| Through the lens of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, I examine the aporias that are inherent in the way multiculturalists define and apply the concept of culture in the mainstream literature on multicultural education and, in the process, provide an alternative framework for understanding and implementing a multiculturalist agenda in education.;Specifically, I analyze the writings of Asante Molefi, Geneva Gay, James Banks and Peter McLaren to identify the diverse ways that multiculturalists have addressed the inevitable paradoxes facing teachers and students in a multicultural classroom setting. Part of my thesis is that the distinctive strategies employed by multiculturalists reflect their particular understanding of culture. The choice to emphasize ethnic pride or cross-cultural integration, cultural congruence or cultural critique, social diversity or political activism, and the teacher as humble anthropologist or informed revolutionary is directly connected to whether one conceptualizes culture in essentialist or constructivist-instrumentalist terms.;After categorizing various positions in the field (e.g. primordialist, situationalist-essentialist, liberal-postmodernist) and analyzing the educational implications of each, I argue that a Gadamerian interpretation of culture, in the form of a cluster concept that combines his treatment of tradition, horizon-fusion, and Bildung, provides multiculturalists with a strong theoretical basis from which to navigate better the ambiguities and complexities of culture and its relation to education while keeping at bay the various pitfalls associated with traditional accounts of culture (i.e., essentialism) and its common alternative (i.e., constructivist-instrumentalism).;This philosophical hermeneutic approach also includes a complex treatment of prejudice and cross-cultural understanding that takes into consideration our historicality as human beings---i.e., our embeddedness in a particular time and place---and a dialogic orientation, refined by the practice of phronesis or practical reason, that provides an illuminating and transformative response to the many paradoxes that inevitably emerge in the process of staking out a multiculturalist position in the classroom. |
