Diversity and Equity In A Global Era

1. Diversity and Equity In A Global Era A Postmodern & Critical Pedagogy Perspective Postmodernism

2. Schooling • The current situation: Consumer pedagogy (freedom to consume) • contingency as an enemy and order as a task • fear of difference and indeterminacy • instrumental rationality (critical thinking limited to specific skills) • standardized curriculum • the technology and culture of the “book” • The desired situation: Radical democracy pedagogy (freedom from oppression) • A shared conception of citizenship that simultaneously challenges growing regimes of oppression and struggles for the conditions needed to construct a multiracial and multicultural democracy. Postmodernism

3. The Global Era Ideology • Modernism: faith in reason, progress, individual • See Functionalism & Conflict theory • Postmodernism: indeterminacy and hybridity as the basic conditions of society • identity constructed in a multiplicity of social relations and discourses Postmodernism

4. Political Economy • New waves and types of immigration • Unemployment and despair among youth • The mass media plays a decisive if not unparalleled role in constructing multiple and diverse social identities • Time and space becomes compressed and fragmented within a world of images (see cyberspace networks, promoted identities through advertisement, virtual reality, etc.) that increasingly undermine the dialectic of authenticity and universalism (see Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) • loss of faith in the modernist ideals • the indeterminacy of the future warrants confronting and living in the immediacy of experience • homelessness as a condition of randomness has replaced the security, if not misrepresentation, of home as a source of comfort and security Postmodernism

5. Border Identities • As the patterns of contemporary cultural and economic life relentlessly frustrate the desire and need to live in communities, these become ‘imagined’ only in the bad sense, that is, disconnected from any sense of social reality, civic commitment and the possibility of transformative collective agency. No longer based on any substantial experiences of a shared political destiny, the longing for national identity becomes a taste for a pseudo-archaic ethnicity cranked out in made-to-order forms by the heritage industry. Postmodernism

6. School Mission Reexamined • Give up the long held idea of schooling as the way to social mobility and success (broader social reforms are necessary) • Make indeterminacy rather than order the guiding principle of pedagogy • Multiple views, possibilities, and differences are opened up as part of an attempt to read the future contingently rather than from the perspective of the dominant ideology/culture that assumes rather than problematizes specific notions of work, progress, and individual • Teach for radical democratic citizenship Postmodernism