Diversity as a Condition of Cultures - Querying Assumptions of Mainstream and Minorities in Education Policy and Curriculum

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk

Explores how diversity in children’s education is framed through persistent binaries such as same/different, mainstream/margins, and inclusion/exclusion, and why these simplifications shape educational policy and curriculum debates. Analyzes curriculum as a contested site that may reinforce dominant social norms, beliefs, and values or alternatively respond to diverse learners’ needs. Argues that policy and curriculum often assume majority cultures are homogeneous, while inequality is multidimensional and intersecting across cultural, social, and human-rights dimensions, urging more nuanced understandings of Otherness within and between cultures.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Highlights

Binaries in diversity framing

Curriculum as contested site

Assumptions of dominant cultures

Multidimensional inequality

Toward nuanced Otherness understandings

Diversity as a Condition of Cultures: Querying Assumptions of Mainstream and Minorities in Education Policy and Curriculum Sue Saltmarsh The Education University of Hong Kong Edith Cowan University Date received: 14 February 2022; accepted: 14 March 2022 Highlights ECNU Review of Education 2022, Vol. 5(2) 338–344 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/20965311221092452](DOI: 10.1177/20965311221092452)[ ](DOI: 10.1177/20965311221092452)[journals.sagepub.com/home/roe](journals.sagepub.com/home/roe) • Discussions of diversity in relation to children’s education are often characterized by binaries of same/different, mainstream/margins, inclusion/exclusion, self/Other. • Curriculum remains a contested site in educational debate, with differing views about curriculum as reinforcing social norms, beliefs, and values, as addressing the learning and social needs of learners from a variety of backgrounds and worldviews, or as a hybrid of these. • Policy and curriculum designed or intended to address diversity tend to rest on assumptions of majority or dominant cultures as homogenous and distinct from the cultures of minority Other/s. • Inequality is often multidimensional, intersecting with, perpetuating, and reinforcing other inequalities and human rights violations affecting children and families. • Understanding culture in terms of heterogenous practices of everyday life shifts the focus of discussion and debate toward more nuanced understandings of Otherness, difference and diversity as operating within, as well as between, cultures. Corresponding author: Sue Saltmarsh, Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR, China. Email: ssaltmarsh@eduhk.hk Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as speciﬁed on the SAGE and Open Access page ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)). In recent decades, the language, logics, and practices of globalizing circumstances have come to furnish the “everyday vocabulary”(Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014, p. xii) of contemporary education research. Indeed, it has become customary to write about childhood, curriculum, and culture asco-located in contexts characterized by the effects of globalization, transnational mobility, and technologically facilitated global networks. Of course, globalization is hardly a new phenomenon (Sachs, 2020), but contemporary scholars argue that its conﬁguration in recent decades … is now placing tremendous pressure on local settings and institutions such as schools and universities, on the very nature of intellectual and pedagogical processes, and on the social subjects and lived communities formed in these domains (Goel et al., 2021, p. 641) . Such concerns regarding globalization and its locally situated effects raise questions about the relevance and effectiveness of curriculum, and tensions regarding equity and inclusion in increasingly diverse multicultural schools and communities. Policy borrowing and curriculum reforms, together with pedagogical approaches from “elsewhere,” offer the tantalizing promise of improving educational quality, ensuring that a given country’s system of education will become or remain competitive within the global knowledge economy. Yet questions abound about what curriculum should look like in any given place, what it should aim to achieve, and how learning that takes place within and beyond educa

FAQs

How does the article describe common ways diversity is discussed in children’s education?

It argues that discussions often rely on binaries such as same/different, mainstream/margins, inclusion/exclusion, and self/Other.

Why is curriculum presented as a contested area in educational debate?

Because curriculum is interpreted differently, including as reinforcing social norms and values, as addressing varied learners’ learning and social needs, or as a hybrid of these perspectives.

What do the article’s arguments suggest about the cultural assumptions behind diversity-focused policy and curriculum?

They often presume majority or dominant cultures are homogeneous and clearly separate from minority “Other” cultures, which can obscure how inequality is multidimensional and intersecting.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk