| dc.description.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.” | |
