Framing multicultural capital to understand multicultural education in practice

Abstract

Educational institutions are agents that can support culturally and linguistically diverse communities and promote transformative change to prepare 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. Early adolescents need to be prepared to succeed in a global and diverse world. 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.