Narrative study: an immigrant pupil's experience of English and multicultural education

[摘要] A discourse on multicultural education evolved from the late 1950s in response to immigration from ‘the New Commonwealth’. By the 1980s that discourse had become dominated by multicultural and antiracist perspectives. Both can be seen to embody partial truths about Britain’s racial minorities, but neither are sufficiently adequate to the complex situation relating to belonging and cultural identity. An account of lived experience provides a unique dimension to such discourse. This study uses narrative as a methodological approach to describe the effects English in multicultural education, has had on me as a child of immigrant parents and how it has shaped my identity and work as an English teacher involved with language and literature. After validating the use of narrative in research, the study draws on my experience as a pupil and, subsequently, poet and teacher. I illustrate my history through a prose chronology as a way of illustrating the role of English in both colonial and multicultural education. The dissertation also speculates on some pivotal points in the recent history of multicultural education and calls for the discourse on assimilation and integration to be re-negotiated. It acts as a revisionist argument about social mobility, ‘big society’ and cultural inclusiveness.

[发布机构] University:University of Birmingham;Department:School of Education

[关键词] H Social Sciences;HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Socialreform