Educating for living diversity: ‘Migrant’ identities, belonging and community-centred pedagogies for social justice

This paper addresses the continued conundrums of racial and religious diversity in education. While social diversity is steadily increasing in Global North countries, there is little evidence of meaningful conviviality. Conversely, despite decades of dedicated multiculturalist policymaking, there is ample evidence of persisting educational disparities affecting pupils from minority backgrounds, as well as de facto segregation inside classrooms. This paper examines two reasons for the ongoing situation. Firstly, we explore the history of ‘intercultural’ approaches to education and demonstrate that they are too detached from the unequal dynamics of social and political life in diverse contexts. Secondly, we employ the concept of ‘museumification’ to show that diversity is often performed and curated, which ultimately keeps dominant structures intact. We conducted multi-stakeholder participatory research in Birmingham, UK. The research involved several stages and outcomes, including collecting stories from Birmingham denizens with a refugee/immigrant background, working with a celebrated photographer to produce portraits of participants and using these materials to co-produce educational resources for primary and secondary schools. Our findings suggest that ‘diversity’ must be approached, taught and learned as a lived/living reality, which will account for its highly complex, iterative and dis/located dynamics at the level of individual and communal identities. We articulate this through the concept of ‘living diversity’.