Reconstructing Multicultural Education Through Personal Story: Transcending the Essentialist/Relativist Dichotomy (Personal Perspective) (Report‪)‬

Multicultural education has become (part of) ... a science of professional training. (Dimetriadis & McCarthy, 2001) Like so many other concepts in education, multiculturalism is a term that has lost its potency because of miseducative examples that serve to maintain Whiteness as the cultural norm. At first it offered great promise, but now as a "social science" quite often we are just exchanging one type of essentialism for another. The "packet" approach that lumps all the people under one racial, ethnic, or religious heading, as a way to learn about other cultures, is an example of this.