Framing Multicultural Capital to Understand Multicultural Education in Practice

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Author(s)
Poyatos Matas, Cristina Florencia
Bridges, Susan
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2009
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Educational institutions are agents that can support culturally and linguistically diverse communities and promote transformative change in preparing global citizens. The degree of preparedness of citizens to deal with the new multicultural reality that constitutes modern life has real economic implications for a nation's success. By adopting a multicultural capital framework that synthesises current capital theories across fields, we seek to understand how educational institutions can prepare students for a world in which the ability to move across cultures and languages significantly determines an individual's ability to ...
View more >Educational institutions are agents that can support culturally and linguistically diverse communities and promote transformative change in preparing global citizens. The degree of preparedness of citizens to deal with the new multicultural reality that constitutes modern life has real economic implications for a nation's success. By adopting a multicultural capital framework that synthesises current capital theories across fields, we seek to understand how educational institutions can prepare students for a world in which the ability to move across cultures and languages significantly determines an individual's ability to succeed. Middle schooling has been increasingly identified in educational literature as an identifiable stage in schooling that spans traditional notions of primary and secondary schooling and that holds distinct characteristics and needs. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a qualitative, exploratory study, this paper maps educational practices (both pedagogic and institutional) across six middle schools in urban Australia. By mapping these practices to the proposed multicultural capital framework, we identify how culturally proactive school communities productively draw upon multicultural capital to foster and promote a distinctly Australian perspective of what constitutes multicultural education.
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View more >Educational institutions are agents that can support culturally and linguistically diverse communities and promote transformative change in preparing global citizens. The degree of preparedness of citizens to deal with the new multicultural reality that constitutes modern life has real economic implications for a nation's success. By adopting a multicultural capital framework that synthesises current capital theories across fields, we seek to understand how educational institutions can prepare students for a world in which the ability to move across cultures and languages significantly determines an individual's ability to succeed. Middle schooling has been increasingly identified in educational literature as an identifiable stage in schooling that spans traditional notions of primary and secondary schooling and that holds distinct characteristics and needs. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a qualitative, exploratory study, this paper maps educational practices (both pedagogic and institutional) across six middle schools in urban Australia. By mapping these practices to the proposed multicultural capital framework, we identify how culturally proactive school communities productively draw upon multicultural capital to foster and promote a distinctly Australian perspective of what constitutes multicultural education.
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Journal Title
The International Journal of Learning
Volume
16
Issue
10
Publisher URI
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2009 .The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. For information about this journal please refer to the journal's website or contact the authors
Subject
Curriculum and Pedagogy Theory and Development
Information and Computing Sciences
Education
Studies in Human Society