Framing Multicultural Capital to Understand Multicultural Education in Practice

Abstract

Educational institutions are agents that can support culturally and linguistically diverse communities and promote transformative change in preparing global citizens. The degree of preparedness of citizens to deal with the new multicultural reality that constitutes modern life has real economic implications for a nation's success. By adopting a multicultural capital framework that synthesises current capital theories across fields, we seek to understand how educational institutions can prepare students for a world in which the ability to move across cultures and languages significantly determines an individual's ability to succeed. Middle schooling has been increasingly identified in educational literature as an identifiable stage in schooling that spans traditional notions of primary and secondary schooling and that holds distinct characteristics and needs. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a qualitative, exploratory study, this paper maps educational practices (both pedagogic and institutional) across six middle schools in urban Australia. By mapping these practices to the proposed multicultural capital framework, we identify how culturally proactive educational institutions productively draw upon multicultural capital to foster and promote a distinctly Australian perspective of what constitutes multicultural education.

Multicultural-Based Public Policy: The Experience of Indonesia in Managing Diversity for National Resilience

“…Through multicultural diversity management policies, they get equal opportunities to access public services (Maxwell et al, 2001). The diversity that exists in society is considered as social capital which must be managed for the common good (Futaqi, 2019;Matas & Bridges, 2009). In this context, a leader or public official must be able to recognize each of the various characteristics and manage them to create harmony in community groups that have their advantages.…”

“…Diversity is not a burden and an obstacle in the interaction of interreligious and intercultural social life. Cultural pluralism is seen as a social asset that has high value in strengthening community integration and national identity that supports the success of the development of Indonesia (Futaqi, 2019;Matas & Bridges, 2009).…”