Diversity in Practice: Perspectives on Concept, Context, and Policy

Abstract

Although diversity is a concept that has generated many policy initiatives, it is also an idea that merits closer critical analysis. This article argues that many efforts to support diversity are framed by discourses grounded in conceptualizations of culture, difference, and identity that, far from encouraging genuine multiculturalism, merely serve to perpetuate the status quo. Educators and policy makers need to become far more sensitive to the implicit stasis of current categories of thinking about difference so that more effective and pedagogically appropriate models for teaching and learning about diversity can be implemented.