Chapter 4: Rethinking Multiculturalism:Attending to Indian American High School Students’ Stories of Negotiating Self-Representations

Multicultural education is a discourse that has emerged in an effort to create spaces of representation for those who have been marginalized, rendered invisible, and, in various ways, “othered” in educational theory, research, and practice. Certainly, the considerable body of literature which now exists in this area (see, for instance, Banks, 1996; Banks & Banks, 1995; Sleeter & Grant, 1988) has served to inform the field about the need to attend to learners from diverse racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, critical pedagogical approaches (see, for instance, Freire, 1982; Giroux & McLaren, 1994) have offered ways of seeing education as a vehicle to combat social, cultural, and class-based inequalities and transform structures of oppression. Scholars who write about diversity and difference from postmodern, postcolonial perspectives (see, for instance, Asher & Crocco, 2001; Hooks, 1990, 1994; McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993) have underscored the need to analyze the dynamic, context-specific intersections of race-class-gender-culture-language-history-geography in school and society. They argue that, unlike cultural pluralism and relativism, this approach allows us to deconstruct the fluid and contested relations of power which shape identities, cultures, and representations in particular contexts. Critical approaches also take into consideration our own participation in social, educational, and educational systems we are trying to change. Thus, today, there are a number of different approaches to creating spaces of representation for marginalized, othered peoples. At the same time, it is important to examine, on an ongoing basis, both the successes and limitations of multicultural education to date in order to ensure that the discourse is indeed serving to deconstruct othering.