Reducing or Re-Producing Inequalities? Grand Narrative of Diversity and Its Influence on the Minority Learner

European societies increasingly implement diversity education as part of a civic education curriculum in order to provide young people with competences in dealing with different forms of diversity. The presentation analyzes policies and praxis approaches pertaining to education for diversity at both the supranational level of European Union and Council of Europe as well as at the level of member states (Germany, Estonia, Russia, and Sweden). The presentation shows that in Europe school education for diversity simultaneously pursues two separate goals: while generating a grand narrative of celebrating European diversity those same materials and policies stipulate that issues of inequality are to be dealt with separately.

Based on the conceptualization of diversity with reference to heterogeneities and inequalities, the presentation shows how inequalities tend to be covered over in positively connoted conceptions of diversity. Comparing educational policies, school curricula, and teaching materials, the presentation reveals the ways in which diversity and inequalities are decoupled in curriculum and educational practice, and poses following questions: What happens if diversity is only treated as a matter of celebration? Turning to the minority learners, experiencing exclusion, the presentation demonstrates, how diversity celebration narrative disempowers the minority learners, contributes to more uncertainty, social closure and (self-)exclusion of those learners, who do not find themselves within diversity celebration.