Diverse Nation, Diverse Curriculum: Multicultural Education in Canada’s Public Schools

Diverse Nation, Diverse Curriculum: Multicultural Education in Canada’s Public Schools

Multicultural education has been an integral component of Canadian public education for more than 40 years. As might be expected with any element of public education that is more than 4 decades old, the nature and intent of multicultural education in Canada has evolved over time and has become a mirror of the changing ways in which Canada has imagined its increasingly diverse population and its national identity, In this paper, we examine multicultural education in three particular aspects. First, we describe the social and political context of multiculturalism in Canada. Second, we focus on multicultural education in provincial curriculum with special emphasis on the province of Alberta, and finally, we take up the more recent shift in multicultural education that suggests that the discipline can be viewed as a form of citizenship education. In our conclusion we touch briefly on education in Korea to return to the idea that national contexts have a significant influence on the ways in which multicultural education is understood and delivered.