This paper examines how discourses on multicultural education are constructed in the recent curriculum reforms of South Korea. In response to the rapid demographic change in the last two decades, the South Korean government has revised its national curriculum to promote multicultural education. However, contrary to the benign intention, multicultural education often serves to perpetuate the dominant group's perspectives. By employing critical discourse analysis, this study investigates implicit messages of multicultural education embedded in the recently revised national curricula of social (...) studies. The findings of this study reveal that the revised curricula contain five competing discourses including pluralist, conservative, essentialist, neoliberal, and critical multiculturalism, each of which has conflicting values and approaches to multicultural education. This discursive conflict in the new curricula shows ambivalence and conceptual instability of multicultural education promoted by the Korean government. By demonstrating how multiple and conflicting discourses coexist in the national curriculum at the same time, this study complicates previous research focusing on unpacking a single predominant discourse in multicultural education. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to trace how the multilingual child has been variably constructed in Norway’s language education policy discourse over time. This will be explored through an in-depth critical discourse analytical reading of two official policy reports targeting specifically the situation of children of non-Norwegian ethnolinguistic heritage in Norway’s educational system. The key analytical concept is intertextuality, connecting the various discursive layers of Norway’s language education policy processes, each replete with a multitude of voices with a stake (...) in shaping the language educational reality of Norway’s young multilinguals. The paper demonstrates that there is a substantial intertextual differential in how the two reports draw on these voices to either challenge or endorse the structural forces of powerful institutions, such as the state, reflecting also the wider social and discursive current of change sweeping through the traditionally egalitarian welfare states of Northern Europe, such as Norway. (shrink)

This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their ‘multicultural capital’. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document Report of the Working Party on Multicultural Education as well as drawing on interview data provided by two important agents who helped to implement Leicester’s/Leicestershire’s moment of multicultural education. This moment generated a symbolic, ideational, and conceptual shift within Leicester’s education provision (...) toward a more culturally inclusive position that began to recognise the cultural capital of non-white students. However, this moment was to be lost in the ‘neoliberal epoch’. It is argued in this paper that neoliberal education policy/practice has become an enabling mechanism for renascent colonial ideology. By re(dis)covering this vision for the official recognition of non-white cultural capital, this paper demonstrates the possibilities for alternative directions within Leicester’s schools and colleges that can challenge neoliberal and colonial conceptions of education. It suggests that there are still spaces and structures that can be re(dis)covered in order for this vision to be enabled. (shrink)

Illustrating the tensions and possibilities that the notion of the ethic of care as a democratic and citizenship issue may have in discourses of citizenship education in western states is the focus of this article. I first consider some theoretical debates on the definition of an ethic of care, especially in relation to issues of justice and (im)partiality. Then, I discuss the reconceptualization of care on the basis of two related but distinct themes: the reconciliation of justice and care, and (...) the rethinking of citizenship. Following this, I lay out some implications for citizenship education and answer the question of what learning and teaching for/about a reconceptualized ethic of care can contribute to changing current perceptions of and actions towards immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the current state of development of Mäori science curriculum policy, and the roles that various discourses have played in shaping these developments. These discussions provide a background for suggestions about a possible future direction, and the presentation of a new concept for Mäori science education.