Enhancing Social Sustainability through Education: Revisiting the Concept of Multicultural Education

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development holds that education is essential to achieving a sustainable future. Thus, many countries around the world have made multicultural education imperative. However, a pertinent question is how multicultural education should be understood and how inclusive teaching and learning approaches should be initiated and integrated within educational systems. In this chapter, I critically discuss the concept of multicultural education and explore how it may contribute to realising the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. First, I give an overview of the main characteristics and goals of multicultural education. Second, I discuss what I see as two major hindrances to realising a sustainable multicultural education: the lack of integrating issues of diversity into everyday school practices and the deficit discourse that still characterises contemporary educational debates on diversity.