From Multiculturalism to Social Justice

Abstract

Multiculturalism emerged as a liberal vision of recognizing and promoting cultural and ethnic diversity in education in the 1960s in North America. Since then, this conceptual orientation has embraced liberal and critical perspectives, and more recently social justice, addressing multiple identity categories including race, gender, class, gender and sexual identity, and disability. Although the resulting vision of social transformation is widely supported by language education scholars, it continues to meet challenges in the form of political backlash and neoliberal pressure, which keep the agenda from moving forward. Comparing the cases of the United States and Canada, this chapter offers an overview of the genesis and development of multiculturalism and its implications for language education. In the United States, multicultural education emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whereas in Canada, multiculturalism became a state policy in 1971 as a byproduct of the establishment of state bilingualism as a means to ease the tension between the francophone minority and the anglophone majority. In both cases, the earlier liberal approach to multicultural education with its focus on the celebration of difference has been criticized for overlooking how difference also signifies injustices caused by unequal power relations. A major difference between the two cases is the status of bilingual/multilingual education which stems from the presence/absence of state policy on multiculturalism and bilingualism. Language educators and scholars are encouraged to practice sustained engagement in criticality in order to bring about concrete change.

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