Diversity Matters - Canadian Pedagogy and the Problem with Being Different

Abstract

Over the last three decades policy makers in Ontario, Canada have sought to integrate the feminist and antiracist discourses into public education policies through a gradual process of mainstreaming. These reformulated policies tend to focus on the broad concept of education as means of eliminating social inequality, with an emphasis on issues of access and inclusion. While this approach may be exigent and economically viable in the short-term, it has undermined a more substantive and long-term approach to critiquing the exclusionary aspects of curricular content itself. This project will explore the ways in which integration and inclusion have been privileged over a more comprehensive approach to reform in Ontario’s education policies. This focus on equality over difference has its roots in liberal feminist and multiculturalist discourses of the 1970s and early 1980s and even the most recent policies disregard contemporary criticisms of these positions. Bringing together contemporary poststructuralist critique and recent public policy from the province of Ontario, this examination seeks to challenge and enliven the debates surrounding the province’s position on diversity and equity in education. Deconstructive methodologies will underscore my analysis of these policy documents with consideration for their social and historical significance displaying an overarching concern for the ways that curriculum, pedagogy and policy are gendered and racialized. The critical question that underscores this analysis is whether, in the process of promoting inclusivity and equity within Ontario’s public schools, educational policy makers are in fact reinforcing the social hierarchies they claim to oppose by promoting an agenda of “equality” over “difference.”