Minority learners – Excluded from the narrative of 'celebrating diversity'?

In: Citizenship teaching and learning, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 201-222

Abstract

Abstract
European societies increasingly implement diversity education as part of citizenship education (CE) curricula in order to provide young people with skills for dealing with diversity. This article analyses the policies and practices of diversity education at both the level of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and on the level of nation states, focusing on Germany and Russia as examples. In Europe, diversity education at schools simultaneously pursues two separate goals: on the one hand, teaching materials and education policies generate a grand narrative of celebrating European diversity. On the other, those same materials and policies stipulate that issues of inequality are to be dealt with separately. Thus, within European citizenship, diversity education and inequalities are often decoupled. Conceptualizing diversity in terms of heterogeneities and inequalities, this article reveals the ways in which diversity and inequalities are decoupled in citizenship and civic education and asks what happens when diversity is treated only as a matter of celebration. Examining blog posts from LGBTQ youth who are minority learners who experience exclusion, the article demonstrates the way in which the narrative of celebration of diversity disempowers them and how it contributes towards more uncertainty and more (self-)exclusion of those learners who do not find themselves within celebration of diversity narratives. The article argues for a reintroduction of the term 'heterogeneities' into CE and concludes by suggesting that diversity education as part of CE should begin with the question of whether there are any heterogeneities that do not require action or critical reflection.