency, mul-
ticultural leadership, and leadership for diversity.
Early research studies have identified culturally responsive principals as those
who emphasize high expectations for student academic achievement, exhibit an
ethic of care or “empowerment through care,” and maintain a commitment and
connection to the larger community (e.g., Reitzig and Patterson 1988; Scheurich
1998; Johnson 2006, 2007). In her review of the literature on the principal’s role in
creating inclusive schools, Riehl (2000) also identifies three tasks that determine
whether administrators are prepared to respond to diversity and demonstrate mul-
ticultural leadership. These include fostering new definitions of diversity; pro-
moting inclusive instructional practices within schools by supporting, facilitating,
or being a catalyst for change; and building connections between schools and
communities. Using Riehl’s framework, Gardner and Enomoto (2006) analyzed the
practices of six urban principals and found that incorporating inclusive instructional
practices was the least evident in these principals’ practices as multicultural leaders.
In a more recent conceptualization, Horsford et al. (2011) draw from literature
on culturally relevant pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, and leadership in diverse
contexts to create a framework for culturally relevant leadership which includes
four dimensions: knowledge of the political context, inclusion of a culturally rel-
evant and antiracist pedagogical approach; a personal knowledge of cultural pro-
ficiency and challenges to it; and the professional duty to work for educational
equity.
Culturally responsive leadership often overlaps with leadership for social justice
approaches, a term that has been prevalent in the US educational leadership liter-
ature and focuses on improving the educational experiences and outcomes for all
students, particularly those who have been traditionally marginalized in schools.
Agosto et al. (2013), in their meta-analysis of 23 practitioner and academic articles
published between 2000 and 2010, advocate for bridging social justice leadership
and culture-based leadership. Although there are subtle differences in how authors
186 L. Johnson
and researchers employ these different terms, in general these leadership approaches
encourage teacher leaders, school principals, and district level leaders to “lead for
diversity” and work with teachers, parents, and the larger community to develop
curriculum frameworks, pedagogical practices, and organizational structures and
routines that are consistent with the cultural orientations of ethnically diverse
students and their families.
Expanding the Tenets of Culturally Responsive Leadership
Previous work on culturally responsive leadership has largely focused on the

practices of principals at the school site. Given the recent interest in rethinking the
parameters of culturally relevant pedagogy, it seems an opportune time to consider
an expanded view of how educational leadership matters in the context of imple-
menting multicultural education, and how leadership practices which are culture
based (Agosto et al. 2013) and culturally responsive might prove empowering to
students and their families who have been historically marginalized in schools.
In this essay, I briefly outline examples of culturally responsive leadership
practices that bridge school and community concerns, advocate for cultural
recognition and revitalization, and position educational leaders as advocates for race
equity and community development in diverse neighborhoods. In short, I aim to
expand the contours of culturally responsive leadership beyond traditional school
site-based leadership roles to embrace a broader definition of educational leadership
that encompasses community-based leadership and cultural empowerment. To
illustrate some of these leadership practices, I provide brief historical portraits of
three Black educational leaders—Gertrude Ayer, who worked as a community
activist and principal in Harlem in the 1930s; Len Garrison, a curriculum developer
and community-based historian in London in the 1980s; and Lloyd McKell, a
school-community relations specialist and district leader in the Toronto schools for
over thirty years (from 1976 to 2011). These leadership profiles and practices were
uncovered in the course of larger historical studies conducted over the past 12 years
about the role of community activism in the development of multicultural policies
and curriculum in three global cities (New York City, Toronto, and London).
I literally stumbled upon Gertrude Ayer’s forgotten legacy as the first African
American woman principal in the New York City schools during the course of
surveying newspaper articles about the intercultural education movement in the
New York City schools during the 1930s and 1940s (Johnson 2002). I was then
able to locate other archival sources about her leadership role in the Harlem
community. Len Garrison and Lloyd McKell’s leadership narratives emerged
through archival research and oral history interviews with educational activists,
which chronicled the historical development of Black-focused educational pro-
grams in Toronto and London in the 1970s and 1980s (Johnson 2013).
Many of the practices described below are not unique to these individuals. There
have been African American educational leaders profiled by other researchers who
exhibit similar community-based leadership both historically (see, e.g.,
Siddle-Walker 2009; Randolph and Sanders 2011) and in contemporary urban
schools (Khalifa 2012). By spanning historical periods and three national contexts,
however, these profiles provide further illustration of the elements of culturally
responsive leadership and underscore that it has a long and proud past in Black
communities across the African Diaspora.
Profiles of Culturally Responsive Leaders
Gertrude Ayer, New York City1
In 1935, Gertrude Ayer became New York City’s first African American woman
principal at P.S. 24 in Harlem during the depths of the Depression, after years of
battling the New York City Board of Education in order to be appointed to an
administrative position (Johnson 2006).2 Although as a principal she became
known across the city for her progressive project-based curriculum, it is Ayer’s
political involvement and her relationship with parents and links to the wider
Harlem community which is the focus of this profile.3
Ayer began her work in the Harlem not as an educator, but as a community
worker and activist. Like other African American women educators who were
politically active in Harlem during the 1930s and 1940s, Gertrude Ayer situated her
educational work as part of a larger project for racial justice and community uplift
(Johnson 2004). After World War I, thousands of young African American women
migrated from the rural South to northern cities like New York City in search of job
opportunities. In 1919, as industrial secretary of the New York City Urban League,
Ayer took up labor issues that affected African American girls and women. She
1
Data sources for the profile of Gertrude Ayer included Ayer’s scrapbook, investigative reports
and articles she authored, and newspaper accounts and photographs depicting her career as a New
York City educator located at the Schomburg Center for African American Culture, New York
Public Library. Back issues of African American community newspapers including the New York
Amsterdam News, the New York Age, and journals such as Opportunity (the official organ
of the National Urban League) and The Crisis (the NAACP magazine) were also surveyed
for a thirty-year period from 1923–1954 to document her community involvement.
2
In our current understanding of race, Ayer could be considered of “mixed” racial background
because her father was African American with American Indian ancestors and her mother was
white and British. However, by all historical accounts (including her own), she affiliated culturally
as an African American and lived, worked, and married within Harlem’s African American
community.
3
An earlier version of Ayer’s biographical profile appeared in Johnson (2006).
188 L. Johnson
undertook an extensive survey of the working conditions of African American

women that was jointly sponsored by the Urban League, the Women’s Trade Union
League, and the YWCA (A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker 1919). This
survey documented the inequalities experienced by African American women who
worked in New York City’s factories and shops after World War I. In the 1920s,
Ayer worked with Harlem’s Negro Labor Committee to end discriminatory prac-
tices in the labor unions.
Harlem erupted in a “riot” in March 1935 shortly after Ayer assumed leadership
at P.S. 24. While community leaders condemned the violence, they concurred that
the uprising was an outpouring of anger and frustration about police brutality,
desperate economic conditions, and ongoing racial discrimination in Harlem. In the
community wide hearings about the causes of the riot that followed, Ayer testified
about the lack of resources in Harlem schools and her efforts at P.S. 24 to gain the
trust of parents and provide additional relief services for unemployed families
(Education Hearing 1935).
As a school leader her social activism included promoting intercultural edu-
cation and race relations work in Harlem. In the fall of 1934, she sponsored a
Teachers College course on race relations at the 135th Street branch of the New
York Public Library in Harlem. During World War II, Ayer worked with pioneer
intercultural educator Rachel Davis DuBois as secretary of the Workshop for
Cultural Democracy to organize intercultural education workshops for parents
and teachers when Washington Heights experienced racial tensions between
Jewish and African American residents.4 Known as “neighborhood home festi-
vals,” or alternately the group conversation method, these workshops were
designed to help individuals from different racial and ethnic groups to dissipate
individualprejudicethrough face-to-face contact which involved sharing food or
other cultural traditions related to one’s racial, ethnic, or religious heritage
(Burkholder 2011). While these intercultural workshops were common in the
New York City schools during the war years, it was unusual for Black and White
educators to lead them together.
Ayer also regularly involved parents from diverse backgrounds in the school’s
curriculum. When Ayer noted friction between the West Indian and African
American students, a social studies unit was planned on life in the Caribbean (Ayer
1963). Parents were invited to the school to share family artifacts, children painted
hallway murals depicting Caribbean scenes, and a school fair was held in which
each class contributed plays or musical performances. Parents at P.S. 24 also
participated in school-sponsored fieldtrips to neighborhood cultural institutions
such as the Schomburg Center for Negro Literature that offered regular lectures on
African and African American history and readings by Harlem writers such as
Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
“Why a Teacher Should Also Serve as a Social Worker,” Scrapbook, GEA papers.
4
Gertrude Ayer created a community centered school at P.S. 24 (and later as the
principal of P.S. 119) where parents were welcomed, material resources were
provided for families in need, and the cultural life of the surrounding neighborhood
was viewed as a resource. Her commitment to the Harlem schools also included
mentoring and promoting the next generation of school leaders. Ayer argued that
parents and community members must be advocates to recruit more Black educa-
tors in the schools. In her words:
If parents and community leaders would demand more Negro principals, the Board of
Education and Assistant Superintendents who select them would have to bow to the tax-
payers’ demands. (Retired Principal Wants More Respect for Teachers, Gertrude Ayer
Scrapbook)
Gertrude Ayer died at the age of 86 on July 10, 1971 in her Harlem home.
Lloyd McKell, Toronto5
McKell arrived from Trinidad and Tobago to study economics at the University of
Toronto in 1967 when racially based criteria was finally removed that had been
used to restrict immigration into Canada. He was part of the first wave of African
Caribbean immigrants to Canada, which included female domestic workers, pro-
fessionals and skilled workers, Blacks of Caribbean background who left Britain
because of increasing racism, and Caribbean university students, many of whom
stayed in Canada after completing their studies (James et al. 2010). Black
Torontonians confronted segregation in housing, increasing police violence toward
Black males, and growing disillusionment with the school system. In response, they
developed community based self-help organizations which provided educational
services and lobbied the school board to become more responsive to African
Canadian students.
Lloyd McKell was recruited as a School-Community Relations officer for the
Toronto School Board in 1976 after serving as a program director at the Harriet
Tubman Center housed in the Oakwood—St. Claire YMCA. Although he did not
originally plan to settle in Toronto, he found himself increasingly involved in
programs to support recent immigrant youth from the Caribbean (McKell 2012).
McKell would go on to head up the School-Community Relations Department for
the Toronto School Board. In this capacity, he organized three city-wide parent
conventions at Central Technical High School which involved over 1000 parents
and championed the development of Heritage Language programs in the Toronto
5
Lloyd McKell’s profile was developed from his oral history, the oral histories of parent activists
in Toronto, as well as newspaper accounts of anti-partheid activities and the development
of the Africentric school in the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and Share (a community newspaper
focused on Toronto’s Caribbean community).
190 L. Johnson
schools (McKell 2012). McKell was also active in the anti-apartheid movement in
Toronto, and helped to organize anti-apartheid conferences for high school stu-
dents, and staged the Toronto Arts Against Apartheid festival, which brought Harry
Belafonte and Desmund Tutu to Toronto. In 1990, McKell was part of the dele-
gation who welcomed Nelson Mandela on his first visit to Canada shortly after his
release from a South African prison. McKell would later advocate for the renaming
of a Toronto elementary school in Mandela’s honor (Brown 2013).
Although the School-Community Relations Department was abolished in 1986
because it was deemed “too political” (McCaskell 2005), McKell eventually rose in
the ranks of the Toronto District School Board to become the Executive Officer for
Student and Community Equity where he created Consultative Committees to
involve Toronto’s ethnic communities in decision making and became the first
school district official to support the establishment of a public Africentric ele-
mentary school in Toronto (Brown 2005).
Tensions sometimes arose as McKell navigated the school system to advocate
for the needs of African Canadian students. For instance, his announcement in 2005
that he supported the proposal for a Black-focused school in the Toronto District
School Board made the front page of the Toronto papers where he was accused of
“importing South African style apartheid to Toronto” (McKell 2012). As Director
of Equity McKell worked behind the scenes with Stephanie Payne, one of the few
African Canadian school trustees on the Toronto School Board, to set up a com-
mittee comprised of teachers, parents, and university scholars, who developed
Africentric curriculum units in 2008 which were pilot tested as a summer program
in a local middle school. Their efforts served as the basis for the initial proposal for
an Africentric school which was taken up by parent activists (McKell 2012).
Through his long professional career in the Toronto public schools, McKell
never lost touch with the interests of Black parents. In a recent interview, he
reflected on the importance of parent and community activism in urban school
reform:
(It was) devoted towards changing the existing school system to make it more responsive,
less Eurocentric, more inclusive in all aspects—curriculum, to student engagement, to
quality and diversity of programs, to employment equity, to promotion of people of color to
positions of responsibility, to access to decision making (and) structures of the Board by
minority groups and so on. It was changing the essential nature of the school system to
make it truly inclusive … in which Black students, in particular, could see themselves
centered, as much as any other student, within the school system.
When immigration to Toronto shifted to include East African families, McKell

established a new Consultative Committee to provide a forum for the concerns of
Somali parents (McKell 2012). As Keren Braithwaite, longtime Co-Director of the
Organization of Parents of Black Children (OPBC) noted, Lloyd McKell served as
“the bridge between the people and the (school) board so the parents and students’
voices could be heard.” (Fanfair 2013). Although he officially retired from the
Toronto District School Board in 2011, he remains active in African Canadian
community based organizations.
Len Garrison, London6
Lenford Kwesi Garrison was a medical photographer by profession, a poet, a

curriculum developer, and a community based historian bent on unearthing and
preserving the record of the Black presence in Britain. He emigrated as a school age
child with his family from Jamaica to London in 1954 as part of the great wave of
post war migration from the Caribbean. By 1958 about 125,000 West Indians had
emigrated to England. Known today as the Windrush generation (after the ship in
which the first Jamaicans arrived in 1948), they were British citizens who had left
behind few job prospects in the post war Caribbean for the promise of a new life in
the “Motherland.”
African Caribbean immigrants living in London in the 1950s found it difficult to
find accommodations, were refused service in restaurants and pubs, and often
worked 12–14 hours a day in difficult conditions for less than white workers
(Walker and Elcock 1998). In the late 1960s, the children of the Windrush gen-
erationwere harassed by the British police through stop and search (SUS) policies
and disproportionately placed in segregated special education programs, known as
ESN (Educationally Subnormal) schools (Coard 1971).
Black educational activism in London became galvanized in the late 1960s and
early 1970s when parents, community leaders, and educators organized rallies,
signed petitions, and staged demonstrations against the banding and tracking of
Black students and their overrepresentation in ESN schools and in-school detention
classrooms known as “sin bins.”
Black educators, like Len Garrison, who advocated for multicultural and anti-
racist curriculum obtained a foothold in the Inner London Education Authority
(ILEA) in the 1970s and early 1980s when the Labor government gained control of
the Greater London Council. Len Garrison had completed a degree at Ruskin
College, Oxford in 1971 where he studied the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. In
1975, Garrison negotiated with the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) for
funding and resources to establish an independent, community based project to
develop African Caribbean and Black British curriculum materials for the schools.
ACER (Afro-Caribbean Education Resource Project) was launched in 1977 with
financial support from Section 11 government funds targeted for the needs of im-
migrant children. For the next 11 years, Garrison worked with Black teachers and
librarians to produce several curriculum guides and provide professional develop-
ment to scores of London teachers about African Caribbean culture and history
(Garrison 1982, 1985). He also recorded interviews about issues in multicultural
education with prominent Black academics such as cultural theorist Stuart Hall and
6
Garrison’s profile was based on archival materials about ACER curriculum and the development
of the program located at the IOE Archives, University of London; biographical materials
about his community activities and the history of the Black Cultural Archives located at the Black
Cultural Archives; and records regarding the Multicultural Inspectorate, Inner London Educational
Authority (ILEA) found at the London Metropolitan Archives.
192 L. Johnson
US multiculturalist Geneva Gay as part of a videotape series for London teachers

entitled, “Anti Racism in Practice” (ACER 1985).
One of ACER’s most popular innovations was the establishment of the “Black
Youth Annual Writing Awards.” Each year youth from throughout the London
schools (and beyond) wrote about their realities and experiences as young Black
people growing up in Britain. Prizes were awarded for entries in poetry and essay
writing, and the winning entries were published in a yearly volume that was dis-
tributed in the schools (ACER 1986). Some awardees went on to become major
British writers. By the early 1980s, ACER had grown to include a self-publishing
unit, a large resource library, a mobile van, and several staff members who
developed and distributed multicultural, antiracist curriculum materials in schools
across London.
Len Garrison could be characterized as a critical multiculturalist before the term
was invented. He affirmed the importance of culture in students’ lives, but also
acknowledged how institutionalized racism impacted schools and the school cur-
riculum. While multicultural education in Britain was regarded by many antiracists
in the 1980s as a “soft” option (Gundara 2013), Garrison never lost sight of his
conviction that Black youth needed curriculum materials that would support their
ethnic identity development, ground them in African and Caribbean history, as well
as explicate the institutional racism they faced growing up Black in Britain.
Today Garrison is perhaps best remembered for his establishment of the Black
Cultural Archives (BCA), which began as the African People’s Historical
Monument Foundation following the Brixton uprisings in 1981. When Black
communities across England erupted in violence that summer, Garrison, and other
community leaders argued that what Black youth needed was not further police
surveillance, but a community space with positive representations of Black history
and culture. In an interview, shortly before his death Garrison made the case for a
national Black Cultural Archives in England:
We need our own archives where important acts and achievement of the past which are now
scattered or pushed into the margins of European history can be assembled, where facts
now presented as negative can be represented from our point of view as positive factors in
our liberation. We also need a Black Archive as a monument which would remind the
indigenous population that we know what is good for ourselves and have earned the right to
be in this country. (Zhana 2006)
In February 2003, Len Garrison died prematurely of a heart attack during a BCA
board meeting (Phillips 2003). His dream for a state-of-the-art museum and
archives devoted to the Black presence in Britain reached fruition in the summer of
2014 when the Black Cultural Archives opened its new facility at Raleigh Hall in
Windrush Square, Brixton.
Culturally Responsive Leaders as Public Intellectuals,

Boundary Spanners, and Advocacy Leaders
At the core of most definitions of leadership is the ability to provide direction and
exercise influence (Leithwood and Riehl 2003). These culturally responsive leaders
used their influence (and marshaled the influence of others) to advocate for
culture-based curriculum, race equality and civil rights issues, and the involvement
of diverse racial and ethnic communities in the schools. Their leadership was
focused on collective uplift of their communities rather than individual gain, and
provides vivid examples of educational leaders who were public intellectuals,
boundary spanners, and advocacy leaders.
Public Intellectuals
As public intellectuals, Ayer, McKell, and Garrison used mainstream newspapers

and community based media, public forums, as well as practitioner and academic
journals to communicate, and advocate for issues affecting Black youth. In the
1930s, Gertrude Ayer wrote journal articles and investigative reports, organized
community forums, and wrote a regular column on education in the New York
Amsterdam News. She argued for African American history in the schools, incor-
porating “funds of knowledge” from the Harlem community in the curriculum, and
the need for more Black teachers and administrators in New York City schools.
Lloyd McKell leveraged his position as Equity Coordinator with the Toronto District
School Board to stage community forums on the racial achievement gap, commis-
sion research studies on the high dropout rate and disengagement of African
Canadian students, and promote the principles of Africentric schooling. Len
Garrison, as a poet and historian, published politically oriented poetry, penned
journal articles, and participated in both university conferences and community-wide
forums on Black identity, Black Cultural Arts, and Pan Africanism. These leaders
drew on their educational backgrounds as well as their lived experiences as Black
leaders to discuss issues of race and culture that deeply affected their respective
communities.
Boundary Spanners
Importantly, these three educational leaders were also boundary spanners who used
their social and cultural capital to bridge diverse communities and educational
institutions. In the educational leadership literature boundary spanning educational
leaders have been portrayed as levers of bureaucratic change, who build new and
nontraditional partnership relationships between the school district and community
194 L. Johnson
sites. These leaders, often hired from outside the school district, broker relation-
ships with community organizations, which enable the implementation of school
district initiatives (Honig 2006; Jemison 1984; Tushman 1977). Adopting a more
activist definition, Miller (2007, 2008, 2009) describes boundary spanning lead-
ership in homeless education in the United States as marked by contextual
knowledge, interpersonal skills, trust and connectedness, an underlying community
loyalty, and a fundamentally socially conscious impetus. He characterizes boundary
spanning leaders as “institutional infiltrators organizing for community advance-
ment” who are “in” and “of” their communities (Miller 2008, p. 372), and operate
as “flexible organizational navigators” and “knowledgeable information brokers”
(Miller 2009, p. 619).
Ayer, McKell, and Garrison successfully navigated the boundaries between
educational bureaucracies and community organizations to develop interdisci-
plinary programs and curriculum that centered Black students in their culture and
history. Gertrude Ayer used her contacts in the larger Harlem community to obtain
additional resources for her school, including establishing the first cafeteria in a
New York City school. Lloyd McKell created school-community consultative
structures which provided parents a “place at the table” in school decision making
and assembled Black academics, teachers, and historians to produce Africentric
curriculum units which were uniquely focused on the African Canadian experience.
Len Garrison brought together the Black arts community, educators, historians, and
Black politicians to advocate for a Black Cultural Archives in London. As boundary
spanners, these leaders excelled at networking across disciplinary and organiza-
tional boundaries. As culturally responsive leaders they became the “bridge
between” educational institutions and the wider community (Johnson 2014).
Advocacy Leaders
Beauboeuf-LaFontant (1999) has argued that culturally relevant teaching might

more accurately be labeled “politically relevant teaching” to “draw attention to the
political clarity, or the courage and savvy” of African American teachers in the
segregated US South. She concludes that culturally relevant teaching may be “less a
cultural trait than personal and political conviction” (p. 709). For Gertrude Ayer,
Lloyd McKell, and Len Garrison, their educational work was both cultural and
political. They used their political savvy to promote and advocate (Anderson 2009)
for culture-based curriculum and community-based cultural institutions and
organizations.
Educational leaders in poorly funded urban neighborhoods are often required to
be advocates and engage with community organizations just to obtain the basic
services and resources of their school needs. Culturally responsive leadership goes
beyond this stance by advocating for the transformation of unequal educational
systems. Through their advocacy efforts, Ayer, McKell, and Garrison worked to
improve the life chances and opportunities of African American students in New
York City, African Canadian students in Toronto, and African Caribbean students
in London.
Implications for Leadership Preparation
Leadership preparation programs in the United States abound that purport to focus
on leadership for social justice (LSJ). These programs generally involve critical
reflection, problem-based learning, and the inclusion of leadership literature that
emphasizes equity, diversity, and social justice as part of their program (Hafner
2009). Other scholars have argued that aspiring school leaders must be involved in
courageous conversations about race and write their own racial autobiographies in
order to develop racial awareness and go beyond a colorblind perspective to school
leadership (Gooden and O’Dougherty 2014; Johnson and Campbell-Stephens
2013). What is missing in most leadership preparation programs, however, is an
emphasis on the development of culturally responsive practices that will support
cultural and community empowerment. Based on the historical profiles provided
here, two suggestions for leadership preparation are made to begin this process.
Expanding the pool of potential educational leaders. Leadership preparation
programs, even those that focus on leadership for social justice, are largely aimed at
teachers who aspire to become assistant principals, principals or headteachers, or
district level leaders in schools. Developing culturally responsive leadership for
community empowerment necessitates, we expand our pool of candidates to
incorporate not only teachers who desire to move up the administrative ladder to
become school leaders, but also community based advocates who might work
“against the grain” of district bureaucracies to consciously link schools and com-
munity improvement efforts. Ayer, McKell, and Garrison became educational
leaders after their involvement in community based organizations and projects,
which immersed them in the needs and concerns of the Black communities in which
they worked. I would argue these community based experiences helped them
develop the critical consciousness and networks necessary to work for change in the
school system and enabled them to bring a different lens to their educational
leadership.
There are currently efforts underway in selected university leadership prepara-
tion programs in the United Statesto link educational leadership with community
development. New York University has begun a Master’s degree program in
Educational Leadership, Politics, and Advocacy where students, many of whom are
recruited from outside traditional schools, participate in an internship in a com-
munity based organization as part of their degree program. Duquesne University’s
Ed.D. Program in Educational Leadership recruits leaders from community based
organizations as well as Pittsburgh school district personnel who work together in a
cohort-based program which is both social justice-oriented and deeply connected to
community and school improvement efforts. The cross-sector partnerships nurtured
in these types of leadership preparation programs contribute to a collective
196 L. Johnson
leadership stance and help to develop school-community relationships, which often

continue after the program is over.
Providing new community-based practicum experiences. Hand-in-hand with a
more diverse candidate pool is the need for community based, political internships,
and curricular activities that require aspiring leaders to engage with diverse families
and communities in civic forums. Ayer, McKell, and Garrison developed the skills
to be advocacy leaders through their lived experiences working for change in
communities experiencing institutional discrimination. Many of our leadership
preparation students will work in similar urban communities, and could benefit
from opportunities to develop the skills needed to lead change in diverse com-
munities. These internships might include apprenticing with principals or head-
teachers who are deeply connected to the local community as well as other
field-based experiences, where aspiring school leaders work under the leadership of
parents and neighborhood leaders in community-based projects. To be most
effective, these internships should be coupled with seminars where aspiring leaders
can dialog and critically reflect on how their experiences intersect with issues of
race, culture, and power. If we are serious about rethinking leadership preparation
for community empowerment, we must restructure our classes and curriculum to
collaborate with parents and community advocates from diverse communities,
particularly those communities that have been marginalized in schools (Auerbach
2009; Cooper 2009; Johnson and Campbell-Stephens 2013).
Reconceptualizing leadership and leadership preparation to include models that
are more culturally responsive and community empowering would help further the
goals of both multicultural education and educational leadership. These historical
profiles of community oriented educational leaders provide important examples, but
the field could benefit from the study of other educational leaders in international
sites who consciously link schools and diverse communities to begin to identify
how the practices of culturally responsive leadership for community empowerment
might vary across context and culture, particularly beyond Westernized societies.
Further understanding of these practices might help us to better prepare the cul-
turally responsive leaders we so desperately need to empower future students,
schools, and communities.
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Chapter 14
Institutionalizing Internationalization
Within a College of Education: Toward
a More Critical Multicultural and Glocal
Education Perspective
Kevin Roxas, Karen B. McLean Dade and Francisco Rios
Introduction
At the outset of the new millennium, a number of multicultural education scholars

began to broaden their multicultural education scholarship beyond the domestic
perspective (see, for example, Grant and Portero 2011). In response, debates began
taking place on whether global inclusion around multicultural education detracted
from addressing sociopolitical issues locally and conversely how to assure that
multicultural education included global perspectives based on globalization’s local
impacts.
Parallel to the “international” multicultural education discourse, higher educa-
tion institutions were seeking to redefine and strengthen the global perspective and
learning experiences of their students on college campuses. As a result, institu-
tionalizing internationalization has become a priority for many higher education
institutions, including our own at the Woodring College of Education at Western
Washington University.
Many colleges and higher education institutions are seeking to move beyond the
corporate-orientation of “globalization” during the 1990s toward broader under-
standing of the “internationalization.” Recognizing the impact of the global on the
local, “Internationalization is an action to integrate international, global, and
comparative perspectives throughout the teaching, research and service missions of
higher education” (Hudzik and McCarthy 2012).
K. Roxas (&) K.B. McLean Dade F. Rios

Western Washington University, Bellingham, USA
e-mail: kevin.roxas@wwu.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_14
202 K. Roxas et al.
The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the process of one college of edu-
cation has followed to institutionalize internationalization within its curriculum and
programs. Specifically, this chapter will focus on the college of education’s work to
integrate its key commitments—such as diversity, social justice, technology, and
sustainability—within its internationalization efforts. In this context, this chapter
examines ways to better prepare colleges of education to infuse critical multicul-
tural and glocal perspectives into faculty work and student practicum experiences in
diverse communities both locally and abroad.
Multicultural Education and International Education
The field of multicultural education has developed in important ways during its
existence as scholars have examined and focused on different areas that relate to the
stratification and inequitable treatment of students and their families in US public
schools. Scholars have examined and written about areas such as race, culture, and
ethnicity (Banks 2006; Sleeter and Grant 2011), class (Anyon 1997), and special
education and English language learners (Artiles and Klingner 2006). Importantly,
research and theoretical work has also included attention to the intersectionality of
race, class, language, gender, and sexuality (Cho et al. 2013).
However, there have been a number of new areas of study within the field of
multicultural education as scholars have begun to turn their attention to the study of
human rights as it affects the education of children (Rios and Markus 2011), larger
social and political movements within countries and their resultant effects on
schools (Apple and Au 2009; Zeichner 2010), and the effects of globalization,
internationalization, and neoconservative ideologies on schools, students and their
families, and local communities (Apple 2011; Apple et al. 2005).
Scholars have also begun to attempt to move beyond the study of multicultural
education and international education in isolation from one another, but rather
toward an examination of multicultural education through both the global and local
perspectives—or through perspectives that are glocal (Weber 2007). There have
also been shifts in how glocal perspectives can impact teacher education, more
specifically on how we can begin to better prepare future teachers within colleges of
education to understand education in global perspectives both in terms of policy
implementation at the national level and in institutional practices at the school level
(Goodwin 2010; Howe and Xu 2013; Patel and Lynch 2013; Zhao 2010).
As scholars within the field of teacher education began to more closely examine
how disciplinary studies of multicultural education, teacher education, and glocal
perspectives intersect, more consideration and conceptualization needs to be given
to what are the end goals and consequent effects of internationalizing the curriculum
within a college of education, especially through a critical multicultural education
perspective.
14 Institutionalizing Internationalization Within a College … 203
Fig. 14.1 Isolated phase
Focusing on Internationalization Through Multicultural

and Glocal Education
One instructive approach to understanding how multicultural education has been

understood internationally is via the discourses and narratives advanced by the
United Nations (UN). Rios and Markus (2011) point out that there were two distinct
phases around how the UN, as perhaps the preeminent human rights organization,
understood our international responsibilities to cultural and linguistic diversity.1
The first phase—the appreciation and affirmation of diversity—a key goal of
multicultural education was not a central construct for the UN (see Fig. 14.1). Rios
and Markus (2011) argue that the UN Convention on Human Rights (1948) was
focused nearly exclusively on the human rights of the individual. Consider, for
example, Article 26 of The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948):
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the
strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote
understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and
shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
At the same time, as Banks (2004) describes, the earliest foundations of mul-
ticultural education were also focused on individual rights. Even while it held a
distinctly antiracist focus, the focus of attention was on how individuals developed
prejudicial ideals (see Allport’s 1954 seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, for
example). Ideologically, the belief was that when crossing borders, the individual
would conform to the dominant culture and worldview.
In the second phase, according to Rios and Markus (2011), The United Nations
began to recognize sociocultural identity rights beginning in the 1980s (see
Fig. 14.2). For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)made
cultural and linguistic diversity of one’s home and host cultures a human right.2
This culminated in the compelling document by the UNESCO (2002) with their
1
Strand 2010, also describes three phases of cosmopolitanism that mirrors the phases described
herein.
2
See also the 1992 Declaration of the Rights of Persons to Belong to National or Ethnic, Linguistic
Minorities.
204 K. Roxas et al.
Fig. 14.2 Integration phase
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. This second phase was driven, in part,
by the substantial increases in movement of people across borders, whether that
movement occurred as a result of voluntary migration for political, economic, or
educative purposes or whether it occurred due to forced relocation or displacement
as a result of political or economic persecution. Ideologically, nation–states were
also coming to understand, largely as a result of the refusal of newcomers to
assimilate, that it was immoral and unethical (not to speak of unrealistic) to ask
them to cast aside their worldviews and cultural orientations as a requirement for
integration into the new society.
Rios and Markus envisioned a third phase where there would be a focus on
global citizenship rights. The third phase builds on the work around cosmopolitan
citizenship that has become a focus, since early 2000. Cosmopolitanism is centered,
traditionally, on principles of universal humanity, human rights, and/or world cit-
izenship (for a helpful review of scholarship in this area, see Spector 2011). It is
within these global citizenship rights that multicultural education, as an academic
discipline, could serve as a central catalyst.
We agree that multicultural education and international education can and should
inform each other in productive ways. We hold the view, collectively, that it is
critically important to help faculty and students understand that multicultural
education and international education are complementary efforts, which are mutu-
ally reinforcing.
Fortunately, we are not alone in this view. Important examples and support
resources exist to show how international and multicultural education is coming
together. Consider, for example, the number of academic connections between
multicultural and international education including books (see, for example, Banks
2009; Grant and Portero 2011), journals (International Journal of Multicultural
Education and Multicultural Education Review), and professional associations. As
important, a new partnership organization, the World Coalition for Equity and
Diversity in Education, has recently been launched.
We too see numerous overlaps between the goals of contemporary interna-
tionalism and multiculturalism, which we detail herein (see Fig. 14.3). From our
perspective, both begin with a respect for the individual but also extend to the
affirmation of cultural and linguistic diversity. Both recognize the importance of
people’s social identities as central to their personal identity. As a result, both
advocate for social integration but without cultural assimilation as a prerequisite.
Fig. 14.3 Transformative integration phase
Both seek a world where justice prevails and where equity is a result. Both rec-
ognize that to move justly in the world requires both cultural consciousness and
cultural competence. Both are distinctly antiracist and strive against the vestiges of
colonization. Both are working to expand what counts as knowledge even while
struggling to authentically incorporate indigenous epistemologies into the national
consciousness.
While it is important to see where these two academic disciplines converge, it is
also important to see where they diverge as well. For us they diverge in ways that
also need to be acknowledged. First, multicultural education in the US is much
more attentive to the local and the national. That is, advocates of multicultural
education seek goals around equity, inclusion, and diversity within their own
borders, beginning with the original inhabitants of the geographical spaces of the
nation–state. Second, multicultural education is not typically focused on movement
across borders, as international education does, but as movement within borders.
Finally, international education is focused on the processes and outcomes of col-
onization as an external force (as but two examples, the British colonization of India
or the United State’s colonization of Hawaii), whereas multicultural education
focuses on the internal colonization of indigenous and ethnic minority persons
within the nation–state.
Notwithstanding these important differences, at the Woodring College of
Education (WCE) at Western Washington University (WWU), we are asking
ourselves the following question: How can our efforts to pursue a critical multi-
cultural education born as a result of “local” variables pushing from the bottom and
internal to the College (increasing student diversity, presidential comments in
support of diversity, increased attention to hiring more ethnic minority faculty,
student activism around education for social justice, an ethic in the college around
sustainability education, etc.) work in concert with our corresponding “global”
initiatives to facilitate both goals? For example, how do our faculties learn to
206 K. Roxas et al.
prepare teacher education candidates for the language diversity they will face in
schools locally and also learn to teach in linguistically responsive ways due to
increasing numbers of international students attending classrooms within our home
institution. THIS IS THE GLOCAL!
As part of our commitment to both multicultural education and international-
ization, we are engaged in substantive development with partner institutions and
agencies internationally. We want to assure that as we develop these partnerships,
we are relying on our multicultural education skills, knowledge, and dispositions to
assure that these partnerships are occurring in culturally appropriate ways. We are
also relying on our international efforts as catalysts to strengthen and support our
commitments to multicultural education.
Institutionalizing Internationalization Through a Critical

Multicultural Education and Glocal Perspective: A Case
Study
The Woodring College of Education (WCE) at Western Washington University

(WWU) is a public liberal arts college located in Bellingham, Washington in the
Pacific Northwest of the US. The mission of the college states the following:
Woodring facilitates life-long learning through exemplary teaching to prepare quality
education, health, and human services professionals for democratic citizenship and
meaningful careers. As a college that serves the state, nation, and world, we construct,
transform, and convey knowledge by integrating research, theory, and practice; cultivate
student growth through extensive community and school engagement in collaboration with
exemplary practicing professionals; act with respect for individual differences, including
taking a strengths-based view; develop collaborative partnerships that promote the learning
and well-being of individuals, families, and the community; and evaluate processes and
outcomes to ensure continual program improvements.
The vision of the college is to foster “community relationships and a culture of

learning that advances knowledge, honors diversities, and promotes social justice.”
The administration and faculty within the college of education seek to enrich
international involvement and awareness throughout its different educational pro-
grams. In striving to reach this goal, they are currently examining the ways in which
the process of internationalization is organically evolving in the college and how to
synergistically enhance their overall commitment to internationalization. The
Associate Dean was assigned to lead this internationalization initiative for the
college. In initial one-on-one interviews with faculty about their current efforts at
internationalization, different forms of international engagement, scholarship and
collaboration were mentioned. These interests included visiting scholar appoint-
ments, faculty led study abroad projects, international exchange partnerships, and
participation in international conferences and consultancy work.
Faculty have asked questions about internationalization efforts within the college
of education regarding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) templates, how to
develop a college-wide protocol for initiating and establishing international part-

nerships, and how to receive support from the college for this work. In response to
these faculty questions, appropriate parties were contacted to begin to develop
answers. Those parties consisted of, but were not limited to, the Dean of the College
of Education, the Director of the Center for International Studies, the Center for
Equity and Educational Development (CEED), the Center for Technology, the
Office of Field Experiences, the Sustainability Committee, and other offices
including Human Resources, Student Services, and Extended Education. The
information gleaned from this initial exploration with faculty was helpful in
determining the next step: getting college-wide feedback on internationalizing the
college.
At the larger college level, a call for formally identifying and listing international
projects, programs, and curriculum was then sent out. This call continued the
process of internationalization by exploring and listing what college personnel were
currently doing in this area. The result of that collection endeavor was documented
on the college website (available at: https://wce.wwu.edu/international-initiatives).
It is a living document that can always be revised through either addition or sub-
traction of new programs and initiatives. The purpose of the listing was to make
public the international and transnational efforts being made throughout the college;
to promote networking within the college, the university and with partners outside
of the university; and, to enrich and inspire additional internationalization efforts.
In February 2013, the College of Education held an all-college meeting on the
topic of Internationalizing the College. This all-college meeting was a work session
to examine the ways in which internationalization is evolving in the college. The
session explored ideas to assure that international programming approaches inte-
grate concepts of diversity, social justice, and sustainability as a critical part of
international civic engagement. To this end, the college representatives from the
Equity and Diversity Committee, the Admissions Office, the Center for
International Studies, and the Education for Sustainability Advising Committee
(ESDAC) served on an informational panel. Furthermore, faculty from the
Woodring College of Education faculty led study abroad programs and student-led
global webinars were also a part of the panel presentation. The panel spoke about
the university’s commitment to internationalization, and how the university sup-
ports the international efforts of the college; they provided an overview of students’
interest in study abroad and examples of student experiences, student-led global
webinars, and faculty led study abroad programs; and, they shared the interests in
internationalization by different committees within the College including the sus-
tainability, equity and diversity, and technology committees.
The format of this all-college meeting was the panel presentation, followed by an
all-college “Think Tank” discussion. During the all-college discussion various
perspectives were shared such as the need to be inclusive of efforts concerning
transnational, local borders, sovereign nations, immigration, and undocumented
students; to be sensitive to the impact of carbon footprints as we engage in study
abroad and other travel related to coursework, research, or international partner-
ships; and to be mindful of the need to integrate equity and diversity, sustainability
208 K. Roxas et al.
and technology concepts within internationalization curricula. Additionally, more

questions were raised such as, “Do we have the capacity to internationalize?”,
“Who will manage international partnerships?” and, “Why should this be an
important focus for the college?”
National trends helped to demonstrate the importance of internationalization at
this all-college meeting. For example, the federal government calls for one million
US students to study abroad annually and for the recruitment of more highly
qualified international students. Additionally, national statistics were shared on
employers’ perspectives: 72 % want more emphasis on global issues and devel-
opments and 63 % believe recent college graduates who do not have what it takes
to survive within the global economy (U.S. Congress 2007).
The all-college meeting, and the increasingly higher number of international
activities has led to an ad hoc committee being assigned to draft a college inter-
nationalization strategic plan. To date, a college international MOU template has
been created and the process for vetting the strategic plan is in place. The ad hoc
committee was charged to have the strategic plan draft ready by the end of winter
quarter 2016.
Currently, the Woodring College of Education has approximately 10 partnership
agreements with international universities. These partnerships are managed by the
Dean’s office and include 3 universities in Chile, 3 universities in Korea, 1 uni-
versity in Mongolia, 1 university in China, 1 university in South Africa, and 1
university in Canada. The most active partnership is with our partner universities in
Chile. Chilean students and faculties, and our own college faculties continue to
participate in academic and professional development exchanges in both the US and
Chile. In addition to this collaborative work in Chile, faculty continue to present at
international conferences throughout the world, participate in university wide
international projects, and develop international projects such as professional
development exchanges for teachers from Taiwan, and a new K-12 school district
partnership in Finland.
The College also provides, as a case study, a look at the challenges and
opportunities (in the next two sections) to taking a critical, international, and
multicultural approach in the internationalization of the curriculum. We share these
challenges and opportunities to be helpful to readers of this chapter in that they
provide contexts for this work and possible points of comparison and contrast for
their own work in this regard.
Challenges of Internationalizing the College
As faculty, staff, and administration continue to work toward revisiting its cur-
riculum, its exchange programs, and its study abroad offerings, multiple challenges
continue to come to the fore. These challenges include ensuring that there are
enough fiscal (financial) and human (faculty and staff) resources to do this work. It
includes crafting a strategic plan with future goals and responsibilities of staff and
faculty clearly delineated. It includes reaching out to other colleges and university
wide offices to build networks of support for our work, making sure that interna-
tionalization efforts are in concert with other initiatives important to the broader
university community. And it includes moving beyond surface level and facile
attempts at internationalization so that we can enact these efforts from a critical,
multicultural, and anticolonial framework.
At the college level, some concerns that have emerged that include questions
about the fiscal and human resource capacity to revise current curriculum, to
maintain and create new study abroad programs, and to build new strategic part-
nerships with colleges and universities in new partner countries. The fiscal resource
question is particularly germane given funding from the state for our university
continues to be reduced. Other questions include how to adapt multicultural edu-
cation coursework to include an international focus when instructors may have
variable expertise in how to integrate critical concepts from both academic
disciplines.
In addition to crafting the college’s own strategic plan with future plans and
goals and responsibilities, the college continues to reach out to and network with
other colleges at the university and with university wide offices to build networks of
support for this work. One area of concern is to build a strategic plan so that there is
clear communication across different colleges and offices so that the lines of
responsibility for specific plans are clearly drawn.
As the college does this internationalization work, we continue to consider how
to increase our capacity for doing this work while still honoring other commitments
we have college-wide. Our college and university, for example, are committed to
environmental sustainability. As we increase our efforts at internationalizing the
curriculum and outreach, a challenge for us is to consider the “carbon footprint” of
our work and how we can make this work sustainable over time (including making
decisions about our international activities with agencies and organizations that are
also mindful of sustainability concerns).
The faculty and administration within the College also continue to try and
consider how we can increase and deepen our efforts at internationalization while
still maintaining a critical multicultural and anticolonial framework. As we try to
stress the value of international dialog around issues of equity and social justice, we
are possibly caught in a double-bind. That is, are we externalizing efforts around
equity and social justice to an international perspective and not attending to these
same issues within our own country? For example, are some faculty very keen on
internationalizing the curriculum, but who are not as interested in looking at issues
of race, class, and oppression within the US itself? Is it easier to talk about cultures
in other countries when it can be seen as more “exotic” rather than looking at
multiculturalism within the diversity and within our own borders? Are we being
critical enough of our own issues of inequitable school structures at home, while
being so willingly to engage in critique of educational systems in other nations?
We also wonder if we are attentive to the transnational experiences and identities
of US-born ethnic minorities as part of the “international” experience. The
“White-stream” (Grande 2004) often regards international immigrants as interesting
210 K. Roxas et al.
and exotic when they have little history with people from that social
group. Members of the white-stream have built up years of stereotypes and acts of
discrimination and are often less tolerant of US-born minorities. This means they
are more open to learning about diversity via international differences.
As we continue to do this work, we also strive to be conscious of superficial
attempts at internationalization that results in the perpetuation of stereotypes about
the “Other” internationally. We wonder if there has been a “food, folks, and fun”
approach to some development of the curriculum, rather than a deeper, more critical
look at societies, cultures, and histories in this internationalization work. When
considering study abroad opportunities, we also wonder how we can assure that
students have substantial and sustained interactions within a host nation as well as
how to encourage students to consider going to non-European countries for these
experiences.
Finally, how might there be some faculty not at all interested in this work or
perhaps disparaging of it? How do we work with and be inclusive of faculty who
are resistant to either multicultural education and/or our international education
efforts?
Opportunities of Internationalizing the College
While the faculty and administration within the college of education face the
challenges described in the previous section as they continue to work on interna-
tionalization efforts, they also acknowledge the many opportunities that present
themselves in this work.
The Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University con-
tinues to develop its internationalization efforts within all of its programs with clear
support from the administration of the university and from its administrative
leadership within the college. For example, as the college continues to engage in
this internationalization work, it is supported by the administrative leadership of the
university. The university president and provost have encouraged colleges to join
and participate in national organizations that promote internationalization, such as
the Center for Internationalization and Global Engagement of the American Council
on Education (ACE). The administration is also focused on university level
strategic planning for internationalization to advance this work. The goal of the
university is to bring both students and faculty from around the world to the campus
and, conversely, to send our students and faculty from the campus to the world.
Within the college, many faculty are engaged in developing international study
trips in which students from within the college travel abroad to better understand
the effects of globalization and neoliberal policies on educational systems and
economic development in other countries. The faculty and administration within the
college of education have also built strong, emerging relationships with partner
universities in Chile in which faculty from Western Washington University travel to
Chile to learn about the educational systems and teacher education programs there,
and multiple groups of faculty and undergraduate students from partner universities
in Chile have spent extended time on the WWU campus to learn about the edu-
cational systems in the US.
Another opportunity presents itself when we establish international linkages with
multiple universities within the same country. This lends itself to building umbrella
partnerships within countries so that we can foster these multiuniversity collabo-
rations so as to best utilize our strengths during our visits and also create strong
relationships between partner universities.
One other opportunity that we can capitalize upon within the college’s inter-
nationalization efforts has been the geographic location of Western Washington
University in the Pacific Northwest region of the US. Because of its close proximity
to the cities of Seattle, Washington in the US and Vancouver, British Columbia in
Canada, the Woodring College of Education is conveniently located as a gateway
for its students and faculty to countries in the Pacific Rim and, as such, continues to
build strong linkages to universities in Korea, China, Mongolia, and other countries
in that region. At the same time, faculty and administration within the college
continue to receive many requests from faculty in other countries from around the
world for faculty exchanges, international student and faculty visits, and longer
term international scholar research sabbaticals.
During these beginning stages of exploration, faculty, through the ad hoc
strategic planning committee, have been committed to grounding their interna-
tionalizing approaches with concepts of diversity, social justice, and sustainability
as a critical part of international civic engagement. The college is striving to cap-
italize on its collective strengths and to examine areas for growth. In this way, the
ad hoc committee continues to bring multiple views to the table and to identify the
synergy among efforts within the College.
Finally, one other opportunity that has presented itself is how the Woodring
College of Education, because of all this work, has positioned itself to be a possible
leader in efforts at internationalizing the curriculum and outreach in teacher edu-
cation. As we continue our process to institutionalize our efforts at international-
ization, we continue to identify and name the unique contributions we can bring to
these conversations and how we can intentionally and consciously shape the
national conversation about internationalizing the curriculum in visionary, inno-
vative, and generative ways. We are hoping to “lead from the front” as we engage
in reflection on how to do this work in ways that are critical, culturally responsive,
and focused on the glocal perspectives important to do this work.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the efforts of WCE have embraced the glocal paradigm shift. The
faculty and administration continue to review programs and program initiatives that
are international through a careful examination and analysis of how our work affects
our faculty, our students, and our international partners in both local contexts and
212 K. Roxas et al.
global contexts. However, we continue to use the glocal and internationalization

terms interchangeably because of our work in redefining internationalization. For
instance, multicultural education, sustainability (environmental, ecological, and
cultural), and technology are integral concepts infused into our
glocal/internationalization framework.
The WCE ad hoc committee continues to stress the importance of moving
beyond the deficit model used in describing systems in place in international
contexts and often incorporated into internationalization frameworks (Patel and
Lynch 2013). The faculty and administration within the WCE continues to have a
strong focus on critical, multicultural education, and glocal perspectives. Glocal is
an organizing concept, and its powerful narrative can help to drive our work and
unify the shared discourse that we hope to use as we move all of this work forward.
Our mission frames our goal to move beyond more colonizing forms of interna-
tionalization and to focus on the glocal for our students, faculty, and local and
global community partners.
Furthermore, the Key Findings Report on the Internationalization at WWU
Report (2014) has enabled the WCE ad hoc committee a greater understanding and
conceptualization of our position regarding internationalization. The report gives an
array of demographic statistics for the larger university community, international
initiatives for each of its colleges, international structures and support, and an
executive summary that describes its findings and suggestions to meet our uni-
versity wide internationalization goals.
After a careful study of our university and college strategic plans, our mission
and vision, and an analysis of our strengths and challenges in our international-
ization efforts, we are now nearing the completion of our WCE Internationalization
Strategic Plan. The strategic plan includes policy and practices, curriculum trans-
formation approaches, faculty professional development, assessment guidelines,
financial resource strategies, and models for implementation. By keeping the glocal
perspective as one of the primary driving forces of our work, the plan provides us a
model for our internationalization efforts throughout our next phase of implemen-
tation and assessment.
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Chapter 15
Epilogue: Toward a Glocal Perspective

and Moosung Lee
The worldwide diffusion and constant elaboration of educational equity as a public

policy discourse since the mid-twentieth century epitomizes policy innovation on a
global scale. The evolution and expansion of various discursive networks that tie
educational professionals and reformers across countries has facilitated spreading
educational equity as a universalistic policy principle throughout most parts of the
globe, raising renewed awareness of inequalities and exclusions rooted deeply in
social structures. A majority of countries have formally announced that their edu-
cation systems are committed to education for all regardless of sociocultural group
memberships. Coupled with the ideal of social justice, ensuring equitable education
for all is not merely a domestic policy agenda. Countries around the world have also
ratified international treaties for children’s rights to education. Various international
organizations and associations have also served as important agents for mobilizing
efforts not only to delineate a range of goals in educational equity, but also to
develop strategies to achieve the intended goals.
It is in such a broader institutional context that multicultural education has
become an integral part of the educational equity framework for policy develop-
ment. Today, the legitimacy of multicultural education appears to be rarely ques-
tioned in most education systems, as the legitimacy is based firmly on the highly
rationalized global discourse that education should empower all future citizens
The work on this chapter was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant
funded by the Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044609).
Y.-K. Cha S.-H. Ham (&)

J. Gundara
M. Lee

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_15
inclusively (Cha and Ham 2014; Sutton 2005). With evolving globalization pro-
cesses that involve increased human mobility and interaction, the importance of
multicultural competence has been receiving considerable attention from
educational policymakers and researchers around the world. The institutionalization
of multicultural education is widely seen as an important stepping stone toward a
more comprehensive and sharper recognition of the right and responsibility of
individual students to promote awareness of, and commitment to, their local, cul-
tural, national, and transnational communities.
Not surprisingly, much literature has been accumulated on various aspects of
multicultural education from a range of perspectives. However, scant attention has
been paid to understanding its institutionalization from a “glocal” (Robertson 1995)
perspective. Previous international comparative studies of multicultural education
have tended to focus primarily on normative dimensions of children’s rights to
education. They show that while there have been considerable advances in minority
students’ educational opportunities, there still remain significant disparities. What
has often been ignored in previous studies is the significance of understanding the
mixture of multiple layers of sociopolitical influences on multicultural education in
both policy and practice.
We believe that an important analytic avenue for sharpening our understanding
of multicultural education is to examine its institutionalization at different levels of
abstraction in its global–local processes. Viewed on a global scale, public education
is deeply grounded in global institutional ontology and rationalization (Baker and
LeTendre 2005; Fiala 2006). A high degree of structural isomorphism is observed
in public schooling across countries in accordance with global epistemic models of
education (McEneaney and Meyer 2000; Ramirez and Ventresca 1992). Yet, it is
also true from a local perspective that education needs to be understood with
reference to various local contextual factors that are distinctive from one society to
another (Alexander 2000; Schriewer and Martinez 2004). A major difference
between these seemingly contrasting perspectives is that the former emphasizes
cross-national commonalities in education from a macro-phenomenological stance,
while the latter focuses on variations in local meanings of education grounded in
substantive societal contingencies.
The concept of “loose coupling” in international sociology is useful to resolve
the tension between the two perspectives. This concept, originating from organi-
zational analysis (Weick 1976), also describes the phenomenon that a nation–state’s
symbolic structuration of the national system often exceeds the substantive func-
tional requirements of a given country (Meyer et al. 1997). Various loose couplings
result from ongoing globalization processes that put constant pressures on nation–
states to demonstrate structural conformity to global epistemic models of what
public education should be like and how it should be organized. Such global
models, once adopted in a country, often become “re-contextualized” at various
levels of policy and practice, resulting in “creolization” into different innovations
from the original ones (Anderson-Levitt 2003; Paine and Fang 2006).
We emphasize that understanding both the “global grammar” and the “local
semantics” of multicultural education helps us grasp the whole picture (Ham et al.
15 Epilogue: Toward a Glocal Perspective 217
2011). The global grammar consists of a set of institutionalized rules that give
legitimacy to certain discursive practices, while the local semantics emanates from
active interpretation and sense-making processes by local agents or communities in
particular societal contexts. This grammar-semantics metaphor helps us understand
the antagonistic yet symbiotic relationship between the highly rationalized formal
structural aspects of multicultural education and the varying forms and contextu-
alized meanings of it, shedding renewed light on a fuller glocal picture of public
schooling.
Despite different emphases and nuances, most approaches to multicultural
education commonly agree on the importance of preparing future citizens to
develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to live in a culturally diverse
society where the global and the local constantly intersect. Given that people are
moving back and forth across national borders and may have multiple citizenships
and plural identities, the notion of educating students to internalize nationalist
values within a singular nation–state is now seriously challenged. In the midst of
increased global-local migration flows, national boundaries have become porous,
raising complex questions about citizenship, democracy, and human rights. As
emphasized by many scholars around the world, the structural legitimacy of modern
democratic society is largely grounded in an expansive conception of the citizen-
ship of the individual as an empowered human person who not only participates in
but also contributes to civil society, both within and beyond national territories
(Banks 2009; Ramirez and Meyer 2012).
It is important for educational researchers and policy makers to constantly refine
and elaborate epistemic models for multicultural education that can provide a
sharper recognition of the rights and responsibilities of individual students to
heighten their awareness of and commitment to the local, national, and transna-
tional communities. We contend that an important aim of multicultural education is
to make society more democratic, where individuals may enjoy a greater range of
what is possible and normal by developing and maintaining healthy plural identities
as competent and responsible glocal citizens. In this respect, we believe that mul-
ticultural education can be understood as a new possibility to creatively broaden our
epistemic landscape in accordance with evolving multicultural discourses—i.e., the
discourses that highlight the existential imperative of valorizing individuals’ rights
to and responsibilities for their diverse glocal cultural heritages in educational
settings and beyond.
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citizenship. Multicultural Education Review, 4(1), 1–28.
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UK: Sage.
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(pp. 29–53). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
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Legal Studies, 12(1), 97–108.
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Quarterly, 21(1), 11–19.
Index
A China, 5, 32, 61, 67, 77, 93, 136, 140, 141,

Academic engagement, 5, 170, 171, 173–175 143, 144, 153, 155, 156, 159–161, 164, 211
Academic enjoyment, 171–174 Christianity, 24, 65, 113
Academic performance, 162, 172, 175 Citizenship, 2, 12, 18, 24, 26, 27, 29, 57, 63,
Achievement gap, 74, 193 71, 73–75, 77–81, 91, 92, 95, 106, 107,
African-American, 68 139, 170, 204, 206, 217
African Diaspora, 187 Citizenship education, 3, 26–28, 73, 76–80, 83,
Africentric curriculum, 190, 194 84, 91, 98, 99
American Revolution, 65 Civic culture, 62, 75, 76, 80, 82, 86
Anti-apartheid movement, 190 Civil Rights Movement, 32, 80
Argentina, 34 Civil society, 2, 14, 16–18, 45, 55, 56, 62, 110,
Asian American, 78, 126 217
Assimilation, 33, 75, 204 Civil state, 62
Atatürkism, 104, 107, 113, 114, 116 Clientelism, 105
Australia, 74–76, 80, 174 Colonial education, 44
Colonialism, 26, 63, 66
B Communalism, 64
Bandung Conference 1955, 66 Community, 4, 6, 18, 26, 29, 30, 47, 56, 57, 62,
Bandung principles, 66 74, 76, 78, 80–83, 85, 91–94, 98, 109, 115,
Beijing, 5, 31, 153–164 121–124, 126, 130, 131, 142, 158,
Belize, 34 184–189, 191–196, 206, 209, 212
Black Cultural Archives (BCA), 192 Community empowerment, 6, 195, 196
Brazil, 78 Community responsive pedagogy, 184
Confucian tradition, 4, 98
C Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC),
Canada, 35, 74, 75, 80, 189, 190, 208, 211 107
Capitalism, 66 Cosmopolitanism, 24, 28, 81–84, 86, 204
Caribbean, 51, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195 Creolization, 216
Caucasian American, 126 Criminology, 122
Center for Internationalization and Global Cultural chauvinism, 66
Engagement of the American Council on Cultural competence, 11, 13, 183, 184, 205
Education (ACE), 210 Cultural democracy, 75, 76, 82
Center for Multicultural Education at the Cultural diversity, 1–3, 6, 11, 13, 19, 58, 139,
University of Washington, 79, 80 183
Central Europe, 51 Culturally relevant pedagogy, 183–186
Centralist, 104, 105, 116 Culturally responsive leadership, 5, 185,
Centralization, 105 185–187, 194–196
Chile, 208, 210 Culturally responsive teaching, 183, 184

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7
220 Index
Culturally revitalizing pedagogy, 184 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR),

Culturally sustaining pedagogy, 184 111, 112
Cultural Revolution, 77 European Multicultural Foundation (EMF), 35
Curricular policy, 41, 58 European Union, 51, 73, 81
Curriculum development, 70
Czechoslovakia, 32 F
Fascism, 65, 66
D Federalism, 62
Dalits, 67 Fiji, 62
Decision over Basic Education Reforms and Finland, 208
Developments, 155 Fragmentation, 66
Democracy, 73, 76, 79–81, 106, 116, 217 France, 75, 77
Democratization Package, 109, 115 French Revolution, 65
Discrimination, 84, 92, 96, 97, 99, 107, 145,
148, 188, 196, 210 G
Dress Code Regulation, 110 Germany, 29, 74, 75, 77
Ghana, 82, 174
E Global Alliance on Cultural Diversity, 35
Economic development, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55, 69, Global citizenship consciousness, 30, 37
96, 154, 210 Global civil network, 47, 48, 53, 54
Economic efficiency, 43 Global civil society, 12, 14–17, 45, 58
Economic interdependency, 13, 43 Global community, 14, 81, 82, 84, 86, 95, 170,
Economic pragmatism, 93 212
Educational equity, 5, 176, 215 Global economy, 13, 42, 43, 208
Educational inclusion, 6 Global education, 83
Educational policy, 2, 14, 42, 55, 58, 140, 170 Global grammar, 1, 216
Education capital, 172 Global institutional ontology, 14, 45, 216
Education Resources Information Center Globalization, 11, 18, 26, 28, 57, 79, 92, 103,
(ERIC), 36 175, 201, 202, 210, 216
Education system, 2, 4, 12, 14, 17, 18, 35, 42, Glocal citizen, 217
45, 54, 56–58, 62–64, 66, 67, 70, 92, Glocal cultural heritages, 6, 217
104–106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115–117, Glocalization, 2, 24
162–164, 170, 175, 215 Glocal perspective, 1, 6, 202, 211, 212, 215
El Salvador, 30 Grassroots social movement, 138
England, 82, 192 Great East Japan Earthquake 2011, 137
English, 2, 34–36, 41, 43–54, 56–58, 82, 145, Guangzhou, 154, 156
147, 149 Guyana, 30
English language education, 2, 41–47, 49, 50,
52–54, 56–58 H
English proficiency, 42, 54, 56 Harlem, 186–189, 194
Enlightenment, 65, 66 Harlem’s Negro Labor Committee, 188
Equality, 41, 58, 64, 75, 76 Harmony, 3, 62, 91, 92, 94, 96–99, 106
Equity, 1, 3, 11, 92, 98, 185, 186, 190, 195, Heterogeneity, 3, 5, 91, 130, 138, 149
205, 207, 209, 215 Homogeneity, 5, 135, 149
Ethnicism, 64 Hong Kong, 67, 143
Ethnic minority, 4, 74, 75, 84, 135, 136, 142, Hukou system, 156, 164
149, 205 Human rights, 24, 27–29, 34, 57, 73, 81, 84,
Ethnic revitalization movements, 73, 74 86, 106, 111, 115, 139, 148, 202–204, 217
Ethnolinguistic fractionalization, 54
Ethnolinguistic minority, 5, 170–175 I
Ethno-nationalism, 61 Imagined community, 18
Eurocentrism, 63, 64, 70 Imperialism, 63, 66
European Convention on Human Rights Inclusion, 24, 54, 63, 69, 79, 104, 137, 201,
(ECHR), 107 205
Index 221
Inclusive education, 1, 11 Lunar New Year Festival, 138

Inclusive epistemology, 3
India, 32, 61, 67, 93, 191, 205 M
Indonesia, 67 Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, 94
Institution, 6, 12, 14, 62, 66, 67, 75, 78, 81, Maria Hertogh riots, 94
104, 106, 108–110, 121, 135, 136, 138, Marxist, 67
184, 188, 194, 201, 206 Meritocracy, 93, 96
Institutionalist, 25, 43, 45, 54, 55 Metropolitan languages, 52
Institutionalization, 1–3, 16, 41, 42, 46, 52, 54, Migrant children, 5, 139, 153–164, 191
58, 170, 174, 175, 216 Migrant integration policy index (MIPEX), 14,
Integration, 5, 15, 63, 75, 77, 122, 204, 205 16
Intercultural competence, 170 Migrant school, 154, 155, 158, 162–164
Intercultural education movement, 186 Migration, 15, 65, 73, 74, 79, 81, 92, 93, 153,
Intercultural understanding, 61, 62, 96 156, 175, 190, 191, 204, 207, 217
Internal Security Act, 94 Modernisation, 61, 63, 68, 70
International business, 43 Mongolia, 208, 211
International communication, 13, 41, 43, 57 Moon Festival, 138
International Court of Justice (ICJ), 31 Morocco, 174
Internationalization, 30, 138, 149, 201, Multicultural awareness, 2, 11, 13
206–210, 212 Multicultural citizenship, 3, 74, 75, 82, 91, 170
International marriage, 135, 139 Multicultural competence, 11, 13, 216
International non governmental organizations, Multicultural curriculum policy, 169, 171, 172,
15, 45, 48 174, 175
International politics, 44 Multicultural democracy, 5, 74, 81
International trade, 13, 15, 16, 43, 47, 48, 53, Multicultural education, 1–4, 6, 11–14, 16–18,
54 28, 36, 91, 92, 98, 103–105, 117, 139, 142,
Islamophobia, 77 149, 169, 170, 175, 183, 192, 201–206,
Isomorphism, 45, 216 209, 212, 215–217
Italy, 77, 79 Multicultural education policy, 11–14, 17
Multiculturalism, 1–5, 12, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36,
J 61, 62, 85, 98, 104, 110, 135–137, 139,
Japan, 4, 61, 75, 78, 92, 135–143, 146–148 143, 147–149, 173–175, 204, 209
Judaism, 113 Multicultural policy, 94, 169, 171, 175, 176
Justice, 1, 11, 45, 55, 57, 64, 75, 78, 80, 81, 86, Multicultural practice, 135, 136, 138, 142, 148,
92, 105, 138, 185, 187, 195, 202, 205, 207, 149
209, 211, 215 Multicultural sensitivity, 14, 132
Justice and development party (AK Party), 104 Multiracialism, 69, 93
L N
Laicism, 111, 113 National citizens, 26, 44
La laÏcité, 75, 77 National curriculum, 63, 91, 173
Language policy, 42 Nationalism, 2, 23–27, 37, 73, 79, 81, 84, 106,
Laos, 61 114
Latin america, 51, 131 National Movement Party (MHP), 113
Lausanne treaty, 106–108 Nation-state, 2, 3, 12, 18, 19, 23–27, 33, 37,
Leadership for social justice (LSJ), 185, 195 42, 45, 56–58, 73–82, 84, 91, 93, 96, 204,
Legitimacy, 2, 12, 17, 24, 26, 43, 45, 55, 56, 205, 216, 217
170, 215, 217 Naturalization, 139
Linguistic diversity, 3, 44, 48, 51, 53, 54, 57, Neocolonialist, 43, 44, 47
203, 204 Neo-liberal globalisation, 61
Literacy skill, 54 Nepotism, 105, 121
Localism, 68 New Year’s Tet Festival, 138
Local semantics, 1, 216 New York City Board of Education, 187
Loose coupling, 45, 54, 216 New Zealand, 174
222 Index
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 66 Social control, 122, 123

Northern Ireland, 96–99 Social disorganization theory, 122, 123
Notice on Test-Free Admission to Compulsory Socialism, 65
Education in the Major Large Cities, 157 Social networks, 122, 123
Social network theory, 132
O Social trust, 125, 127
Oceania, 50, 51 Societal diversity, 62
OECD, 34, 35, 105 South Africa, 34, 190, 208
Organization of Parents of Black Children South Korea, 27, 50, 92
(OPBC), 190 Sovereignty, 24, 45, 47, 53, 55
Osaka Prefecture Resource Council, 136, 139, Soviet Bolshevism, 65
151 Soviet Union, 52, 65, 77
Ottoman, 104, 114–116 Spanish, 48, 49, 52, 76
Sri Lanka, 61, 96–99
P Stereotype, 67, 84
Parental education level, 172 Subjectivities, 135, 138, 149
Participatory pedagogy, 69 Sub-Saharan Africa, 52–54
Particularism, 66, 69 Sunni Islam, 112
Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), 113 Supranational citizen, 41, 47, 54
Peer culture, 124, 131 Sustainability, 202, 205, 207
People’s Republican Party (CHP), 113
Personhood, 18, 57, 170 T
Pluralism, 104, 112, 117, 184 Tabunka kyosei, 4, 136–138, 143, 146
Portugal, 34 Tabunka rikai, 146
Postapartheid Constitution, 34 Taiwan, 32, 143, 208
Post-national society, 25, 41 Tanzania, 34
Poverty, 123, 125–128, 153 Tautology, 64
Prejudice, 81, 92, 99, 148, 188, 203 Technology, 34, 139, 207, 212
Private Education Institutions Law, 109, 113 Temporary study permit (jiedu zheng), 161,
Prophet Muhammad birthday riots, 94 164
P.S. 24, 188 Thailand, 61, 146, 147
Public education, 57, 107, 154, 155, 157, Toronto School Board, 189, 190
162–164, 216 Trends in International Mathematics and
Public schooling, 2, 6, 216, 217 Science Study(TIMS), 169
Turkey, 4, 32, 104–108, 110–112, 114–117
R
Racism, 62–64, 66, 81, 84, 192 U
Recontextualization, 45 Ukraine, 173
Renaissance, 65 U.N. Decade for Women, 32
Residential mobility, 122, 123, 126, 127 UNESCO, 17, 35, 66, 139, 203
Russian, 48, 49, 52, 115 UNESCO affiliated schools, 27
United Kingdom, 30, 35, 74, 77
S United Nations (UN), 27, 29, 31, 69, 139, 203
Schomburg Center for Negro Literature, 188 United Nations Convention on the Rights of
School curriculum, 42–45, 47, 49–52, 54–56, the Child (1989), 203
95, 185, 192 United Nations Universal Declaration of
School leadership, 185, 195 Human Rights (1948), 203
School poverty, 172 United States, 4, 42, 52, 74–76, 78, 80, 92,
Secularism, 65 194, 195
Sedition Act, 94 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 27,
Singapore, 5, 69, 91–99 34, 73
Social capital, 4, 121–128, 131 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity,
Social cohesion, 13, 96, 99 204
Index 223
Universal education, 56 World Data on Education, 17

Universalist, 2, 24, 37, 57, 65, 215 World society, 17–19, 24, 25, 45, 58, 79
USSR, 30, 51 World Trade Organization (WTO), 31
World War I, 187, 188
V World War II, 24, 27, 42, 66, 68, 188
Vietnam, 136, 144, 145
X
W Xenophobia, 64
Westernization, 63
White-stream, 209, 210 Y
Windrush generation, 191 Yemen, 34
Workshop for Cultural Democracy, 188 Yugoslavia, 65
World Coalition for Equity and Diversity in
Education , 204

Yun-Kyung Cha, Jagdish Gundara, Seung-Hwan Ham, Moosung Lee (Eds.) - Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives - Policy and Institutionalization-Springer Singapore (2017) PDF

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Yun-Kyung Cha · Jagdish Gundara

Seung-Hwan Ham Moosung Lee

Jagdish Gundara Moosung Lee

ISBN 978-981-10-2220-3 ISBN 978-981-10-2222-7 (eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

Part I Global Institutionalization of Multicultural Education

Part II National/Local Dynamics in Multicultural Education

9 Multicultural Community Development, Social Capital

Part III Global and Local Possibilities in Multicultural Education

James A. Banks University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Yun-Kyung Cha, Jagdish Gundara, Seung-Hwan Ham

Multicultural education is still a contested concept. Deﬁnitions and conceptual-

Y.-K. Cha (&) S.-H. Ham

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 1

education helps us grasp the whole picture of multicultural education as an evolving

English language education is not necessarily in conflict with the celebration of

that harmony is a deep-rooted value in societies with a Confucian tradition, East

and London. In particular, through an expansive reconceptualization of leadership

Banks, J. A. (Ed.). (2009). The Routledge international companion to multicultural education.

Yun-Kyung Cha, Seung-Hwan Ham and Kyung-Eun Yang

While multicultural education is still a contested concept with multiple meanings

Y.-K. Cha S.-H. Ham (&)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 11

of multicultural education policies is less extensive than might be expected, con-

Conceptualizing Multicultural Education as Policy

The cross-national adoption of multicultural education policies around the world

First, the most popular account of a country’s adoption of a multicultural edu-

dependent on international economic relations (Hypothesis 2). Despite a unique

Data and Method

To examine what national-level characteristics are associated with multicultural

Table 2.1 Description of national-level characteristics

reference guide that made an international comparison of educational policies

Table 2.2 Exploratory factor analysis of national-level characteristics

Table 2.3 Descriptive statistics for variables

Table 2.4 Regression for multicultural education policy (n = 33)

Discussion and Conclusion

Francisco O. Ramirez, Patricia Bromley and Susan Garnett Russell

Treating migrant workers with disrespect is a violation of their human right to

F.O. Ramirez (&) P. Bromley

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 23

Beyond Monocultural National Narratives: Toward

strong current emphasis on the right to dignity, in practice, applies to individuals

Data and Methods

women, minorities, indigenous groups, and immigrants. A sixth indicator of the

Findings and Discussion

implementation shortcomings. This in turn may further fuel human rights-based

Future Research Directions

We focus speciﬁcally on the valorization of diversity and humanity in high school

countries in transition, targeting areas such as music, multimedia, cinema,

Yun-Kyung Cha and Seung-Hwan Ham

This chapter is a substantially revised version of an earlier article: Educating Supranational

Y.-K. Cha (&) S.-H. Ham

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 41

considering the perceived importance of this language in many different countries.

English is expected to be taught in schools to the degree of its substantive utility

Theorizing the Spread of English Language Education

The diffusion of English as a legitimate component of curricular content in schools

Finally, an institutionalist perspective posits that “education is an institution…

Data and Method

In order to see the global patterns of institutionalization of modern foreign lan-

indicating the degree of adoption of English language education in a given country.