CONSTRUCTING THE MARGINS - OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND CURRICULUM SETTLEMENTS

This article examines multicultural education as an example of a curri culum ''settlement'' or negotiated agreement as to what ''truth'' and whose ''truth'' is taught in the schools. It locates the emergence of multicultural education historically in the 1960s and relates it to th e emergence of new social movements on the democratic Left. Although m ulticultural education as a settlement represents a significant victor y for democratic progressive forces, it has also tended to become inco rporated within a dominant reform discourse and practice in public edu cation that severely restricts its democratic and progressive potentia l. Carlson argues that currently multicultural education is limited by : the marginalization of multicultural education in a highly different iated curriculum, an essentialistic treatment of identity that fails t o see identity as a historical and cultural production, the treatment of discrimination and bias as an individual psychological phenomenon, and a failure to ground multicultural education within the context of a critical pedagogy. In a brief concluding section, Carlson speculates on how multicultural education might be reconstructed consistent with a democratic progressive counterhegemonic or oppositional discourse.