Conference Agenda

This Panel proposes a set of papers which engage the question: what are the challenges that arise when seeking to value diversity in education? In (neo)liberal democracies, inclusion and cultural diversity is often framed in policy in celebratory ways (European Agency, 2022). However, diversity produces challenges. For example in 2010, then German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced that multiculturalism had failed (Weaver, 2010) and ensuing years have seen growing prevalence of ethno-nationalist discourses and political representation in Europe and across the world.

This panel takes seriously the desire for diversity in education by examining the discontents that emerge with such desire. Policy language such as 'managing diversity' (Little et al., 2013) implicitly acknowledges that diversity is difficult. While ‘diversity’ may signify a positive aim for liberal society, the actual existence of diversity brings to the surface a cultural politics in which often unacknowledged assumptions about identity, race, and culture are brought into conflict.

Through analyses of diversity dilemmas in schools, the Panel will discuss the 'discontents' of diversity by considering the relationality of pedagogies of discomfort, difficult knowledge, school subject choices, and educative leadership. By examining these issues in relation to settler colonial contexts and international schooling, the Panel aims to unsettle the too-easy celebration of diversity within liberalism, and scrutinise the problems and potential of centring that which is difficult and uncomfortable about education within the context of diversity. All papers within the Panel are guided by a commitment to justice that looks beyond the liberal frame.

The first paper contends with how to address historical injustices in diverse classrooms in British settler colonial contexts. By examining the possibilities of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ the paper explores the potential for ethical violence raised by approaches that intentionally invoke discomfort (Zembylas, 2015). In response, building on Grande (2018), the paper proposes a range of key tenets for a care-ful and uncoercive reconfiguring of desire, suggesting a path through discomfort to transformative possibility.

The next two papers focus on curriculum in different ways and question the unintended consequences of diversifying curriculum and subject choice. The first of these papers focuses on the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) in culturally diverse educational spaces. The paper proposes the concept of ‘difficult funds of knowledge’, as a possibility for engaging with the range of knowledge culturally diverse young people might bring into white dominant classrooms and the dynamics that arise for teachers in relation to this.

The second curriculum paper focuses on diversity in senior secondary education in Australia. Despite decades of reform and reviews that have sought to make senior secondary schooling in Australia more equitable and increase the subject opportunities to a growing and diverse student body, these reforms have consistently failed to destabilise the curriculum hierarchy and its privileging of academic knowledges. The paper demonstrates the distinctive curriculum hierarchy in operation in one Australian state and its durability across time, highlighting continued inequalities in subject access in relation to class, gender and location.

The final paper will examine the problem of international schools leading change in relation to attitudes and practices related to racism and cultural diversity. In response to attempts within the international school sector to lead change in the area of diversity and inclusion, the paper argues for educative leadership (Fay, 1975/2015) as a non-instrumentalist approach to social change. It draws on anarcho-syndicalist structures of organisation to account for diversity within schools and a collective, participatory approach to a more just leadership for change.

Overall, the Panel opens a conversation about educator and researcher responsibility to grapple with diversity’s discontents in our quests for more equitable and just education systems.