Intercultural education is an approach that responds to societal change arising from the contact, noncontact, and conflict among cultural groups. It envisions the prospects and challenges of living together in pluralistic societies. Globally, intercultural education has prominent origins in various European societies. Scholars and practitioners have also developed and practiced intercultural education in parts of North America and Latin America. As an epistemology, interculturality underpins intercultural education in recognizing and promoting equitable relations across cultural groups. At its forefront is the attention to equality issues in culturally diverse societies, which espouses the mutual accommodation of majority, minority, and Indigenous populations through dialogue and shared cultural expressions. Intercultural education seeks to prepare learners to live in diversity by supporting their understanding of inequalities, fostering respect, developing intercultural communicative skills, and resolving conflict. In practice, intercultural education involves developing skill sets and cultivating values related to intercultural competence, intercultural communication, intercultural dialogue, intercultural encounter, and intercultural sensitivity individually and collectively with the support of communities and institutions. While it continues to be promising in terms of supporting societies to engage with changes in cultural demographics and promoting interactions among different groups, intercultural education is not invulnerable to persistent and emerging societal problems, particularly those that have been legitimized politically, such as anti-immigration and nationalist movements that fuel racism and xenophobia. Intercultural education can at times be confined to the intellectual ambit of the diverse societies in Europe or the Global North. It is also prone to risks in its neo-assimilationist and technocratic tendencies, putting to question its explanatory value in addressing structural and evolving forms of racism. A need for intercultural education theorists, proponents, and practitioners would be to confront racial injustices that operate in novel ways. This need suggests the efforts to restore the humanity, respect, and social justice that sustain societies to thrive on the peaceful coexistence and cooperation among different cultures.
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Origins, Concepts, and Trends in Intercultural Education
Jan Gube
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Seeding Rightful Presence and Reframing Equity in STEM Education With Historically Minoritized Communities
Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton
Equity as inclusion maintains as settled the epistemological, ontological, and axiological bases of Western STEM. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) In exchange for participation in Western STEM, historically underrepresented and minoritized people in STEM need to deny salient aspects of their epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies in order to assimilate into Western STEM culture. The existing structures in STEM and STEM education, built for White middle class heteropatriarchal norms, have alienated and oppressed minoritized youth of color. In response, a framework has been proposed, called “rightful presence,” for justice-oriented teaching and learning to critique and perturb the guest–host relationality operating in most STEM classrooms. The rightful presence framework is undergirded by three tenets: (a) allied political struggle is necessary to disciplinary learning; (b) rightfulness is claimed through making justice and injustice visible; and (c) collective disruption of guest–host relationalities amplify sociopolitical engagements. A case study from a 6th grade engineering project called the “Happy Box,” illustrates how these three tenets worked together to support students’ desires to address a community-identified problem—low student morale related to LGBTQ2S+ bullying—with rigorous engineering practices. How students came to frame the community issue and their iterative engineering process in prototyping the “Happy Box” illustrated the expansive epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies made legitimate and important in 6th grade STEM teaching and learning. It is important to pay attention to both temporal and spatial dimensions when engaging in rightful presence sociopolitical work of surfacing injustices in STEM education. The process of disruption involves taking both a temporal (past-present-future) and spatial lens (spaces in which one may engage in STEM-related activities, in which contexts, and with whom). A temporal and spatial dual focus allows for making STEM-related justices visible across space and time that have a cumulative impact on how historically minoritized students might engage with STEM in the present. One way to keep our focus on both the temporal and spatial is to engage in community ethnography as pedagogy. Community ethnography as pedagogy involves: (a) an anchoring stance that community knowledge is valuable and essential to disciplinary learning; (b) a repertoire of pedagogical moves that support teacher–student, student–student, and student–community interactions in ways that identify, invite, integrate, and build on students’ community-based knowledge and embodied experiences; and (c) tools that position teachers and students as colearners of a community-identified, STEM-related phenomenon. Thus framed, community ethnography as pedagogy eschews the ideology of equity as inclusion with an eye toward new, justice-oriented social futures in youth-STEM relevant spaces and experiences. Allying with youth and community members in sociopolitical struggles is not an easy undertaking. Sustained efforts are required to make youth’s lives, communities, histories, presents, and hoped for futures visible and integral to reimagining what engaging with STEM education is and could be.
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Approaches to Education for Sustainability
Robert B. Stevenson
Approaches to education for sustainability, or education for sustainable development, have diversified since the normative concepts of sustainability and sustainable development came into common international policy discourse in the late 1980s. These terms and their conceptualization, somewhat controversially, largely replaced environmental education in international rhetoric and policies. The dominant goal of approaches to environmental education to this point had been promoting environmentally responsible individual behavior through increasing awareness and knowledge of the natural environment and issues related to its protection. This approach began to be critiqued as inadequate for understanding, accounting for, or responding to the complexity, unpredictability, and contestation of sustainability issues, as well as the sociocultural, economic, and political influences shaping such issues as climate change and loss of biodiversity.
More discursive and collaborative approaches were conceptualized, such as engaging students in critical issue- or problem-based inquiries, including into the influence of institutional arrangements, social structures, and cultural features on unsustainable practices that characterize socially critical approaches. Action competence approaches provide a conceptual and pedagogical model for developing student capacities to engage in individual and collective local issue-based inquiries and civic actions on urgent socioecological issues to contribute to a more sustainable community. Social and sociocultural learning approaches offer a framework for and emphasize the potential meaningful learning that occurs from bringing individuals or communities together to share, discuss, and reflect on cognitive and normative understandings of local and global socioecological issues.
Expanding on the identified positive elements of the previously mentioned approaches, an extension of a socioecological approach in the form of a critical socioecological justice approach embraces the development of a critical and transformative responsiveness to issues of people and place. In such an approach, sociocultural, ecological, and economic sustainability, as well as socioeconomic and environmental justice, could be addressed in grappling with the challenge of rebalancing human–environment and human–human relations. This perspective acknowledges that beyond the ecological imperative, there is a moral imperative to alleviate human suffering and provide basic material well-being for all humankind, such that sustainability has a concern for the human condition as well as the environmental condition.
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Freedom and Education Revisited
Pedro Tabensky
There is an influential and highly diverse tradition of philosophers and philosophically inclined educational theorists who argue that education should aim at freedom, indeed that education, properly understood, is the practice of freedom. On the one hand, there is the movement that neither commences nor ends with John Dewey (active during the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century), but of which Dewey’s philosophy of education is the neuralgic point. On the other hand, there is the movement, inspired to some extent by Dewey but quite distinct from it, launched by Paulo Freire in the second half of the 20th century—known as critical pedagogy. Freire and his followers—bell hooks and Henry Giroux, among them—explicitly claim that education is the practice of freedom and think of this practice as emancipatory in its aims. Dewey never explicitly describes education as the practice of freedom, but Richard Rorty, one of Dewey’s most influential followers, does so, and he correctly attributes the view to Dewey.
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Institutional Dis/Continuities in Higher Education Changes During the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods in Kazakhstan
Gulzhan Azimbayeva
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) higher education system has undergone radical change since the perestroika period—the Gorbachev period (1985–1991). Perestroika means restructuring in Russian. In this period, the institutional context of higher education was fundamentally transformed by the major upheavals of the political and socioeconomic institutions of the USSR. The changes in the USSR higher education had a major impact on the higher education of Kazakhstan—a former Republic of the USSR. Thus, to understand the changes in higher education in Kazakhstan, it is important to locate them in the stages of the collapse of the USSR. It could be argued that the “institutional dis/continuities” theory would allow a careful examination of the educational changes in the postsocialist context. The “institutional dis/continuities” of the perestroika period draw on path-dependency and critical juncture concepts within historical institutionalism theory. Perestroika period can be seen as a critical juncture in the historical development of higher education. Also, the policy choices which were made during the perestroika period could establish further path-dependencies in policy-making.
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Inclusive Education as a Human Right
Ignacio Calderón-Almendros and Gerardo Echeita-Sarrionandia
Inclusive education has been internationally recognized as a fundamental human right for all, without exception. This international recognition seeks to address the dramatic inequality in current societies, since the enjoyment of the right to education for many disadvantaged people depends on it being inclusive. The recognition and enjoyment of this right requires a detailed analysis of the meaning and scope of inclusive education, as well as of the barriers and the main challenges faced.
The consideration of inclusive education as a right, with its moral and legal implications, has been achieved to a large extent thanks to the political impact of diverse association movements of people with (dis)abilities. Paradoxically, many students with disabilities continue to be systematically segregated into special schools and classrooms, which violates their right to inclusive education. There is therefore much to learn from this contradiction. A lot also needs to be done to ensure the equal dignity and rights of people that experience exclusion and segregation associated with gender, social class, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, ability, etc.
To this end, it is important to conceptually delimit the neoliberal domestication of a profoundly transformative term. The historical evolution of the recognition of inclusive education as a human right needs to be understood. There is also a need to consider the strength of the scientific evidence supporting it in order to counter certain views that question its relevance, despite them having been soundly refuted. Untangling these knots enables a more situated and realistic analysis to address some of the problems to be tackled in the implementation of inclusive education. This is a social and political endeavor that must break away from the market-oriented logic in education systems. It involves accepting that it is a fundamental right to be guaranteed through collective responsibility.
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Slow Violence and Schooling
Leanne Higham
The concept of slow violence has broadened understandings of violence in ways that capture its spatial and temporal complexity, and that draw attention to its often-hidden operation. Since the 1960s and 1970s scholars of schooling and education have asked questions about power relations, inequalities, and injustices in schools, and in the early 21st century have turned their attention to affect and materiality. Although its conceptual predecessor, structural violence, has informed past education research, slow violence has not been widely taken up. This article explores the concept of slow violence, considering its relevance and use for education scholars concerned with the various mundane forms of violence enacted in schools, sometimes unintentionally, and often unnoticed. While the concept of slow violence is useful for thinking about everyday violence in this way, its real strength as a concept is lifted to view when considered in relation with affect in schooling and education.
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Schooling in Racist America
Zeus Leonardo
Education is both a racial and class project. This means that a multidimensional theory of educational stratification is necessary if an accurate appraisal of schooling’s modern appearance in capitalist, racialized states is central to the research endeavor. Critiques of capitalism are found in critical pedagogy and Marxist studies of education since the 1970s, which argue that schooling’s intellectual division of labor mirrors the material structures of a capitalist division of labor. In addition, the advent of critical race theory in education since 1995 provides compelling evidence that schooling is not only an ideological apparatus of the capitalist state but also equally of the racist state. Together, developing a critical class theory and critical race theory of education offers a more complete explanation of educational stratification in order to understand its processes and perhaps ways to intervene in them.
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Critical Race Theory and STEM Education
Terrell R. Morton
Critical race theory (CRT) is a framework that attends to the prevalence, permanence, and impact of racism embedded within and manifested through the policies, practices, norms, and expectations of U.S. social institutions and how those concepts have differentially impacted the lived experiences of Black and Brown individuals. CRT bore out of the legal studies—complemented by philosophical and sociological fields—and has since been applied to a multitude of disciplines including education. Composed of several tenets or principles, CRT approaches to research, scholarship, and praxis take a structural, systematic, or systemic perspective rather than an individual or isolated perspective. CRT provides scholars and practitioners the ability to acknowledge and challenge structural racism and intersectional forms of oppression as foundational to the perceived and experienced inequities outlined by various constituents. In providing such a perspective, CRT facilitates the opportunity for future ideologies that promote radical and transformative change to systems and structures that perpetuate racial and intersectional-based oppression. STEM education—representing the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from inter- and intradisciplinary perspectives—constitutes the norms, ideologies, beliefs, and practices hallmarked by and within these fields, examined both separately as individual disciplines (e.g., science) and collectively (i.e., STEM). These concepts comprise what is noted as the culture of STEM. Scholarship on STEM education, broadly conceived, discusses the influence and impact of STEM culture across P–20+ education on access, engagement, teaching, and learning. These components are noted through examining student experiences; teachers’ (faculty) engagement, pedagogy, and practice; leadership and administration’s implementation of the aforementioned structures; and the creation and reinforcement of policies that regulate STEM culture. Critical race theoretical approaches to STEM education thus critique how the culture of STEM differentially addresses the needs and desires of various racially minoritized communities in and through STEM disciplines. These critiques are based on the fact that the power to disenfranchise individuals is facilitated by the culture of whiteness embedded within STEM culture, a perspective that is codified and protected by society to favor and privilege White people. CRT in STEM education research tackles the influence and impact of racism and intersectional oppression on racially minoritized individuals in and through STEM by revealing the manifestation and implications of racism and intersectional oppression on racially minoritized individuals’ STEM interactions. CRT in STEM also provides opportunities to reclaim and create space that more appropriately serves racially minoritized individuals through the use of counterstories that center the lived experience of said individuals at the crux of epistemological and ontological understandings, as well as the formation of policies, programs, and other actions. Such conceptions strive to challenge stakeholders within STEM to alter their individual and collective beliefs and perspectives of how and why race is a contending factor for access, engagement, and learning in STEM. These conceptions also strive to challenge stakeholders within STEM to reconfigure STEM structures to redress race-based inequity and oppression.
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Theories of Tolerance in Education
Ben Bindewald
Scholars in diverse democratic societies have theorized tolerance in various ways. Classical liberal tolerance can best be understood as non-interference with forms of behavior or expression one finds objectionable. It has been criticized for being too permissive of hate speech and not demanding enough as a theoretical guide to civic education. Alternatively, robust respect is characterized by open-mindedness and respect for diversity. Critics have suggested that it is too relativistic and overly ambitious as a guide to civic education. Discriminating (in)tolerance suggests that tolerance should only be extended to individuals and groups who support the advancement of egalitarian politics and the interests of historically marginalized groups. It has been criticized for being overly authoritarian and dogmatic. Mutuality emphasizes reciprocity and sustained engagement across difference. Critics argue that it is not revolutionary enough to address past injustices and persistent inequality.
