Diverse Responses to Diversity: Local and Global Approaches to Educating Heterogeneous Populations

Abstract

With increasing globalization and mass migration, nations around the world are facing new levels and new types of diversity. On one hand, increased diversity has prompted global attention to issues of human rights and related discourses of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cross-cultural tolerance. On the other hand, flows of diversity are sometimes linked to renewed nationalisms and xenophobia, and educational actors engage in new “bordering and ordering” processes (Robertson, 2011). Amidst these shifts, schools continue to be sites where complex global debates about diversity and national belonging play out in localized, “everyday” ways. In the quotidian activities of classrooms around the world, educators are expected to promote equality, build national unity, increase intergroup tolerance, and foster peace. Yet schools are inextricably linked to their sociopolitical contexts, and often reflect the exclusion, inequality, stratification, and xenophobia that exist outside of school walls. Scholars of Comparative and International Education (CIE) are uniquely positioned to examine how these complex dynamics of nation building and intergroup relations are negotiated in local-level curriculum, language practices, and pedagogical approaches. By comparing such dynamics on local, national, and global levels, scholars can interrogate how global discourses of human rights, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism play out in different contexts – and how such discourses are circulated, adapted, resisted, and appropriated by global and local actors.

Citation

Moland, N.A. (2016), "Diverse Responses to Diversity: Local and Global Approaches to Educating Heterogeneous Populations", Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2016 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 30), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 97-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920160000030008