Recognition and Multiculturalism in Education

2021

This article discusses how recognition may contribute towards giving underprivileged groups and students, a voice in education. Traditional measures aimed at forwarding equal opportunities for all, like redistributing resources and improving objective conditions have had limited success. The inequality gap between privileged and underprivileged, rural and urban, indigenous and descendants of colonialists persists. The article argues that the importance of intersubjective conditions for equal access and opportunity in education have been underestimated in education and as a consequence one has missed out on the delicate balance between the social and education. In this regard recognition is not an end but a necessary step towards equal opportunities. However, instrumental approaches to recognition must be avoided as recognition is imperative to developing students’ self-esteem and identity. Teachers must therefore comply with moral and ethical standards, thus safeguarding the dignity...

Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2001

This article analyses conflict over multicultural education in the United States as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms 'classification struggle'. By classification struggles, the author means struggles over those symbolic representations of social divisions that help to construct a hierarchical social order. In particular, following Bourdieu, efforts that 'aim at retrospectively reconstructing a past fitted to the needs of the present' are emphasised. Consequently, the author focuses particularly on contests over the reconstruction of United States history. To begin, he asks what is at stake in how a nation and its past are symbolically constructed. He then identifies specific ways in which multiculturalism engages in classification struggle and consider the nature of resistance to those efforts. Next, he illustrates limitations in multiculturalism's success in effecting changes in symbolic classification. Finally, he concludes by suggesting the implications of the analysis for answering the question 'In what sense, can a curriculum be imagined as a national curriculum?'

k@ta, 2010

Culture has become an important component that is addressed in a variety of contexts from the teaching of a language (Baker, 2003),

Jurnal Kemanusiaan, 2020

This paper criticizes the Philippine Education Curriculum's attempt at embracing and implementing multiculturalism. Specifically, it aims to expose the recurring issues of instruction paradigm seen in existing pedagogy. Using Charles Taylor's view of Identity Politics, as well as Paolo Freire's Banking Concept in education, and Jean Paul-Sartre's existential phenomenology, this paper points out the issues in Philippine Education's instructional paradigm leading to oppression. Reflexivity is given emphasis to build on the theme of identity and recognition embedded in the discussion. In this paper, I exposed the main challenge of multicultural education in a predominant instruction-centered paradigm, which is politics of recognition in the classrooms, resulting to [what I posit as] academic othering, which I consider as the cornerstone of an age-old oppressive paradigm in Philippine education. Such problem is characterized by the imbalance in the power relations that is not just imposed onto the students, but has been institutionalized historically as an unconscious yet structurally-motivated way of oppression in education. Despite the promising goal of multiculturalism in the Philippines, our education continues to struggle with the challenges of creating equal opportunities and proper treatment of individual and communal differences.

Handbuch Anerkennung, 2020

In a world where our neighbors are largely different than ourselves, the commandment of loving our neighbors becomes very difficult to do. In fact, we have largely failed to do so and violence in the form of religious or ethnic strife continues to be one of the most pressing global issues of today. Efforts at brokering peace have remained largely ineffective because of the conceptual straightjacket of seeing people primarily in terms of a singular belligerent identity defined along religious or civilizational lines. Seeing the world in terms of disparate civilizations makes the world a much more flammable place than it need be even before the question of a clash is even raised. Misguided theory exacerbates the conflict as they are effectively used by proficient artisans of terror to promote fundamentalism and bigotry. It also forces political leaders to respond to these threats through redefining a person's religious identity in largely political terms. As a response to this crude conceptualization, Amartya Sen proposes that we should start seeing people for the multifaceted beings that they are. Peace lies in the recognition that we human beings are not only much the same but that we are also diversely different. The recognition of the plurality of our identities will enable us to cut across the limitations imposed by a hardened line of classification and give emphasis to the priority of freedom and reason in weighing the claims that our different identities make on us. The challenge of fostering peace and understanding in a multicultural world require that our educational systems be able to cultivate identity-sensitive reasoning especially among the young.

Struggles for recognition are at the same time struggles over what it means to recognize and be recognized. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth propose two mutually exclusive ways to understand recognition: either as a matter of justice (Fraser) or as a matter of identity (Honneth). This article argues against the limitations of both of these construals of recognition, and offers a third way of construing it: as a matter of freedom. Recognition is not reducible, empirically or normatively, to any of these, however. Moreover, it needs to be regarded both more critically and more openly since what we are dealing with is a practice and an ideal that is by its very nature deeply contestable and therefore (more than most practices and ideals) subject to unforeseeable historical and normative change. Rather than trying to fix the meaning of recognition in order to give it a determinate role in ambitious theories of justice, it would be better to proceed more sceptically, attentive both to the complexities of recognition relations and to alternative ways of conceiving them and going on with them differently from before.

What Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor has called a “politics of recognition” remains a highly influential interpretive framework for understanding contemporary social movement demands for group-differentiated rights, protections, and political representation. This chapter will provide an overview of key debates in the reception history of contemporary theories of recognition when applied to questions of racial justice and indigenous sovereignty in particular. Recent scholarship on antiblack racism, settler colonialism, and what critics have called “neoliberal multiculturalism” have mounted powerful challenges the recognition paradigm’s initial framing of racial injustice primarily in terms of cultural misrecognition. Afropessimist, Indigenous Studies, and Marxist theorists’ subsequent attempts to move beyond recognitive politics reveal an underlying conceptual tension between antiracist political strategies premised upon the affirmation of racial identity on the one hand, or upon what could be characterized as the abolition of the racial order on the other. This affirmation/abolition bind is subsequently narrated through a Fanonian deformed dialectic of racial nonrecognition, indigenous refusals of settler state authority, or the racially differentiating effects of economic maldistribution and state-sanctioned expropriation of land and labor.