The experience of multicultural education in Australia six case studies

University of Wollongong

Research Online Centre for Multicultural Studies Occasional Papers

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts

1989

The experience of multicultural education in Australia six case studies Mary Kalantzis University of Wollongong

Recommended Citation Kalantzis, Mary, The experience of multicultural education in Australia six case studies, Centre for Multicultural Studies, University of Wollongong, Occasional Paper 20, 1989, 47. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cmsocpapers/16

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The experience of multicultural education in Australia six case studies Abstract

Australia is the site of a quite remarkable social experiment. In just over four decades since the post-war immigration program began, the Australian population has more than doubled, from 7.5 million in 1947 to 16 million by the mid eighties. Without immigration, given the birth rates of the native bom, the Australian population would now be only about 11 million. This in itself is not remarkable. Mass migration has been one of the most important historical features of the era of global industrialisation, from the country to the city, the developing to the developed world, from points of crisis to points of quieter affluence. But, in a half century when global mobility has been greater than ever before, Australia’s immigration program has been greater than that of any first world country relative to the size of the existing population, bar the peculiar historical phenomenon of the establishment of the state of Israel in British Mandated Palestine.

This report is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cmsocpapers/16

T H E CENTRE FOR M U L T IC U L T U R A L STU D IES U N IV E R S IT Y OF W O L L O N G O N G

The Experience of Multicultural Education in Australia Six Case Studies Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope Occasional Paper no. 20

THE EXPERIENCE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA SIX CASE STUDIES Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope

CENTRE FOR MULTICULTURAL STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG P.O. Box 1144, Wollongong, NSW, 2500, Australia Phone: 042 270780 Fax: 042 286313

ISBN 0 86418 135 3 Occasional Paper Series No. 20, May, 1989

THE EXPERIENCE OF M ULTICULTURAL EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA SIX CASE STUD IES M ary K alantzis and B ill Cope

Servicing C ultural and L inguistic D iversity in A ustralia Australia is the site of a quite remarkable social experiment. In just over four decades since the post-war immigration program began, the Australian population has more than doubled, from 7.5 million in 1947 to 16 million by the mid eighties. Without immigration, given the birth rates of the native bom, the Australian population would now be only about 11 million. This in itself is not remarkable. Mass migration has been one of the most important historical features of the era of global industrialisation, from the country to the city, the developing to the developed world, from points of crisis to points of quieter affluence. But, in a half century when global mobility has been greater than ever before, Australia’s immigration program has been greater than that of any first world country relative to the size of the existing population, bar the peculiar historical phenomenon of the establishment of the state of Israel in British Mandated Palestine.1 The diversity of Australia’s post war immigrant intake is also remarkable. Ostensibly, the first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, intended that mainly English-speaking immigrants come from the British Isles. This fitted with the official policy of assimilation, in which those people least likely to appear different in cultural and linguistic terms were to be encouraged as ideal immigrants and non-English speakers were to become ‘normal’, unaccented English speaking Australians by the second generation. In fact, this prescription for cultural and linguistic homogeneity was immediately unworkable, even in the late forties, and the historical evidence shows that Calwell knew it despite much of the public rhetoric.2 As insufficient British immigrants could be recruited, a large emphasis was placed on recruiting refugees from Northern and Central Europe. During the fifties and sixties, recruitment was increasingly from Southern Europe - again, very much determined by the availability of suitable immigrants. During the seventies, with the ‘economic miracle’ in Europe, the net had to be spread still further, to include Middle Eastern countries, particularly Turkey and Lebanon, then South and Central America. From the mid seventies an increasing number of Indo-Chinese came to Australia, many as refugees. This was nominally the result of an international humanitarian obligation and a by-product of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. In reality, considerable diplomatic pressure was brought to bear upon Australia by front-line South East Asian

2 countries with a serious refugee problem, and the Australian Government perceived a need to avert the possibility of a large scale arrival of ‘boat people’ on the shores of Northern Australia.3 Thus, although the original official intention of Australia’s post-war immigration program had been cultural and linguistic homogeneity, the end result has been extraordinary diversity. As well as about 150 extant Aboriginal languages, there are now over 100 immigrant ethnic groups, speaking about 80 different languages. Over 25 per cent of the population in 1988 was of non-English speaking background.4 O f the two million Australians who reported in the 1986 Census that they spoke a language other than English at home, 20.6 per cent spoke Italian, 13.6 Greek, 6.7 per cent a Chinese language, 5.6 per cent German and 5.4 per cent Arabic; Spanish, the various Yugoslav languages, Polish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Maltese, French, Macedonian, Aboriginal languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Russian each scored between 1 and 5 per cent; and a very large proportion of 14.4 per cent were ‘other’ languages, each with less than 1 per cent representation per language.5 Numbers and diversity alone, however, do not justify the claim that this continent is the site of a remarkable social experiment. Immigrants have officially been encouraged to come and become citizens, not guestworkers. Unlike other countries whose immigrant recruitment was largely for labour force reasons, Australia’s immigration involved population building and thus permanent settlement. Later this reality came to be forced upon countries with temporary guestworker programs, despite their intentions. A succession of sophisticated settlement policies were orchestrated by the Australian federal government for two purposes: to reduce the social cost of return migration and to ‘sell’ mass immigration to the existing population - a population which in 1947 was ninety per cent Australian bom, almost exclusively Anglophone, and harbouring a vigorous history of racism. The history of these policies - from the assimilation policy of the forties to the sixties, then integration, and, most recently, multiculturalism since the late seventies - is complex, subtle, and of immense historical importance. If one overarching assessment of these programs can be made, it is that, on their own terms, they have been extremely successful. For immigrants, there has been a degree o f upward social mobility, perhaps not always commensurate with their aspirations, but at least as significant as that found in any other country at a similar stage of economic development.6 In broader social terms, one of the world’s most homogeneous societies, culturally insular and racist, has been peacefully transformed into one of the most diverse. The extraordinary sense of quiet on this

3 continent belies an experience of world historical significance in the pace and extent of population change. The fact that change on this scale was effected in so few decades and the quiet maintained, history having been made almost behind the backs of its population, itself attests to the sophistication, creativity and adaptiveness of the succession of government policies dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity.7 Australia, in this respect, is an important place to look for lessons about social policy and practice relating to immigration and settlement. This paper reports on this historical achievement on one social site only • schooling. Education, in fact, happens to be an extraordinarily significant site. It is compulsory. It is the place where the state, as nation builder and maker of national identity, can play its most deliberate, systematic, and sustained socialising role. It is a place where the state can be creating the cultural conditions for peaceful social change rather than reactively patching up popular resistances to change. In fact, at each stage in the development of Australian policy, the state has always seen education this way: as one of the most important places where the real work of assimilation, or integration, or multiculturalism - whatever the policy at the time happened to be - took place. Perhaps ironically, recently vocal opponents of multicultural education cite the social mobility of immigrants as a reason to scrap specialist programs. Immigrants don’t seem to need, so these opponents argue, the special treatment and additional government expense. Ethnic minorities have their own particular sense of commitment, closely bound into the migration process itself, manifest in the ‘ethnic success ethic’ or ‘ethnic work ethic’. It is argued that these factors, extraneous to institutionalised education, mean that specialist servicing such as multicultural education is unnecessary. These critics, in other words, advocate a laissez fairs approach to the interaction of processes of immigration/settlement and education.3 Critical to the story of mobility, however, has been the success of education systems in meeting the special needs of immigrant students, in part through precisely those special programs which the new critics of multicultural education seek to abandon. Rather ironically, it is precisely the interventionary role taken by Australian governments, not just in education but in all areas of social policy, that has made the social changes wrought upon Australian society by mass immigration so peaceful, despite the cultural proclivities of the native bom population in 1947, despite the extent of the changes, and despite the inherent structural difficulties of incorporating labour migrants in such a way that they do not form a permanently ghettoised underclass. Whatever their weaknesses, federal government policies of assimilation, followed by policies of integration and then of

4 multiculturalism, were extremely active and effective processes of state intervention, almost always ahead of public opinion in their historical vision, and taking an educative stance even in relation to ‘educated’, seemingly professional and ‘expert’ service providers, such as state education authorities and teachers. Most importantly, these policies have never been static. Assimilation, for example, was a necessary story to tell a population about to face mass labour immigration, but with a powerful popular tradition of economically-based racism. But the architects of mass immigration knew right from the start that the immigration program would inevitably bring with it cultural diversity which could not be erased by fiat of a policy of assimilation. Assimilation was therefore an extremely effective step in creating a culturally and linguistically diverse society, and its success was its own peaceful supersession by integration and multiculturalism.9 Similarly, today, multiculturalism is an unfinished historical process, visionary and historically active, yet ridden with limitations and inherent difficulties upon which its practitioners work creatively in their daily activity. Despite the effective role of education, for example, in creating lasting social, cultural and linguistic change in Australia, there are still critical issues to be tackled. The positive social effects of education are distributed unevenly among ethnic groups. And even when educational attainments are statistically positive for any one ethnic group, generalisation about the performance of students of particular ethnic groups ignores the fact that each group is itself deeply divided socio-economically and by school performance. Even if one small stratum is making it through to higher education at a rate marginally more than average, the majority may still be having difficulties specific to their minority cultural and linguistic status in Australia in which their background plays a contributing part. Moreover, first generation immigrants enjoy substantially less social mobility through education than the second generation.10 And the cultural and linguistic content of curriculum is an issue that all Australian schools need to face all the time. These are just a few of the nagging questions that face those dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity in Australian education. Thus this paper reports on an evolving social project. Australia might in some respects lead the world in the development of multicultural education policies and practices, yet this means more than ever that we must evaluate our ongoing failings, as lessons to be learnt before taking the next step. There are no lessons for direct export, which can be happily duplicated elsewhere. But there are experiences of partial success and a constructive approach to failure that might be very useful.

5 The ECALP project: A Focus on Innovation The research project ‘Education and Cultural and Linguistic Pluralism: Innovative Schools’ (ECALP), upon which this paper is based,was devised by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A number of OECD member countries is involved in a parallel program of research, employing a common methodology centred around a case study protocol. The Australian component of the project was initiated and subsequently funded by the Australian Advisory Committee on Languages and Multicultural Education (AACLAME) which operates under the National Policy on Languages. The Australian fieldwork and reporting has been undertaken by the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales. The objectives of the overall project were expressed by CERVOECD as follows: The purpose of this project is to study innovation strategies which have resulted in particularly successful forms of education for the children of immigrants or ethnic minority groups. Through case studies of innovations in OECD member countries, approaches proven to be successful in a variety of settings will be identified and the common conditions under which the approaches have succeeded will be described and analysed. The detailed analysis of the innovations is likely to be of interest to all those who are involved in multicultural education. It will draw attention to some effective and exemplary practices and also identify useful criteria for the formulation of new policies in this area. In assembling case studies from a number of countries, the project seeks to go beyond the narrow circumstances reflected in a particular educational system or country setting. In this way, the conditions under which innovations succeed may be revealed more clearly, even amplified. A case study approach is especially well suited to the goals of the project, since inclusion in the sample is dictated by the uniqueness or creativity of the approach rather than on the number of such cases. The multi-site case study strategy adopted for the project is unique in that, while the case studies are guided by the overall objectives of the

6 CERI project, the design allows for case studies of quite different types of innovations. As a result, the individual case studies will have in common those aspects necessary to permit comparisons across cases, but they will differ in striking ways according to the characteristics, settings and purposes of the innovation/approach under study.11 For the Australian component of the project, case studies were conducted at Brunswick East High School, Collingwood Education Centre and Footscray High School (each part of the Victorian state education system); Burwood Girls’ High School and Cabramatta High School (both part of the New South Wales state education system); and MacKillop Girls’ High School (a Catholic systemic school, in the Sydney Archdiocese). These secondary schools were selected by AACLAME in consultation with the Victorian Ministry of Education, the New South Wales Department of Education and the Catholic Education Office, Sydney. The criteria for selection were those specified in the ECALP project guidelines: The schools that will be singled out as candidates for a case study will be chosen from among those providing examples of approaches which have been successful in improving the performance of minority children in the following educational situations: Cultural/linguistic incorporation; i) ii)

Community participation;

iii) iv)

Pedagogy; Assessment;

v)

Use of new technologies in basic learning.

The ‘innovation’ in the Australian context turned however,out to be a somewhat different phenomenon to that evidently presupposed in the original project design. This does not imply that the focus on innovation was unfruitful or that there was no innovation to be found. On the contrary, the six Australian case study sites were able to show off innovations in multicultural education o f precisely the order of those anticipated by CERI/OECD. But, taking the liberty of ‘reading into’ the CERI/OECD guidelines, the rationales of seeking ‘uniqueness or creativity’ rather than representative national cases, and o f attempting ‘to go beyond the narrow circumstances reflected in a particular educational system or country setting’, imply that perhaps isolated but replicable cases of excellence in multicultural education are thrown up at a grassroots level, in very specific micro-environments.

7 In none of the six Australian case studies were innovations found that had been developed uniquely within that school. There were no school-based innovations in this sense. Yet innovations there were, in the sense of dramatic departures from traditional curriculum and school structures. These, however, have to be viewed as systemic, structural, historicocultural events, in which the basis of educational innovation and change, and, in some cases, the reasons for the abandonment of certain of the innovations, are to be located outside the school itself. This is not to deny that the six cases surveyed here are amongst the best to be found in Australia, but to locate the origin and sustainability of the innovations outside each school - to those broad historical phenomena, alluded to above, that make Australia an interesting place. Further, within each school, it is often not the innovatory program or practice alone which ‘works’ for the school, but the institutional framework in which it is set: that cluster of leadership, sense of community, and so on, that make a good school ‘work’ as a whole. Sometimes, in fact, there was nothing innovatory about the program itself (such as teaching Turkish from traditional textbooks). It was simply having Turkish in the school, as part of a compulsory core program in languages other than English, that was innovative. Turkish would never have featured in a more traditional curriculum structure, taught to Turkish speaking background students. Summary o f findings: The Six Schools The linguistic and cultural diversity of their student populations had transformed quite fundamentally all six schools in the case studies. Their common features, moreover, make them typical of one sort of Australian school, but not all. In all six, the vast majority of students (seventy-five to over ninety per cent) are of non-English speaking background (NESB). Given the size of Australia’s post-war immigration program, these numbers are by no means unusual. But, although there would not be a single school in Australia immune from the effects of mass immigration, these schools are representative of conditions in which it would be impossible to do nothing. The case study schools, however, do not just share as a common feature absolute numbers of NESB students, but the range and variety of their language backgrounds. In none of the schools was any one language group overwhelmingly preponderant. Usually three or four groups shared roughly equal numbers, with a total of about twenty or thirty language groups represented in each school.

8 The populations served by the schools were also extraordinarily transient. In Footscray, for example, twenty-five percent of the local population has been resident in the local government area for less than one year. Waves of immigration have meant in all six schools that language groups have more or less come and gone, sometimes in the space of just a few years. These have mostly been the ‘first stop’ suburbs, places where you rent a house before buying one further out in the great suburban sprawls of Sydney or Melbourne. It is perhaps a little too simplistic to say that all six schools serve lower socio-economic status or working class communities, although there is a good deal of truth in this generalisation. Many parents work in unskilled wage work, often part time, or live on some form of social security payment or other. Others have small businesses - shops or clothing manufacturing, for example. This often means working excessively long hours in unpleasant conditions • a far cry from the conventional image of the entrepreneur. The uneven material results of overtime wage work or toiling in a small business are to be found in every school; students’ socio-economic status is in fact quite variable. A degree of class mobility is also at the bottom of the considerable population movement, either to established middle class suburbs or to the outer-suburban ‘mortgage belt*. All these demographic features profoundly influence the logistics of servicing the schools’ constituent communities. So, for example, the once thriving Greek and Turkish Language Other Than English (LOTE) programs at Collingwood Education Centre will probably have to end in the next few years because of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of the school’s local community. The difficulty of schools responding to the vagaries of demographic change, let alone planning even short term provision, was also illustrated at this school. In just two days during the fieldwork for this research, twelve new arrivals from South East Asia turned up, on the doorstep so to speak. There was simply no space for them in the local language centre, and until such time as places came available - several months away perhaps - they could only be accommodated in the general classes. Socio-economic disadvantage, moreover, overlays cultural and linguistic diversity in such a way that it is hard to isolate different variables in the determination of educational outcomes. In the words of one teacher, ‘if I can do it as a wog, but Australians can’t do it , then it’s not just a cultural thing’. The enormous, inherent challenge of servicing schools in these sorts of areas means that the value of innovation specifically designed to meet the needs of cultural and linguistic diversity is in itself very hard to measure.

9 In pedagogy, too, all six case study schools have trodden a similar path in which innovation was broadly along progressivist lines. The challenge of making the school work had meant, over a ten or twenty year period, a revolutionary change in teaching practices in which students’ cultural and linguistic diversity has been incorporated into the curriculum rather than excluded as academically and socially inappropriate; in which strong attempts have been made to involve the community in the running of the school and their children’s education; in which classroom pedagogy is experiential, involving students in the active making of their own knowledge and relating learning to their linguistic and cultural background and in such a way that the curriculum is demonstrably relevant to their own experience of life; in which assessment doesn’t condemn NESB students on the basis of culture- or language-biased standardised tests but positively assesses individual development in relation to a task; and in which, institutionally, the project of the school and its innovations are shaped through processes of collaborative decision making. In going down these paths, these schools are by no means unique, reflecting rather, a major paradigm shift in all Australian education over the past two decades - a paradigm shift which has implicated every aspect of education, from its epistemological assumptions in the minutiae of classroom experience through to systems management structures. In schools like the ones surveyed here, however, the change has been more dramatic than anywhere else. Putting a positive construction on this, these schools have responded most flexibly because they really had to do something. They could not rest on their laurels in the way that‘establishment’ schools might. Or, to put it in more negative terms, there was little resistance here to massive change. Said one curriculum administrator, ‘where people [parents] are powerless, changes seem to come more easily than where people are more influential’. Just as important is what these six schools are not. They are definitely not ‘establishment* schools, and perhaps, there, other crucial dilemmas face multicultural education dilemmas with very different dynamics to those found in the case study schools. To speak anecdotally, in another (as yet unpublished) piece of research by the principal investigators contrasting four totally different schools, one was of similar demographic, institutional and pedagogical complexion to the six case study schools in this project, and another an expensive, private ‘establishment1boys’ school. In the latter, a modicum of progressivist pedagogy had tempered an otherwise traditional curriculum in such a way that students would acquire those linguistic-cognitive competencies needed for conventional academic success and then to ‘rule the world’. An all-pervasive sense of cultural homogeneity, however, not only erased the significant but unrecognised cultural and linguistic diversity in the school itself, but produced a racism which can only prove unproductive in the outside world in the long run. These boys will be living and working in a world in which,

10 despite their education, cultural and linguistic variety is more likely than commonality to characterise their workforce. In the other school, broadly similar to the six surveyed in this project, attitudinal racism was much less of an explicit problem. Cultural and linguistic diversity was such an unavoidable reality that racism or cultural isolationism was a barely thinkable nonsense. Yet, viewing the education system in structural terms, the linguisticcognitive outcomes - cultural goodwill and radically progressivist curriculum notwithstanding - were abysmal. There are, in other words, other very important lessons to be learnt about the necessity of multicultural education outside the type of school which is the focus of this case study. These schools are also not ones that have just recently taken on the challenge of cultural and linguistic diversity. They have all been doing it for a long time. Indeed, they were chosen for this project precisely because they are among the most soundly established and oldest living examples of multicultural education in the Australian context. They are mostly old, inner city schools in areas that were once the poorest, but which are quite steadily becoming gentrified as inner city real estate prices skyrocket. A good number of immigrants in these areas are now doing quite well for themselves. Now, some of the poorest areas are on the outer fringes of Australia’s big cities. Whilst most of the schools in these case studies are, in terms of facilities at the very least, enjoying the luxury of declining numbers (even if declining enrolments also produces serious resource gaps and loss of curriculum range and depth), many schools ‘out west’ in Sydney and Melbourne are bursting at the seams and only just starting to come to grips with the cultural and linguistic diversity of their constituent populations. So, the Turkish language programs at Collingwood Education Centre and Brunswick East High are fine and have been going for a long time. But the Turkish class sizes in these schools are getting smaller all the time and Melbourne’s Turkish speaking community is moving to outer suburban areas where the schools do not as yet teach Turkish. This project, also, is not about primary school. It is possible to argue that a good deal of the educational good or damage is already done by the time students reach the secondary school. Special programs catering for linguistic and cultural diversity at the primary level are ciucial. At Collingwood Education Centre, the infants/primary part of the school mounted a variety of bilingual programs that it was not possible to examine in this secondary oriented project. St Mel’s Primary school at Campsie, a feeder school to MacKillop Girls’, mounts bilingual teaching programs in the infants years, but aimed at linguistic-cognitive development, rather than cultural self esteem or language maintenance. From the mid primary school, the focus of LOTEs teaching is on literacy and learning the language in a way specifically compatible to academic success in it as a subject in the

secondary school. It is surely not just the endeavours of MacKillop that produced creditable results in that school, but a degree of co-ordination, intended or fortuitous, with its feeder primary schools. Unfortunately, this project was neither able to examine case study primary schools nor the critical issue of the match or mismatch of primary and secondary programs. Nor was the project an exercise in looking for exemplary innovation. The innovations were those officially deemed to be innovative by the education systems involved in the project. As the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, this meant that by the time the researchers got to some of the schools, the innovation that had been the intended object of study had all but vanished. But this itself produced results which have their own intrinsic interest. As often as the data presented the dynamics of successful innovation, they also presented evidence of why innovation is often problematic or vulnerable. Added to this, in all the six case studies, even the ones deemed to be a success and still in operation, there were little or no hard data, especially pre/post innovation control data, to demonstrate the unequivocal success of that particular innovation. Their claim to be exemplary is thus no better than tendentious. On the other hand, had the researchers gone looking until they found six innovatory schools, all with hard, longitudinal data to demonstrate tangible success, the picture may well have been different. It certainly would have been hard to find schools with a sufficient level of documentation, but they are around. From 1981, for example, De La Salle College, a Sydney Catholic boys’ secondary school with a very high proportion of NESB students, instituted a series of major reforms. A structured English literacy program; the Social Literacy program, aimed at conceptual development and cultural self understanding in social science; LOTEs; and an extensive pastoral care program, were all introduced. By 1988 the serious intercultural conflicts that had plagued the school at the beginning of the decade had gone and Higher School Certificate results for students who had done all their schooling under the new eighties regime, had improved out of sight. This can be clearly documented. Nevertheless, whatever different things could have been done in a different sort of project, there are positive and useful results that have arisen from this one. It would be impossible for there not to be some very instructive lessons to be learnt from these schools, just as much as it would have been impossible for them to do nothing about the cultural and linguistic diversity of their students. In all schools, in fact, teachers said that they met the challenge of cultural and linguistic diversity with the support of the hard-won knowledge of practical experience, not book knowledge or adequate tertiary training. It was their

12 experience of being an immigrant or of non-English speaking background, or of having to come to grips with the ineluctable reality of this sort of school, that taught them more than anything else. For this reason alone, their voices are a critically constructive part of this report ‘I don’t think of these programs as innovations’, said one principal. ‘They simply answer a need’. C ultural and L inguistic Incorporation Australian schools, even during the era o f assimilation, have always attempted to incorporate students whose languages and cultures are in a minority in the Australian context. This serves to highlight the fact that ‘incorporation’ can mean quite different things. On the one hand, incorporation can occur in the sense of actively respecting and servicing the difference of minority students (the cultural pluralist model). On the other hand, incorporation can mean bringing minority students into the mainstream by providing them with paths to academic success (the 'ethnic disadvantage’ model of specialist teaching). This may well incorporate them successfully, yet also assimilate them culturally (intentionally or unintentionally), by subsuming their ‘minority’ culture to the demands of the dominant culture. With the rise o f progressivism in Australian education in the seventies and eighties, there was a very strong trend to the cultural pluralist model of multiculturalism. More recently, there has been a trend to view multiculturalism as a project which centrally involves equitable access, but without the old assimilationist agenda. In education, multiculturalism thus means removing barriers to access to mainstream society/culture in a context which is nevertheless open to cultural diversity and which actively faces the demands of non-discriminatory intercultural communication in the school and the community. O f the six case study schools, this latter sense of incorporation was most clearly expressed at Cabramatta High School. ‘Education is still about individual pupils achieving a place in the world for themselves’, said the principal, ‘satisfying to the self and supportive of the community’. In the words of the deputy, ‘if they’re going to assimilate, students need to know how to operate in Australian society .... They need to know how the Australian community operates; multiculturalism is about assimilating.’ This philosophy was very much in evidence in action in the school’s programs, particularly in the Intensive Language Unit, the Language in Learning Program, an Australian history across the curriculum perspective and the teaching of five LOTEs as full scale academic languages. A social science teacher at Collingwood said that, just as much as respecting all the differences, it was important to ask ‘What makes us Aussies? This is important for NESB students • not for a nationalist purpose, but to provide access to information.’

13 Still, it would be safe to say that, across all six schools, this philosophy of multicultural education was less in evidence than the cultural pluralist approach of progressivism. This newer approach to multiculturalism was seen by the school personnel to be self-corrective of inadequacies in the cultural pluralist model. A later section of this paper will deal with this issue in relation to pedagogy in the sense of classroom strategies and their epistemological presuppositions. At this point, the issues are introduced from the point of view of school organisation and the overall strategy of granting esteem to difference. The main elements of progressivist cultural pluralism at this level are curriculum diversification and highlighting cultural difference as a marie of respect. In the past few decades curriculum diversification has become a key measure to serve students whose needs and interests are inevitably various. This trend has been most marked in the secondary school, particularly in the post-compulsory years of schooling where rapidly increasing school retention rates have produced a more diverse student body. Traditional curriculum, with its middle class, academic and ‘Anglo’ cultural biases, so the progressivists argue, was simply an exercise in exclusion, of marking cultural and socio-economic difference as failure, and rationalising this as individual ‘ability’. Diversified curriculum, on the other hand, presents students with a wider range of subject choice, such that every student can work through a program of study relevant to their individual needs and interests, and appropriate to their social destination. There is simply no point, so the argument continues, in a curriculum which can only hand down a negative verdict upon a large number of students. Language teaching, as powerfully as any other area of the curriculum, epitomises the change wrought upon Australian education by curriculum diversification. Whereas twenty years ago, mainstream schools almost only taught French or German or Latin as an academic ‘foreign’ language, now, as a direct by-product of immigration and multicultural education policies, over twenty major languages are taught in Australian schools. All six case study schools now teach at least three LOTEs as full subjects, many for all six years of secondary schooling, often with ‘relevant’ community-based rationales such as linguistic and cultural maintenance. In the six schools there has also been a proliferation of ‘alternative’ courses for the ‘less academically inclined’, sometimes accompanied by restructuring of the curriculum around short ‘semesterised’ courses and ‘vertical’ timetabling. ‘Food for Living*, ‘Life Skills’ and ‘Driver Education’ are a few of the dozens of alternative courses offered in the case study schools. The Interpreting, Translating and Multicultural Studies course, the focus of

14 this project’s case study at Burwood Girls’ High, was an ‘Other Approved Subject’, to use the parlance of the NSW Department of Education which underlines the otherliness of one end of the diversified curriculum. Typical of all alternative subjects, however, this course was for students less likely to do well in ‘academic’, externally examined LOTEs and could not count for credit in calculating a student’s tertiary entrance score. The rhetoric of choice, individual and community relevance, and democratically diversified curriculum, it was reported in the case study schools, had an underside which in some other senses was not so democratic. In effect, it often amounted to a new form of streaming, dressed up in democratic garb. Once it was ‘ability’ that slotted a student into an educational and social destiny. Now it’s pseudo choice and pseudo relevance. Students, all too ready and able to sniff out the truth behind nice-sounding euphemisms, soon realised that ‘communications skills’ really meant ‘vegie English’ and ‘maths in society’ really meant ‘vegie maths’. The ESL co-ordinator at Cabramatta spoke of the alternative English course offered in Year 11 by another nearby high school. ‘Few here would choose [such a course] if it was offered; students here want to be educated, succeed, go to uni, and they do programs that will get them there. And we would be doing them a disservice if we didn’t have high level English.’ Sometimes the alternative curriculum meant ‘dressing up’ a subject - making it stand out as an attractive morsel in the curriculum smorgasbord, and making it more palatable by simplifying its contents. Because you were competing with lots of other ‘fancy courses’, said a teacher at MacKillop, you had to call your language ‘let’s be bopping*, but as soon as you did that, the subject being taught ‘kind of slipped back there’. The problem o f curriculum diversification is even more serious when one stands back and views the scene at a systems level. It is the low socio-economic status, high NESB schools that predominantly get progressivist, diversified curriculum. Meanwhile, the traditional academic curriculum steams on at the other end of the system, in middle class state schools and private schools. The differences show in the results at the end of schooling, and these are at the bottom of rapidly growing NESB representation in private schools (often at great financial and personal expense to parents) and the proliferation of private ethnic schools, more concerned with ‘standards’ than cultural and linguistic maintenance. A self-corrective trend was to be found in all six case study schools, with a strong trend back to a rationalised core curriculum. This was partly a recognition on the part of education professionals of the difficulties of wholesale diversification and partly based on a growing feeling that if some things were good enough to choose, they were good

15 enough to be compulsory. Almost all students in all six schools undertook compulsory LOTE study for some time during their secondary education. It was also a matter of students voting with their feet. The interpreters’ course at Burwood ended as much because students opted for really relevant courses - the ones that are externally examined for hard marks in the Higher School Certificate. Parents also expressed unease about diversified curriculum. In Australia, said one, summing up a frequently reported view, ‘it seems to be a bit loose; it doesn’t seem to be a straight line .... [Ijn South America ... it’s a more common curriculum.’ LOTEs were perceived to be an important part of the curriculum, mainly as a matter of economic necessity • exploiting diverse linguistic resources in a multilingual nation highly integrated into the world economy. They were also seen as a part of the curriculum where NESB students could do well and pick up marks. LOTEs did not have an unproblematic place in the diversified curriculum, however. Some had lower status. Macedonian, for example, is still a ‘Group 2’ subject in the Victorian senior secondary school, which means, in the words of one student, that ‘it’s not worth much’. Sometimes, moreover, ‘community languages’ were perceived to be less than serious academic languages when their objectives were mainly maintenance. Too often, one teacher reported, the maintenance rationale was really an issue of identity and the pork barrel politics of community recognition. ‘Language teaching has to be pedagogically valuable. Language maintenance on its own is not enough because it won’t last forever. There is no need to maintain the language just to talk to Granny; she doesn’t talk the standard language anyway.’ The relevant-to-the-community rationale is unsustainable, anyway, when there are so many languages to be serviced in so many schools. School already has an onerous responsibility, said another teacher; it could offer languages as subjects for their intellectual worth and for their international usefulness; it could offer bilingual education because it aids cognitive development; but linguistic and cultural maintenance is up to the community. At the bottom o f curriculum diversification is a set of assumptions about the role of individual motivation in education; if students choose something at which they can succeed and that seems interesting to them, education is more likely to be effective than when they are forced to accept and learn what someone else thinks is important for them. In line with this strong affective-motivational orientation, the challenge of cultural pluralism in schools is treated first and foremost as a matter of self esteem. If only the school incorporated minority students in the sense of valuing their differences, so the progressivist critique of an ethnocentric traditional curriculum goes, their relationship to the school, and in all

16 probability their academic results, would improve. In any event, the academic results can only follow, once the school’s affective house has been set in order. One of the primary roles of the Arabic language program at MacKillop, for example, is to enhance self esteem. The problem had been that some of the girls ‘didn’t really value their Arabic background’. The school’s response is, via the languages program, for example, to ‘make public’ this culture and encourage appreciation of it. The Bilingual English and Social Science Program at Brunswick East has as a ‘social’ rationale that the privileging of ‘mother tongue languages will lead to an increase in the individual and community’s self esteem’. The program is evidence of ‘the respect the school shows for the culture and language of the home and community groups’. An important part of LOTEs teaching at Collingwood was improving self esteem and confidence by ‘promoting their home culture’. The Interpreters’ course at Burwood was based on a less ‘traditional’, more ‘confidence building’ pedagogy for a ‘less academic’ clientele. The focus on granting respect to difference as a means of building self esteem was challenged a number of times. One teacher pointed out that the only way to improve students’ self esteem was, not by programs that tried to make students feel good, but by those that enhanced their educational chances. ‘Toleration of difference’, whether it be cultural or otherwise, can in fact be a toleration of social inequalities. Another teacher criticised one of her LOTEs teaching colleagues, who saw their role more as ‘keeping the difference, and it has become a patriotic thing’. This was a ‘double edged’ objective, because when there are students with inadequate skills in both English and the mother tongue, language skills in the first language have to be given priority over a cultural emphasis, to overcome the cognitive gap. It was by no means a foregone conclusion, however, that self esteem was really created by granting public respect to differences. In some cases, there seemed to be a surfeit of confidence in one’s cultural difference, but this was not necessarily translated into self esteem in a broader social context. ‘Everyone is in the same boat; it’s all wogs versus the world here’, said a teacher. The enormous popularity of the play ‘Wogs Out of Work’ and the cult of Con the Fruiterer on the high-rating prime time television show ‘The Comedy Company*, are both testimony to a, slightly counter-cultural, but nevertheless confident, assertion of ‘wogness’. There is even a personalised car numberplate in Sydney which simply tells the world ‘WOG’. In fact, in popular discourse, ‘wog* is now as often associated with status and success - flashy red cars and rococo suburban mansions - as it is with social marginality or inferiority.

17 All this attribution of positive status, however, is not just an exercise in elevating difference, but in measuring the difference in social terms. The problem that led to the demise of the interpreters’ course at Burwood was not that it didn’t go out of its way to build confidence and capitalise in a very practical way on students’ different language backgrounds, but that in broader social terms and within the pattern of senior school credentialling, it had low status. If students were to be esteemed, it was by publicly measurable success in mainstream courses. Similarly, there’s not a lot of point in using the teaching of Macedonian as a stepping stone to self esteem when the education system marks the subject for low status through its credentialling mechanisms. Put more generally, it can be concluded that esteem is a phenomenon of social relation, not a cultural thing that can be readily isolated. If curriculum relevant to cultural difference does not produce the goods in broad social terms, it is a sham even on its own primarily affective terms. Massive changes had occurred in curriculum and teaching in all of the schools surveyed. What were the results? Were students being incorporated in the sense of gaining access to the mainstream? This is difficult to measure, partly because it was difficult to access hard, comparable pre- and post-innovation data; and partly because the results themselves are ambiguous. At one of the schools, a teacher who had completed her own schooling in the same place some fifteen years earlier said there had been no improvement in pupil performance. Retention rates in the post-compulsory years had increased and more students were getting into colleges because there were more places, but their results were no better. At times, the results seemed extremely poor for the resources and personal commitment of teachers. At other times, when the results were ‘average’ in relation to the whole student cohort across the system, this, under the circumstances, was a good result. A number of teachers, however, pointed to an unusually large standard deviation even when the results came out to be average. Whilst some students, strongly committed to success (in the nature of the immigration process), do extremely well, there is often an unusually long ‘tail’ of students who do very badly. Whilst the case for their academic performance remains unproven, in socio-cultural terms, all six case study schools seem to be succeeding. At Brunswick East, for example, the whole cluster of innovations ‘had a centring effect; the school has a clear identity and the students know this’. Whilst an ESL co-ordinator at one of the schools could not speak confidently of their academic results, there was a strong pastoral care element to the ESL program and it is effective ‘in terms of its social goals at the very least*. It was frequently reported that racism is a serious problem in the community but that, comparatively, school is a haven from that. In schools which are located in relatively poor neighbourhoods, and

18 with so much cultural diversity, this must be regarded as testimony to the long term social success of Australian multicultural education. This is not to imply that the socio-cultural question is a closed book in schools, a problem that has been solved. Racism was still a powerful concern, an object of eternal vigilance. In the words of one principal, ‘we’re sitting on a time bomb’. Tolerance is ‘very fragile’. The school has to deal with regular ‘invasions’ from the ‘outside’, particularly on Mondays when weekend fights are brought into the school. Except at MacKillop, where the Social Literacy materials were used as a full mainstream social science program in Year 7, there were no programs specifically tackling the question of intercultural relations in a context of cultural diversity. The comment was made several times that LOTEs, for example, were a roundabout way of promoting intercultural harmony. Generally negative comments were made about ‘ethnic studies’ approaches to multicultural education, but repeated calls were made for socio-cultural programs. ‘A curriculum of cultural selfknowledge’ was essential, said one social science co-ordinator. Students desperately needed programs that gave them knowledge and access to a complex Australian society in which the dynamics of cultural diversity were a central and ever-challenging issue. Some cynicism was expressed about facile approaches to multicultural education which created more problems than they solved. The ‘stuff on festivals’, to use one teacher’s expression, was an impediment to students’ learning and an abrogation of the school’s responsibility to take seriously the question of cultural self understanding • to teach sociological and anthropological concepts - and to teach ‘serious stuff about access and participation in the Australian multicultural society. Several systems administrators, reflecting on schools with a less mature approach than the six case study schools, pointed out that the ‘international days’ version of multicultural education produced stereotypes that had as much potential to feed into racism as to alleviate it. The issues are trivialised, and then they don’t seem to be important. A token on the periphery of school life becomes an alibi to leave them out of mainstream curriculum. ‘A lot of what goes on is really tokenistic; “multiculturalism” is used very glibly. Cultural identity in terms of what people wear and eat doesn’t mean anything; it’s not hitting the mark.’ ‘Culture’, in the words of another person, ‘is more subtle and dynamic and should be seen as such’. Sometimes cultural maintenance, the barely hidden agenda of this sort of multiculturalism, it was reported, is hard to sustain. Communities often try. ‘Once migrated, people tend to remember their culture’s ways as they were when they left.’ Schools have to have a much more sophisticated view of culture; always moving and with contradictory pressures coming to bear on it. One can’t simply support the fossilisation of culture; ‘schools have to

19 be aware of what culture is, well beyond the surface of spaghetti and polka’. The view was expressed that this is a matter of understanding how people are socialised and of teachers understanding their own cultural assumptions and the culture of schooling as a way of dealing with the various cultural and language groups in the school. It’s not a matter of preservation of a distanced ‘their culture’, but a dialogue, a dynamic process of negotiation. ‘Culture is always being formed and reformed’, said one principal, always being modified in relation to the mainstream and never static. He felt he was not in a position to make decisions about the maintenance or not of other people’s cultures. ‘Kids are volatile and can’t be treated in an authoritarian way ... ; we have to think with them, alongside them.’ At other times, the project of cultural maintenance was not necessarily even seen to be desirable. It was a good thing, according to one senior administrator, ‘so long as it does not infringe upon basic human rights’. Sexism is one hallowed cultural tradition which schools were to work actively against. In the words of a principal, ‘parents will say, “this is our culture, how dare you”. You have to say, like Mill, “this is the law, respect it”.’ The contradiction in values was most strikingly highlighted in the case of a Turkish background girl, about to be ‘circumcised’. The school spoke to the parents but she ‘disappeared anyway’. Cultural chauvinism, moreover, appeared as the unacceptable underside of many attempts at cultural maintenance. Preserving culture was also reported often to include an element of political antagonism, sometimes anachronistic, and often contributing little that was constructive, in social and educational terms, to late twentieth century Australia. Sometimes LOTEs teaching and socio-cultural programs become an intended or unintended medium for this. Antagonisms between different Yugoslav language groups, and between students of Greek and Macedonian background, were cited as examples, as was the case of a Vietnamese teacher’s aide who attempted to inculcate a sense of specifically South Vietnamese (pre-1975) ‘culture’. Multiculturalism and cultural maintenance in some instances did not necessarily appear compatible. Multicultural education was not simply seen to be a management strategy, a process of opening schooling to the unproblematic representation and reproduction of whatever cultures come along. Multiculturalism manifested itself in these schools much of the time as a powerfully value-laden and culturally specific assumption • that in liberal western society, cultural difference is valued, but within a very particular framework of rights and obligations. One teacher defined the relationship between multiculturalism and cultural maintenance very clearly. ‘Cultural maintenance can only be effective when you

20 are maintaining more than one culture at a tim e..., otherwise you get a kind of arrogance. What’s good here is that obviously we think it’s valuable to be Greek and Lebanese and Turkish and Chinese.’ The culture of schooling needs to be recognised and clearly articulated. This seemed to be a difficulty in the case study schools. Both progressivism and multiculturalism are ostensibly open creeds, but to protest the open-ness too loudly, is in fact to highlight the cultural specificity of western liberal education and society. The Salman Rushdie affair, cited by one of the administrators, highlighted the fact that the framework of open-ness and diversity is itself a solidly cultural phenomenon. In fact, the loud rhetorical protests do little service to ethnic communities who really want to know what strange presuppositions this liberal, progressivist education system rests upon. Nor do they help the school establish its own sense of mission. Schools and societies work best when they have a strong sense of shared institutional community. Pretending cultural agnosticism does not help. All schools reported communal and institutional fragmentation to be an important challenge. They also reported a good deal of unease and uncertainty about the word ‘multiculturalism’. Repeatedly, they said the term was faddish or ambiguous or the preserve of political opportunists. They just went about their daily business of dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity. The reality of their constituent communities was such, however, that a strong, positive and generally agreed sense of multiculturalism could be the only antidote to fragmentation. Rather shamefully, the project socio-cultural education was frequently associated with these sorts of difficulties, and ESL and LOTEs were seen to be the only respectable manifestations of multicultural education. The problem with LOTEs, however, was that their own underlying socio-cultural agenda was often as poorly spelt out as socio-cultural education ever has been, leaving themselves open to the same range of difficulties. Community Participation Community participation has become a catch-cry in Australian education over the past two decades. Schools can use a variety of techniques to increase community participation in education. These can range from processes which democratise decision making, to making parents and communities feel part of the social atmosphere of the school. In Victoria, for example, the school councils have a powerful governing role by legislation and parental involvement is sought on school subcommittees, including curriculum committees. In New South Wales, as well, there is a trend to devolution of control of schools to the community. And, in the area of Commonwealth funded programs, it is a clear policy of

21 the Disadvantaged Schools Program (five of the six case study schools were DSP schools) that the community be involved in all aspects of school decision making. Yet there are tensions between the rhetoric of participation as an ideal and problems including: a community’s ability to participate; a potential conflict between community views on the way schools should work and the authoritative position of the school personnel; the time and material resources required to support community participation; a possible threat to teacher professionalism and control of their work; and the fact that the culturally specific liberal ideal of grassroots community participation might well be at odds with many immigrant cultural expectations. Starting with the most obvious of material realities, it was reported in all six schools that NESB parents are so preoccupied with the logistics of survival, starting a business or working overtime - they are ‘too busy making money* - that it is difficult for them to take an active, participatory role in their children’s education. Mostly it was the few ‘Anglo’ parents, often education professionals themselves, who found their way onto educational policy committees, and, often, the Parents’ and Citizens’/Friends’ Association as well. All too frequently, the type of parent who participated was self-selected and from a privileged minority. There were also limits, material restraints aside, to the ability and inclination of NESB parents to participate. One Turkish teacher had tried to establish a Turkish parents’ club, but with no success. Parents from a peasant background, he said, found Australian education so unfamiliar that ‘they don’t want to know’. The idea of critically contributing to the running of the school was culturally alien. An aide quoted a Vietnamese saying about the status of the teacher in a hierarchy of social respect - ‘the king first, then the teacher, then the family*. The authoritative place of the teacher-as-knower and transmitter of knowledge, meant that parents were to respect the teacher just as much as the students should respect the teacher. Teachers had something to give. Indeed, asking for student and parent contribution sometimes produced more community disquiet than support, as it seemed to indicate a looseness, lack of discipline and allowing the students too much freedom to the point where the teacher gave up their proper position of respect. When NESB parents did contribute, moreover, their input was sometimes at odds with the philosophical and pedagogical temper of the school, demanding, for example, the reinstatement of school uniforms, strict discipline and examinations with grades given, and ‘more spelling, grammar and punctuation’. When one of the schools diversified their curriculum offering, ‘democracy was very hard to achieve’, said one interviewee. ‘They

22 were a very reactionary body of parents, who were not convinced that the curriculum was appropriate for their daughters.’ A submerged sense of cultural confrontation, perhaps even ingratitude in a system which gives parents such extensive rights, partly underlined the fact in the case study schools that community participation is a key tenet of a progressivism as a culture. Community participation was found to be not so much a procedure of open-ness to other people’s cultural ideas about education, but itself an element in a very specific culture of schooling. A story is told of a ‘teacher unionist in the feminist boiler suit uniform’ who addressed a group of Turkish and Italian mothers in one of the case study schools about their girls taking up traditional male trades such as plumbing or motor mechanics. Far from enlightening the community about the wider employment prospects for their daughters as a result o f non-sexist education and employment practices, parents were appalled by the prospect of their children working in jobs which involved work which was as dirty and heavy as the factory jobs in which many of them - the mothers and fathers • still worked. They wanted their daughters to have the middle class prospects of the evening’s speaker, but to dress better. It was found, moreover, that immigrant groups did not necessarily want school to reproduce their culture, when that culture is defined by the paradigm of pluralist multiculturalism as their ‘difference’. Rather, they want access measured in mainstream economic and social terms. This is just as much a cultural thing, bom of the migration process itself, as the differences. They often don’t expect their home language to be taught in school as of right. This is not to imply that, once the languages are there, it would be possible to take them away. Nor that, once x language is taught, there won’t be parents asking for y language. As the process of incorporation gathers a momentum of its own, specialist provision itself becomes the leverage for emerging lobby groups. Still, repeatedly, parents in the case study schools stressed the primary importance of English and academically prestigious subjects. LOTEs were fine, but only insofar as they were subjects where their children could get high marks. ‘Reactionary* maybe, but it would be wrong to dismiss parents’ concerns and expectations. Vietnamese parents at one parent evening, although happy about the particular school and appreciative of the presence of a Vietnamese aide as an interpreter, said that the most disturbing things about Australian education were that it did not instil solid moral values such as respect for elders and teachers, and was too weak on the ‘hard’ academic disciplines such as maths. Read carefully, it seemed from the evidence from the case study schools that there may well be a lot of truth in this perception - that schools

23 have not projected a solid image of their own values and mission (such as the meaning of multiculturalism, projected in a direct, positive sense), and that progressivism has brought with it a slippage in traditional academic rigour and ‘soft’, imprecise assessment which is unsatisfying to parents and fails to prepare students for the ‘hard’ assessment of public matriculation exams. This is not to imply that the parents’ view is an immediately acceptable answer. They refer to the only alternative known to them, not being professional educators - their own experience of schooling. Their reference point may not be relevant to a first world society in the late twentieth century, but their observations, as they emerged in this research, were perceptive and important nevertheless. Yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a populist vision of democratic control needs to be tempered with a positive reassertion of teacher professionalism. In one school parents ‘torpedoed’ a human relations course because it dealt with sexually transmitted diseases. They insisted that the diseases be presented as ‘God’s scourge’. There was a point, concluded the teacher who told this story, when teacher professionalism had to override community participation. ‘The school is a critical presenter of values and not just a maintainer of them.’ This conclusion applies just as much to multiculturalism as it does to pedagogy. Multiculturalism is evidently not just an empty vessel, but an overarching principle of social action in Australia. The school has to take an explicit educative stance vis a vis cultures which are chauvinistic, reclusive or which breech official institutional and legal stances on issues such as sexism. Equally, insofar as progressivist pedagogy embodies some profound insights into the way socially powerful knowledge is made in industrial societies in the late twentieth century - actively appropriated by critical, inquiring, ever-adaptive minds - it was obvious from the case studies that school communities need informing and educating, rather than unproblematically ‘giving them a say*. They need to know, they desperately want to know, about those forms of knowledge and learning that really give access. They only hark back to a supposedly golden past when the present doesn’t seem to be producing the goods, or when the way the present is producing the goods has not been convincingly explained to them. The most developed of the community liaison programs, at MacKillop Girls’ High, undoubtedly proved that much was to be gained from informing parents and actively involving them in their children’s school. On the one hand, community liaison educates the school about parents’ cultural expectations of schooling. It destroys fanciful notions about what parents want. It trains the school on the inside about what the outside is like. The fact that [NESB] children do not do very well at school is not always just an ESL problem; half the time it isn’t at all. You can’t

24 remove language problems from their social context. So being able to see their problems from the two sides is very useful; ... it’s useful to the teachers because you can contribute both aspects, and it’s useful to the parents because you can explain linguistic problems as well as look at cultural problems. There can be no doubt that the Community Liaison Program at MacKillop played an important part in the creditable academic results achieved by students in that school. As it transpired from the case studies, for different cultural groups, there are different entrees to participation. One of the ironies of the culture of liberalism, working with concepts like ‘rights’, ‘participation’, ‘control’ and ‘empowerment’ is that, whatever the practical virtues of getting parents involved, and however much they connote community access, they are themselves culturally alien, even culturally threatening, terms to many people. They work well in the culture of the liberal individual, confidently able to avail themselves of their rights of participation. A principal in one of the Victorian case study schools made this point clearly. ‘Very few schools are able to have school councils take an active role, unless they are white and middle class.’ At MacKillop, community liaison had worked because all the parents were visited in the relative security of their own homes, on their own cultural ground. The stance was ‘informative’ rather than ‘empowering’. The cups of tea and coffee established ties of intimacy and bonds of hospitality and obligation which could not have been established in the institutional setting of the school. For the parents at this school, this was the culturally appropriate entree to participation, and possibly even, in the longer term, empowerment. In the words of the community liaison teacher, discussion is the important thing, because you don’t necessarily change people, but if they understand why we are doing something and we understand why they say something - that makes the difference. It’s the discussion that’s important, not the resolution. But I think the discussion is a resolution in a way. Pedagogy Surveying Australian syllabus documents and curriculum materials over a period of three or four decades, there has been a revolutionary change in pedagogy. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the teaching of English and the humanities. The Language Learning

25 Policy at Burwood Girls’, for example, spells out the currently fashionable and official ‘process’ approach to writing. Gone are the emphases on drill and convention of the past. The first principle is ‘ownership’, a culturally laden principle of knowledge and learning to be sure, in which ‘a student has the choice of topic, form and full control of the writing without the constraint of formal grammar and spelling’. The latter is attended to in the ‘process’ of writing - drafting and editing to make the meaning clear, a process which involves ‘conferencing’ with teachers and fellow students. No curriculum area has been exempt from the move to an emphasis on process over content. Teaching is now the management of students making their own knowledge rather than the presentation of a defined and rigidly sequenced body of knowledge as it was in the past. Even senior maths, the last bastion of traditional curriculum, one would think, had succumbed to progressivism. A Vietnamese parents’ evening at one of the schools was entirely devoted, despite the broader intention of the convenor, to the new Victorian Certificate of Education maths syllabus. The parents were concerned that the syllabus moved away from a definable set of contents - formulae to be memorised and the like - to a problem solving approach in which the answer and the formulae are less important than the problem solving skills. In this project, two main issues emerged: the epistemological presuppositions of progressivist curriculum, and its practical form. The most elementary epistemological principle of progressivism is the centrality of the critical ego in the making of knowledge and learning. Thus motivation and self esteem are seen to be prerequisites to effective learning, learning how to learn and making one’s own knowledge. The Language in Learning Program co-ordinator at Cabramatta characterised an earlier approach to language across the curriculum at the school which was based on the idea that ‘we leam through learning language’ and where ‘student-centred experiential learning’ was the order of the day. Bringing the influence of his own ESL training to bear, he subsequently modified the pedagogical approach away from progressivism somewhat, using exercises and materials because ‘students need to leam language forms’ through ‘conscious application’. This move to a more explicit and less ‘naturalistic’ pedagogy is encapsulated in the term ‘genre’. Emphasis is placed on the explicit teaching of the linguistic structures that constitute socially powerful forms of writing such as reports. Thus we see an important self-corrective process at work, taking the school’s approach to cultural and linguistic diversity beyond progressivism, and even beyond the paradigm espoused in departmental syllabus documents. As was confirmed in these case studies, the epistemology of progressivist pedagogy is culturally specific. As such, it does not necessarily mesh well with the learning styles of

26 immigrant cultures. At the most obvious level, progressivism recycles the terminology of the market - individual ownership and so on. At its deeper psycho-linguistic foundations, knowledge is most powerful when made inductively and then owned by the individual. Education must therefore be experiential, an engagement with students’ real life experience. This contrasts sharply with other cultures, including the culture of Australian schooling just a few decades ago, which place a greater emphasis on externalised knowledge as received truth. If the individual has a place in traditional pedagogy, it is to work deductively from received knowledge to one’s own experience. To give an example from history or social studies, today in the multicultural curriculum students might actively research their own necessarily various communities. They will be actively engaged by the demonstrable relevance of their task, and the learning outcome will be a skill of process: social science research skills or historical method or whatever. In traditional curriculum, they might have learnt about an historical metanarrative in which they, incidentally, could deductively locate their own experience: the expansion of the British Empire and the colonisation of Australia, for example. O f course, effective schooling has always worked both ways. The historical and cultural point here is the overwhelming tendency of Australian schools in the late twentieth century to work one way rather than the other. The progressivist pedagogy prevailing in the case study schools privileges ego-centred cultures and allows environment to play a big role. So much now turns on motivation and the critical ego, and students have to bring to bear a cultural inclination to (progressivist) schooling. Process writing, for example, is founded on a principle of naturalism • that language is leamt naturally through purposeful use. This advantages students from printimmersed environments who will happen to see the purpose of literacy much more ’naturally’, and who have more ’natural’ skills to apply to the task than disadvantaged students. The ’process model’, in the words of one teacher, is ’all induction and no guidance, which is OK for those already with the skills, but not for those without them’. As centrally determined truths are no longer relevant in the progressivist model, curriculum in the case study schools was school-based. And as progressivist pedagogy is culturally appropriate in a first world country in the late twentieth century, so the principle of the professional teacher in full control of their work is appropriately in tune with the latest systems management theory. ‘It’s a metacognitive thing*, said one informant. Using other people’s materials may well be beneficial if the materials are good; this can too easily become ’imitative not adaptive behaviour; they need to keep going back to the broader question of the students’ needs’.

27 But school-based curriculum, however solid its grounding in management theory, was often found to be of dubious quality. Traditionalists claimed that language curriculum without formal content such as grammar had produced a drop in standards. ‘It’s all laissez faire now. They’ve abandoned traditional grammar and spelling, but the new hasn’t worked.’ A systems administrator also complained about huge problems of accountability that came with the radical devolution of control of curriculum. The quality of education, particularly in areas that were innovatory or required specialist servicing, was vulnerable to the ability or commitment of individual teachers. At the end of the day, said another teacher, ‘there is no overall direction. Spontaneity is all.’ Programs were often found to be eclectic and discontinuous, both in terms of content and linguistic-cognitive order. Animals - basic needs including health and nutrition - Early Man • the Roman Empire, went one of the programs in this research project. And the best teachers were highly susceptible to bumout. One teacher saw school-based curriculum as education on the cheap. It was even worth it to the system to spend a fortune on stress management, she said, rather than pour resources into curriculum and materials. Too often, under difficult circumstances, the fallback was onto the photocopier curriculum or pedagogically dubious exercises such as cloze activities. Cheap maybe, but school-based curriculum appeared to be extremely inefficient. A Melbourne Turkish teacher in one school was struggling with some very old and inappropriate textbooks produced in Turkey, but he was unaware of some excellent materials produced in Sydney. A teacher of Arabic had produced some exquisite calligraphy, which will probably never be seen outside his school. Another Arabic teacher had produced a full set of materials with funds from the Multicultural Education Program before it was axed, but these had never been published and distributed. The mountain of material produced for the Burwood interpreters’ course was sitting in a filing cabinet. In fact, the only innovation destined to see the light of day beyond the school in which it began was the Language in Learning Program at Cabramatta, and this was only because the co-ordinator had been seconded to the Department of Education to produce the materials as a book. Teachers were extremely proud of the materials they had developed, but this was obviously not something that the systems valued, nor the basis of anything that in the Australian context would be a viable project for a commercial publisher. One of the great ironies of the field of multiculturalism as portrayed in this project is that LOTE teachers, teaching languages brought into the education system in a spirit of progressivism and pluralism, were often the strongest advocates of traditional pedagogy. Much more than any other group interviewed, they taught formal conventions such as

28 grammar, tested in the manner of traditional examinations, and regarded themselves as the presenters of knowledge rather than the managers of student-centred inquiry. This is obviously not a function of their subject matter since the subject to have gone most dramatically in the other direction was the teaching of English as a foreign language. In fact, the way English is currently taught was frequently cited as a hindrance to effective LOTEs teaching. Students, many LOTEs teachers complained, do not bring with them an ability to think reflectively and explicitly about language structures. Parents and students had an especial respect for LOTEs teachers, and appreciated the fact that students did end up picking up crucial extra marks. In one school, a Turkish teacher taught in an extraordinarily traditional manner, even giving full examinations twice yearly in all years from Year 7. In the final Year 12 external examinations, the Turkish results stood out as the best of all subjects across the school and even students whose results were poor in other subjects scored very well in Turkish. At another school, a LOTEs teacher spoke of a sort of subtle cultural and pedagogical apartheid between two staffrooms • the NESB staffroom and the ‘Anglo, unionist’, progressivist staffroom. ‘Democratic ideas’ which dictate that ‘schools should respect social and cultural differences rather than impose academic criteria on students, maintain NESB kids in their disadvantage.’ She characterised a special teacher training course on how to teach kids in the western suburbs as ‘Mickey Mouse’ and ‘more on about managing than teaching the students’. ‘Who gets the benefits?’ she asked. ‘How do private schools teach? They might innovate, but they teach the three R’s for the ruling class.’ Again, this level of debate represents constructive self correction that is currently taking Australian multiculturalism beyond the difficulties of progressivist pedagogy. The only problem was the toll the debate was taking on individual teachers, on top of the pressure of doing an honest day’s work. This woman, a highly qualified anthropology graduate and Macedonian teacher, had applied for a job as a barmaid that morning and has since resigned. It was regularly claimed that NESB students themselves often have ‘more conservative’ learning styles. ‘The Vietnamese as a group would like to sit there and do grammar all day, anything that’s structured. They absolutely adore structure.’ Students also voiced their dissatisfaction. ‘I don’t like the way of schooling students spend lot of time in school and they learn nothing. I do not know how to learn by this way of schooling.’ And another student wrote, ‘My parents thingk that this school is not good because I had a better school overseas’. Quite often, however, NESB students found ‘the Australian Way* to be more congenial, involving class discussion and the like. Learning style, presumably,

29 is a function of a variety of factors including length of time in Australian schools, level of linguistic competence, and so on. The match or mismatch of learning and teaching styles was seen to be an important challenge for teachers. Sometimes it was seen as a problem of trying to wean students off ‘unacceptable’ preferred learning styles. One private school, not part of this project but which the principal researchers have studied recently, consists entirely of full fee paying ‘overseas’ students from Asia. Every student in the school qualified for university entrance last year - a unique feat, surely. But the senior staff were concerned that they were not picking up crucial elements in the culture of Australian education and the culture of western industrial society. ‘The students are slaves to work, authoritative knowledge and rote learning, said a teacher, and this will not serve them well in a western culture that requires creativity, critical engagement and which socialises through sport and leisure’. One could ask cynically, did the school really want to take on all the cultural and pedagogical attributes of Australian schools, including their ‘normal’ spread of academic results? And why did the staff find the teaching environment ‘a dream’? Nevertheless, there are some fundamental aspects of progressivist pedagogy which are culturally very appropriate to advanced technological societies in the late twentieth century. Teachers in the six case study schools often agonised over this point. I think I failed one class because I tried to teach them using lots of student participation. They didn’t like i t .... They think they do more work when it is teacher-centred. But, as the new V[ictorian] Certificate] of Education] is more student-centred, they have to be pushed more toward that style if they are going to succeed. A teacher in a new arrivals Intensive Language Unit explained how they met this challenge. The students tend to be very traditional in their expectations and ‘are happier with the teacher at the centre of the information flow. W® meet their expectations at first, using a teacherly manner and then become more friendly. We have tremendous group work success.’ Students become fascinated by the different learning style in Australia compared to their homeland and they ‘love talking about the cultural differences’. This project involved lesson observations, the collection of programs and materials used in the classroom, and an examination of students’ written work. Unfortunately, however, the globally oriented case study approach did not allow the necessary space to capture and portray the details of classroom interaction which make up effective or ineffective

30 pedagogy. Case study methodology captures structural dynamics well - institutional factors at the level of the whole school or the whole system which determine the adequacy of servicing of linguistic and cultural diversity. It was thus possible to trace processes of incorporation and community participation. These are tangible and easily described by the case study participants. Not so the more subtle and pervasive issues of epistemology and pedagogical form. These are much less visible, located deep in the unconscious of conventional wisdom. Frequently the interviewers found themselves leading the interviewees into the realm of ‘interesting discussion’, things about which they felt uneasy but which they had rarely really considered in depth. It also became obvious that a lot of goodwill, commitment and sheer overwork was foundering on poor or inappropriate pedagogy. The elements of this failure have been outlined here, but to make a detailed linguistic-cognitive map of how this happens would be another research project. A ssessm ent Assessment performs a dual function in schooling: promotion from one class to another and final school credentialling; and diagnosis of teaching/learning. Assessment is frequently accused of being a process of ranking which reconstructs differential performance and achievement as reflecting inferior or superior ability. For example, low ranking in the ‘majority’ language early in a student’s school life can affect later educational participation, self esteem, and so on. Assessment was by far the weakest point in the innovations examined in the case study schools. In line with the progressivist critique of traditional assessment, tests were rarely used and reporting was often descriptive only. There was a strong sense that students should not be told they were failing, but rather that they should be assured by being given something at which they could succeed so they could feel positive about doing their best. Rather than fail at LOTEs, for example, students at Burwood Girls’ could do the Interpreting, Translating and Multicultural Studies course, at which they could succeed and thus gain self esteem. But the danger in this sort of school, and with this sort of assessment, is to ‘lower one’s expectations’ and ‘do what is reasonable’. The problem of lack of ‘hard’ assessment had serious implications for program evaluation as well. When there are no rigorous procedures for student evaluation, schools can’t evaluate programs. This was a serious methodological problem for this research project. And it is a disastrous problem for the schools. No-one knew whether what they were doing was working beyond a sense of ‘doing the right thing’ and the program seeming to ‘work’ in the teachers’ ‘professional judgment’. Teachers do indeed have a ‘feel’ for

31 what’s happening. Teacher professionalism is a positive reference point, but as much as anything it can involve projection, wishful thinking and flying by the seat of one’s pants. In the case of one program, an exasperated teacher reported, we can’t have an evaluation because it might be critical of the program. Any criticism is seen as interfering with the consensus. I was once actually told “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. There is never any discussion. It is never assessed if a kid no longer needs ESL; they no longer need it when we [the ESL faculty] no longer need their numbers. The program is in no way needs based. They don’t know what the needs of the kids are because they are never assessed. No statistics are kept; no-one keeps records. Even information on the final school credential, virtually the only point of valid societywide comparative assessment and evaluation, is difficult to access. Most problematically, this is not available longitudinally. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the revolution in pedagogy and the assumption of the multicultural mantle over a period of several decades had not produced a significant improvement in educational results and social outcomes in some schools. There is no way for the schools or researchers to know whether this is true or not. In all probability there is neither unequivocal improvement nor unequivocal decline. The sorts of assessment employed in many of the innovations made it even less possible to isolate ‘hard’ results attributable specifically to the innovation. The only program evaluation was linked to specialist funding and submission writing skills, and this usually presented little more than a proof of the existence of activity. This was only compounded by the nature of the goals of some of the programs. These are intrinsically hard to evaluate, being all too often vague, unmeasurable, problematic or tendentious. How does one evaluate a program that sets out to elevate self esteem, in such a way that meaningful comparisons might be made with other schools, other localities, other types of program? What is self esteem anyway, and can the elements of an innovation plausibly be causally linked to the innovation itself? U se o f New T echnologies in Basic Learning A few things were happening in this area in the case study schools,but nothing that could be considered a significant innovation. A teacher was developing a Vietnamese word

32 processing package at MacKillop. Computers were used in ESL teaching at Footscray. At the systems level there was a project in Victoria aiming to use computers extensively in distance LOTEs learning, and a quite remarkably comprehensive guidebook to multilingual typesetting programs. C O N C LU SIO N : M odels for N eg o tiatin g C u ltural and L inguistic D iversity in E ducation Cultural and Linguistic Incorporation. Incorporation in the old sense of assimilation is neither desirable nor viable. Nor can multicultural education successfully incorporate via cultural pluralist strategies such as curriculum diversification and unproblematically granting esteem to difference. Indeed, incorporation itself is not a useful descriptor of the most effective, ‘proactive’ multicultural processes. Both assimilation and cultural pluralism imply incorporation in its usual passive sense: immigrants passively submitting to the dominant culture or the passivity of immigrant cultures being allowed to do their own things in their own spaces. Multicultural education, to be effective, needs to be more active. It needs to consider not just the pleasure of diversity but more fundamental issues that arise as different groups negotiate community and the basic issues of material life in the same space - a process that equally might generate conflict and pain. Incorporation, even in its passive sense, implies the existence of a dominant culture. Yet this dominant culture needs to be transformed by multiculturalism: the languages it privileges, the symbols it refers to, the future it envisages for its offspring, and so on. Such a multiculturalism would simultaneously involve structural incorporation for immigrants (access to the mainstream) and open-ness to cultural and linguistic diversity. The one cannot happen without the other. Respect for difference rings hollow when, institutionally, the program catering for difference does not actively and demonstrably promote social access. Tolerance of difference rings hollow when the dominant culture is itself inflexible to cultural transformation and regeneration. The task o f multicultural education is thus much more challenging than mere incorporation. If it is successful, it will inevitably transform the mainstream. Its fostering o f universal rights and values will profoundly influence cultures of everyday life. This includes making institutional space for cultural and linguistic variety. Citizens of the next century will require a facility based on linguistic-cognitive skills and cultural knowledge, with which to operate effectively in a world with multilayered identities and affiliations ethnic, national, regional, global. For both longer established and more recently arrived residents, this will be an ongoing need. Multicultural education will have to come to grips

33 with the dynamic of a new epoch - constant flux, decentring and the necessity continually to negotiate difference. Practically, what does this imply? With populations that are extraordinarily transient, it is not possible, for example, to teach all languages. It is possible to validate the principle but not to legislate the necessity - of certain programs in which structural and cultural incorporation complement each other. Schools should promote bilingual programs as a fundamental element in linguistic-cognitive development, particularly at the early childhood stage. They should offer as wide a range of languages as possible, so long as they have equal institutional status and are seen to be as pedagogically serious as science or maths or history. Indeed, Australian society is now such, and its international intertwinement such, that compulsory LOTEs learning is in order. Ironically, the most do-able and most critical part of multicultural education is that which is currently least and worst done. The socio-cultural dimension of multicultural education is not concerned to teach the ‘other* to like themselves - trying to engender self esteem like this is a patronising exercise anyway - but to enable each student in the investigation of how they have become a cultured being and how to relate to others. As the century draws to a close, this will become a lot more than just a humanitarian frill in a liberal education. It will be a sheer economic necessity. The boundaries of nationhood are falling in a unified Europe. Multiple layers of regional affiliation - from feeling Welsh to feeling European have diminished the significance of boundaries of nationality. In the same way, the Australian economy has to find bonds of complementarity in the world at large and in particular in its region. This will inevitably lead to greater co-operation with Asia. Nor will migration slow down. As unusually high as Australian immigration has been by international standards, a pattern has been established over the past half century which is unlikely to be reversed. Without a strong and positive multiculturalism as national socio­ cultural policy, this could lead to disaster. And all our cultures will be constantly exposed to the cultures of others in a global network of media ownership. The technologies for the transmission of culture will be such, and the culture market so thoroughly internationalised, that anything other than a multicultural worldview will be irrelevant and marginalised by history. And to sell cultural and manufactured products successfully on this international market, people will have to understand the dynamics of cultural reception extremely well. Schools, perhaps more than any other social site, have a lot to do. It will be a difficult challenge, not simply to revel in the pleasure of difference as has been the extent of much multicultural education in the past, but to establish a new social epistemology, to prepare students for the negotiation of life, including its pain and

34 conflicts, in a decentred and ever more rapidly shifting world, whilst at the same time maintaining cohesive sociality as a core value.

C U L T U R A L

& L I N G U I S T I C

I N C O R P O R A T I O N

Traditional curriculum; A ssim ilationism .

Progressivist curriculum; Cultural pluralist version o f multiculturalism.

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• Incorporation to core culture in this case meant the dominant ‘Anglo’ version (with Celtic undertones). With economic and cultural links to the ‘Motherland’ perceived to be important, Australian education social­ ised students in values and skills to service that link. Minorities, such as Abor­ igines and NESB immigrants had to submerge and trans­ form their own sense of destiny and lifestyle to this.

• Core culture comes to respect aspects of minorities’ cultures (traditions, customs etc.) and attempts to address access and equity issues: securing an equitable share of resources. A diverse population (a recog­ nition of immigrant lifestyles and ‘seeing’ indigenous peoples) requires new strategies for servicing schools, etc. These are the ‘ethnic dis­ advantage’ and cultural pluralist models of incorporation. Passive connot­ ations to incorporation in its impact on the mainstream.

• Beyond the passive connotations to the term ‘incorporation’, the ewe dominant culture is transformed by multilayered allegiances. A flexible, multiskilled citizenry is international in its economic and cultural orientation; markets are internationalised through deregulation and there is an increasingly mobile international labour and skills market Growing recognition of Australia’s possibly pivotal place in Asian regional co-operation.

• Minority cultures subsumed by assimilation to the dominant culture.

• Respecting and servicing cultural differences; access to the dominant culture - but the fundamental character of the dominant culture remains unchanged.

• Social fabric transformed by cultural and linguistic diversity; necessity for all citizens to be able to negotiate life and work in a society with multiple layers of identity and affiliation.

• Marginalisation of minority languages and cultures by neglect

• Structural marginalisation of issues of multiculturalism as cultural self esteem or ‘ethnic disadvantage’. ‘Ethnic-specific’ servicing.

• Equitable access to Australian society dirough education. Core skills plus Australian Studies: including diversity in a liberaldemocratic society.

• Chauvinism and systemic processes of dominance by dominant culture.

• Self esteem programs and cultural maintenance programs for linguistic/ cultural minorities. Tokenism on the margins of curriculum. Access programs that fail to define or refine the dominant culture.

• Access programs including over­ arching framework of liberal society (rights, values etc.; e.g. the culture of schooling) • a social identity that allows for diversity within the limits of liberaldemocratic society. Esteem achieved through enhancing life chances.

• Subsuming of cultural and linguistic minorities.

• Cultural relativism.

• Multiculturalism as a positive, value-laden thing. Toleration, basic principles of human rights have a definite cultural content. Clear, positive articulation of the culture of schooling.

Self-corrective phase: Equitable multiculturalism; Post-progressivist curriculum. Late 1980s +

35 Traditional curriculum; A siim ilation ism .

Progressivist curriculum; Cultural pluralist version of multiculturalism.

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• No multicultural education. Focus on all students, in undifferentiated way.

• Multicultural education has a focus on minority students: e.g. cultural self esteem, mainstream skills.

• No specialist strategies to meet • Multiculturalism a strategy to rectify educational disadvantage the demands of cultural and for groups of minority cultural/ linguistic diversity. linguistic background.

Self-corrective phase: Equitable multiculturalism; Post-progressivist curriculum. Late 1980s + • Education for cultural and linguistic pluralism has a focus on all students: epistemology of pluralism (effective intercultural communication) plus linguistic/ cognitive skills for life-long learning in a society constantly subject to technical and cultural change. Specialist educational strategies (e.g. ESL) will be needed, but to achieve common educational objectives. • Multicultural education is a basic social and economic necessity.

• Comprehensive curriculum.

>Diversified curriculum.

• Reconstructed core curriculum. Eg. LOTEs and multicultural Australian Studies as compulsory.

• Fixed, centralised curriculum.

• A relativism of curriculum diversification. Choice, relevance, needs. A new streaming in pseudo-democratic garb. Suspect quality of the progressivist end of the diversified curriculum.

• Core linguistic-cognitive skills for participation in a society of increasing technological automation and social interconnectedness; rights and values of universal applicability plus epistemological and social skills to live with cultural and linguistic diversity.

• National development goals that appear singular and uncontested.

• Relevance, choice and diversity of lifestyles; possible sense of national and school fragmentation.

• A universal core in terms of values and rights in a multicultural society; yet emphasis on flexibility and creativity.

• Welfare/charity for

• Ethnic-specific servicing.

• Mainstreaming multiculturalism in such a way that the core culture and institutions are transformed.

Community Participation. Effective school management and community participation involves interaction in which parents and the broader community play a significant role in school life, whilst, at the same time, teacher professionalism is maintained and a mutually educative dialogue is established between school and community about the role and function of schooling in late twentieth century industrial society. The only problem is that this is a time- and energy-consuming process. It requires additional staff, which means additional expense. This is a small investment, however, in relation to potential returns, harnessing parents' positive support in the schooling of their children.

36

C O M M U N I T Y

P A R T I C I P A T I O N

T raditional curriculum ; A ssim ila tio n ism .

P rogressivist curriculum ; C ultural p lu ralist version of m ulticu ltu ralism .

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• Parents deliver children into the care of the state. Schools present basic skills and homogeneous ‘Anglo’centred cultural literacy.

• Diversity of backgrounds and lifestyles challenges the traditional role of the school. School now has to negotiate its role and be responsive to economic restructuring. Open-ness tends to lead to fragmentation of school identity and mission; threats to teacher professionalism etc.

• A mechanism to reforge school identity is now needed. Schools need to be explicit about their socialising role and the core values of the culture of schooling, as well as re-establishing teacher professionalism.

• Institutional correctness and benevolence.

• Community participation. But differential ability to participate and difficulties with the liberal-democratic culture of participation, rights control etc.

• Mutually educative dialogue between school and community in which teacher professionalism is maintained yet schools are accountable to communities.

• Traditional structures of schooling and curriculum non-negotiable.

• Multiculturalism and the culture • Negotiation between the culture of schooling and community of schooling are ostensibly expectations. empty vessels. Creates difficulties for school identity and sense of mission. Yet hidden agenda: the culture of liberal-democratic society.

• Authoritarian relations with community.

• Populist conception of demo­ cratic participation.

Self-corrective phase: E quitable m ulticulturalism ; P o st-p ro g ressiv ist curriculum .

Late 1980s +

• Culturally appropriate means of introducing communities to the culture of schooling. Democracy as a long term program based on knowledge, dialogue, accountability.

• A single entree to participation: • A single entree to participation: • Different entrees to participation established in intercultural the culture of liberal-democratic the dominant curriculum and school-community communication. management styles of the rights. traditional school.

Pedagogy. Successful pedagogy reflects both the living hand of cultural tradition (cueing into culturally specific learning styles) and the particular social, linguistic and cognitive requirements of the future in a rapidly changing industrial society. This is an historically unique demand to be put upon education as a public institution and is pivotal in the articulation of private and public rites of passage or socialisation. Pedagogy for ‘minority’ students will be most effective when it is clear about the core social, linguistic and

37 cognitive requirements of an advanced industrial society, yet when it is also sensitive to the differential pedagogical techniques necessary to achieve that end. At the same time as addressing this core, successful multicultural education will be open to community cultural diversity in its curriculum content and social and behavioural objectives. Pedagogical strategy is an essential issue in this twofold endeavour: initiation to the core linguistic, cognitive and employment requirements of late twentieth century society, yet sensitivity to the local, the culturally specific and the particular. As important as it is to cue into culturally specific learning styles in order to teach new ones most effectively, the dominant pedagogical paradigm itself should not be seen as given and uncontested. Progressivism may well be potent as a technique, and culturally relevant to life in the late twentieth century, but in its more unrestrained guise in disadvantaged schools it often unhelpful in failing to be explicit about knowledge and in failing to explain and justify its own epistemological appropriateness. The answer, perhaps, is curriculum which is more authoritative in its content and principles of organisation, yet not authoritarian as a medium of instruction. It is perhaps an irony that immigrants’ critique of individualist epistemology, their sense of the power of socially received knowledge and paradigms of learning, is in some ways tmer to industrial society - a more broadly interconnected system of social order than has ever before existed in human history - than the conceit of progressivism that knowledge is a matter of individual perspective. It might also help explain why some immigrant groups have a peculiar cultural resource which sets them, despite all their particular educational handicaps, educationally beyond many members of the longer established English speaking background population. What then, needs to be done in a practical way? One clear finding of this research is that rigorous, materials based inservice training is needed. School based curriculum is enormously inefficient and teachers learning on the job is an ad hoc way of schools facing the challenge of cultural and linguistic diversity. There is also a great need to elevate the science o f teaching. School based curriculum development has also meant a degree of amateurisation of curriculum to the best that can be done in circumstances where one also has to teach and be a guardian to students. In a revived science of teaching, progressivism provides insights into educational management, operationalising the pedagogical process, harnessing motivation, and so on. At the same time, it is time to be more explicit about the content of culturally powerful knowledge and culturally powerful ways of knowing.

38

P E D A G O G Y

Traditional curriculum; A ssim ilationism .

Progressivist curriculum; Cultural pluralist version of multiculturalism.

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• Singular cultural and economic goals require rote learning and authoritarian pedagogy.

• Pace of change increases; fixed knowledge less important than creativity, motivation, versatility. Education now processorientated: open-ness to constant change and life long learning. Paralleled by increasing cultural and linguistic diversity which means no fixed truths of cultural literacy.

• Pedagogy based on core linguistic/ cognitive skills, yet premium placed on technical and cultural creativity. Skills-based education, but also clear overarching social/ educational philosophy. Education should aim at a new cultural literacy with common objectives for all students, both broader than older versions of the socio-cultural project of multiculturalism in aiming at theory/abstraction about the nature of culture and diversity and narrower in terms of basic skills and knowledge foundations. Creativity and adaptability still critical, so return to core of learning does not imply ‘back to basics’ straight-jacket. This task needs to be located in a combination of professional development and a variety of excellent, authoritative materials to choose from.

• Core subjects and oveit streaming.

• Diversified curriculum and covert streaming.

• Core and diversified curriculum of equal status.

• Authoritarian pedagogy.

• Pedagogy based on individual motivation.

• Authority in structure of task and effective mastery. Exercise of choice and creativity in application, reapplication, adaptation, etc.

• Monolingualism or ‘foreign’ language learning for the ‘academically inclined’ elite.

• ‘Community’ model of LOTE teaching: maintenance and self esteem.

• Multilingualism a norm and necessity. All language learning equal status and intellectual seriousness.

Self-corrective phase: Equitable multiculturalism; Post-progressivist curriculum.

Late 1980s +

39 Traditional curriculum; A ssim ilationism .

Progressivist curriculum; Cultural pluralist version of multiculturalism.

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• Nationalism around a single ethnic group.

• Fragmentation, eg. around ‘relevant’ ethnic studies.

• Theory of cultural becoming; the facts of cultural diversity. Equitable initiation to core linguistic, cognitive and employment requirements, yet sensitive to experiences based in the local, the culturally specific and the particular.

• Product or content orientation.

• Process orientation.

• Process as management technique and as basis for operationalising curriculum; explicit product (content of curriculum) as a basis for more effective and accessible teaching/learning, clearer educational accountability, as & basis negotiating educational change etc.

• Knowledge based on objectified, • Knowledge a function of the externalised content. Object of critical ego. Motivation and knowledge: the ‘facts’. experience as key elements in learning. Object of knowledge: open-ness to change, processes of problem solving.

Self-corrective phase: Equitable multiculturalism; Post-progressivist curriculum.

Late 1980s +

• Both authoritative knowledge possible and students active learners, shapers of their own understandings. Critique as a crucial skill in a diverse society undergoing rapid change.

• Fixed, content-centred learning.

• Student-centred learning.

• Definite contents to skills and standards of socially powerful knowledge, yet students as active inquirers.

• Inflexible ‘standards’ and decontextualised, meaningless ‘rules’.

• ‘Anything goes’ relativism according to ‘needs’, ‘relevance’.

• Core linguistic/cognitive requirements, cultural literacy.

• Singular pedagogical technique. • Pedagogy relativises knowledge, • Variant specialist pedagogies; skills, differential outcomes. singular ends. • Failure of minority students, less academically affluent students etc. through boredom and irrelevance.

• Failure through pseudo• Hard, core skills plus specialist democratic streaming mechanisms areas of interest and knowledge. and relativising socially powerful knowledge, diffused in a plethora of ostensibly relevant forms of knowledge.

• Pedagogical formalism.

• ‘Naturalism’.

• Rigorous, skills-based inquiry.

• Bias to deductive reasoning.

• Bias to inductive reasoning.

• Productive and balanced interplay of deduction from received theory/ knowledge and induction in experimental learning.

40 Traditional curriculum; A ssim ilationism .

Progressivist curriculum; Cultural pluralist version of multiculturalism.

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

• Centralised curriculum. Teachers as transmitters of received, official knowledge and values.

Self-corrective phase: Equitable multiculturalism; Post-progressivist curriculum.

Late 1980s +

• School-based curriculum. • Centralised models of curriculum Teachers as professionals, in the form of exemplary materials makers of curriculum, and in conjunction with professional managers of open classroom development programs. Aim to processes. Yet, ironically, raise professional status of teaching problems of quality, standards, ind science of teaching. Return of curriculum vulnerable to the structure, skills, rigour to ability or commitment of teachers, curriculum, yet allowance for programs tend to be eclectic or creativity, open-ness, active student discontinuous, duplication and enquiry, wastage of energy, etc.

• Insensitivity to match/mismatch • Insensitivity to match/mismatch • Match/mismatch of teaching/ of teaching/learning styles. of teaching/learning styles. learning styles as a critical educational concern.

A ssessm ent . ‘Soft’ forms of assessment are often weak in their capacity for comparability, in failing to report accurately on results as they lead to the final school credential for entrance to higher education, in being often unclear and ambiguous, and involving, as they frequently do, a devaluing of the assessment process to the point where it loses much of its meaning. Notwithstanding the critique of the effect and reliability of standardised testing and IQ tests on ‘minority’ students, assessment is crucial. Teachers need assessment tools of broad comparability for diagnostic purposes. Meaningful parent participation requires clear and accurate assessment and reporting procedures for the purposes of accountability. Students need accurate feedback on their work. Education systems need comparable results for final school credentialling and to determine entrance into post-secondary education. Assessment, therefore, needs to be designed to be sensitive to cultural differences, not foreclosing possibilities in the fashion of standardised tests or IQ tests, yet reporting to teachers, parents, students and systems in ways which are accurate and ensure comparability. What needs to be done on the assessment front? Sophisticated forms of assessment are sorely needed for the purposes of diagnosis and for comparability. Parents really do need to be told honestly whether the education their children is receiving, in broad social terms, will produce outcomes commensurate with their aspirations. The problem of assessment is integrally related to the problem of curriculum. Without a clearly defined linguistic, cognitive and cultural core, schools have no generalisable things

41 to assess. The project of assessment is now coming back onto the agenda of schools, as part of the historical self-corrective process. The problem is to avoid the ‘rorf that was traditional, standardised testing. At the program evaluation level, meaningful performance indicators are needed, and at the level of the individual student, clearly specified assessment criteria are required, which: measure linguistic skills; identify the attainment of cognitive objectives (levels of abstraction, critical engagement and so on); evaluate levels of cultural literacy necessary for access and participation in the multicultural society; and assess the practical and theoretical skills necessary for joining the workforce in a highly technological society and as an autonomous, responsible and responsive worker.

A S S E S S M E N T

T raditional curriculum ; A ssim ilatio n ism .

Progressivist curriculum ; C ultural p lu ralist version o f m ulticulturalism .

Self-corrective phase: Equitable m ulticulturalism ; P o st-p ro g ressiv ist curriculum .

1940s to 1960s

1970s and 1980s

Late 1980s +

• I.Q. and other standardised tests. A method of using education to stratify society, ‘blind’ to cultural and linguistic diversity and pronouncing on ‘ability’ or lack of ‘ability’.

• Critique of traditional testing: not useful to measure students, whose starting points and aspirations are different, by a common measure. Move to describing behaviour and individual development Since education a process, cultural literacy fluid and curriculum is diversified, there is nothing fixed to test. Assessment more subjective and behaviour-based.

• The extent of diversity itself increasingly demands benchmarks to ensure that difference is not a mask of segmentation. Concrete, national evaluation tools are needed to ensure that schools are reaching their objectives in socially measurable terms in order not be be unfair to individuals. Performance indicators needed to measure effectiveness of innovation. Measurement impacts productively back on curriculum and not the fate of individual students.

• Rigid system of placement; • Subjective, descriptive, culturally and linguistically behaviour based assessment, loaded I.Q. and standardised tests.

• National assessment frameworks to ensure finetuning of curriculum, quality control, measurable success in achieving equal outcomes.

Use o f N ew Technologies in Basic Learning. The use of new technologies in basic learning can involve learning in traditional ways (but more efficiently whilst incidentally gaining familiarity with new tools), or new ways of learning, packaging knowledge or presenting curriculum which would not otherwise be presented. In other words, new technologies in basic learning can mean both more efficient ways of teaching the ‘basics’ using traditional pedagogy, and new ways of knowing in which, for example, memory

42 and note-taking are less important than an ability to access information storage, use spelling programs, draft and edit on a keyboard and so on. In stitu tio n alisatio n o f Innovation Innovation only happens in favourable institutional circumstances. The remarkable thing about the six schools that were the subject of this investigation was not so much the profundity of change at a grassroots level in response to cultural and linguistic diversity, but that the institutional climate had been such that this amount of change could occur. Sophisticated and proactive centralised policy, can enjoy much of the credit for the thorough infusion of multicultural education at the case study schools. One of the greatest ironies of both multiculturalism as social policy and progressivism as educational policy, however, is that, rhetorically, they devolve the focus of control and the practical initiation of activity, but that, in historical reality, they were both initiatives from a very creative and forward looking centre. Australia’s immigration history is unique amongst first world countries, and this helps to explain the success and creativity of centralised policy. The proportionate numbers and the diversity of immigrants set Australia apart. So do the settlement policies over four decades, always anticipating permanent settlement. Whether it be through assimilation or the various refinements of settlement policy that have led to today’s multiculturalism, Australia has for some decades now accepted a reality which many other first world countries are now finding forced upon them. The supposed ‘guestworkers’ are really there for good. In demographic terms alone, Australia already represents a uniquely advanced urban pluralism which will be the destiny of many other ‘first world’ countries as they move into the twenty-first century. Minority languages are geographically dispersed and, usually three or four major minority language groups enjoy equal numbers in any one location. Canadian stye bilingualism or specialist servicing of immigrant enclaves is just not possible in this sort of society. Education has been a critical site in the large scale absorption of immigrants. And there, devolution o f control and diversification o f servicing have been cornerstones of multicultural education. In some ways this is a sophisticated and humane management technique. No more Taylorism or Fordism of the production line which breaks the work process down into its most elemental units and deskills the vast majority of workers. Teachers are more in control of their own professional environments; communities have a say in their children’s education; students contribute in the government of the school. Democracy, choice, relevance. If Weber were alive in the late twentieth century, he would

43 have to rethink his theory of bureaucracy. Bureaucratic intransigence there still is; hierarchy there still is; inequality of socio-economic outcome there still is. But bureaucracy also encourages diversity, responsibility, autonomy, creativity, negotiation, consensus. The Cultures o f Schooling report has tried to explain the dynamics of all this - how cultural and linguistic diversity has been a catalyst to rethinking the whole way education is managed and delivered. In larger historical terms it describes lessons of a politics which some would call postmodern, lessons which are only now beginning to be learnt in the Soviet Union and which China evidently still has to leam - that the most effective way of enlisting commitment in highly technological industrial societies is to nurture the culture of liberal civil society and that this is done by devolution of control and the active recognition of communal diversity. Yet, modem management practices are a two edged sword. They are all-consuming (committees, negotiations, consultations) to the point of personal exhaustion and to the point of attrition where the blandest of common sense must prevail. Teachers’ control of their working environment shifts the burden of responsibility for curriculum onto them and increases workloads to the point of bumout. The promise of the democratic rhetoric has not borne fruit either in the quality of teachers’ lives or in significantly improved patterns of educational results. These difficulties are compounded by the ever increasing pace of change. Sometimes it seems like change for change’s sake, changing the acronym to appear to be doing something new, abandoning an imperfect, incomplete project to start another afresh. A succession of funding arrangements and schemes passes by with bewildering rapidity: the Multicultural Education Program, the Participation and Equity Program, the National Advisory and Coordinating Committee on Multicultural Education, to name just a few. The current Australian Advisory Council on Languages and Multicultural Education, up and running to administer National Policy on Languages funds last year, may not last beyond next year. Sometimes, well intended but unsustained handouts are more disruptive than helpful. A lot of resources are simply wasted. Said one principal of a now-defunct innovation we were investigating as part of this project, ‘it was one of those one-off things. We do those very well in Australia; we get a wonderful program and then the funding disappears.’ This is by no means a finished story. However far Australia’s demography has taken it down new historic paths, the problems are not solved, and a new pattern of difficulties and contradictions is unfolding. The education system is now in another m ajo r self­ corrective phase. If this paper has been critical of the cultural pluralist ve rsio n of multiculturalism and the progressivist version of pedagogy, it has not been to denigrate the

44 historical achievements of these complementary movements, but to highlight in the foreground the most promising incipient developments in Australian multicultural education. Throughout the world people are experiencing a state of permanent cultural flux. The French Bicentennial parade was shown on Australian television, a broadcast bought from a Canadian television network. America was ‘represented’ by a Southern all black gymnastic band; Britain was ‘represented’ by a dance group with umbrellas who were showered by a fire engine and kept ostentatiously sneezing in the wet. La Marseillaise was sung by the black American opera singer, Jessye Norman. The Canadian commentators were lost for words. ‘It’s not national; it’s not French; it’s not even European. It’s fragmented, a collage’. In a year when one would expect France to be celebrating the birth of the modem liberal democratic nation, the parade foretold the decline of the nation and the rise of a pluralist, liberal civil society in which bonds of community are more local and bonds of economy are international. In this crisis of flux, there seems to be no centre. How can there be ethos or community when the core itself is not defined? How can you deal with the immigrant minorities when you don’t know yourself? In redefining nation, Australia is particularly advanced. In multicultural education, Australia perhaps has most to offer in a revived socio-cultural education. Reference: Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Greg Noble and Scott Poynting, Cultures o f Schooling: Pedagogies fo r Cultural D ifference and Social A c c e s s , A ustralian Advisory Committee on Languages and Multicultural Education, Canberra, 1989, 460pp. Forthcoming as a book from the Falmer Press, London.

45 Footnotes 1.

CASTLES, S., COPE, B., KALANTZIS, M., and MORRISSEY, M., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise o f Nationalism in Australia, Pluto Press, Sydney, pp 24-25; AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Australian Yearbook 1988, Canberra, 1988.

2.

KEIRNAN, Colm, Calwell: A Personal & Political Biography, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 117-121; KUNZ, E. F., Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians, Australian National University Press, 1988, pp. 11-20.

3.

VIVIANI, N., The Long Journey; Vietnamese Migration and Settlement in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 114.

4.

DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION AND ETHNIC AFFAIRS, Don’t Settle for Less Report o f the Committee for Stage 1 o f the Review o f Migrant and Multicultural Programs and Services, (Jupp Report), Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986, p.42.

5.

AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Australian Profile - Census 86, 1988.

6.

WOOD, D. and HUGO, G., Distribution and Age Structure o f the Australian Bom with Overseas Bom Parents, DIEA, Canberra, 1984, pp. 254-257; KALANTZIS, M. and COPE, B. ‘Why We Need Multicultural Education: A Review of the “Ethnic Disadvantage” Debate’, Journal o f Intercultural Studies, 1988, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 39-57

7.

The terms ‘homogeneous’, ‘peaceful’ and ‘quiet* refer to the European experience in Australia only. The indigenous Aboriginal peoples suffered grievously at the hands of the British, who, from their perspective, invaded their land. The waves of new settlers remained blind to the original dispossession and unwittingly did nothing to alleviate the injustice. This work concerned as it is with immigrants does not address the issue of the indigenous peoples of Australia. The discussion of multiculturalism and the forging of community in Australia cannot go forward however, without an integration of their concerns.

8.

BIRRELL, R. and A. SEITZ, A., ‘The Eth n ic Problem in Education: The Emergence and Definition of an Issue; Paper presented at AIMA Conference, Melbourne, 1986; BULLTVANT, B., Getting a Fair Go; Studies o f Occupational Socialisation and Perceptions o f Discrimination, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986; KALANTZIS, M. and COPE, B. ‘Why We Need Multicultural Education: A Review of the “Ethnic Disadvantage” Debate’, Journal o f Intercultural Studies, 1988, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 3957.

9.

JAKUBOWICZ, A., MORRISSEY, M. and PALSER, J., ‘Ethnicity, Class and Social Policy in Australia’, Report No. 46, Social Welfare Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 1984, p.27, 40.

10.

HUGO, S., Australia’s Changing Population: Trend and Implications, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1986; HORVATH, B.M. ‘An Investigation of Class Placements in New South Wales Schools’, Mimeo, NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission/Sydney University, 1986; CASTLES, S., LEWIS, MORRISSEY, M., and BLACK J., Patterns of Disadvantage Among the Overseas Bom and Their Children, Centre for Multicultural Studies, Wollongong University, 1986; AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF MULTICULTURAL AFFAIRS, Reducing the Risk; Unemployed Migrant Youth and Labour and Market Programs AIMA, Melbourne, 1985.

11.

ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT: CENTRE FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AND INNOVATION, Project No 6 Education and Cultural and Linguistic Pluralism (ECALP): Innovative Schools, Protocol, OECD,Paris, 1989.