Diversity and the importance of context

Although the challenges of increased diversity are shared by almost all OECD countries, the contexts in which they are addressed are quite different. In OECD countries with long histories of immigration as well as indigenous populations (e.g. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United S tates), classroom diversity reflects the long-standing diversity of the population as well as new arrivals to the country. Practically speaking, for these countries this means that diversity is reflected in cultural and historical terms but not necessarily in linguistic terms. As countries with long histories of immigration have traditionally perceived themselves to be built on the strength of their diverse immigrants, diversity and multiculturalism are often deliberately and formally celebrated in the classroom, in the present day at least.

The approach taken has varied among countries and over time, including the assimilationist vision of forging a unique American identity from a melting pot of diverse settlers, the quintessential approach of e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). This is in contrast to the official Canadian policy of multiculturalism, where ethnic groups are encouraged to retain their individual identities in order to achieve a cultural mosaic. These national core values are expressed in approaches to education and to teacher education programmes in particular, and include long-standing programmes to provide tools and strategies to help prepare teachers for diverse classrooms.

In other OECD countries, classroom diversity is more strongly linked to more recent international migration. In European countries with postwar labour recruitment (e.g. Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) and European
countries with colonial histories (e.g. France, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom), immigrants have been settling (either through active recruitment for temporary workers or as long-term immigrants) since the 1960s and 1970s.

In these countries (with the exception of the United Kingdom, which has taken a more multicultural approach in line with the description of the paragraph above), perceptions and discussions of national identity have remained, until rather recently, virtually unchanged from the image held prior to the arrival of the international migrants. In some of these countries it was assumed that the immigrants in the country would be there only temporarily (e.g. the “guest workers” of Germany and the Netherlands), while in others immigrants were
welcomed rather freely with the assumption that they or their descendents would eventually become just like their peers in the host country, e.g. France, and thus no long-term targeted approach to integration was necessary. The French approach to teaching and the classroom reflected this virtually unchanged notion of a homogenous national identity, effectively excluding the experiences and contributions of these immigrants. Recent social upheavals such as the riots in the suburbs of Paris, as well as the poor scholastic performance
of first and second-generation students from migrant backgrounds in many of these countries, have recently called this approach into question and refuelled debates on the nature of national identity and the long-term plan for immigration and immigrants.

Still other countries (e.g. Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain), have recently been transforming from immigrant-sending nations to immigrant-receiving nations, and as a result classroom diversity is a relatively new phenomenon. In these countries the impact of recent and proportionally large-scale immigration, especially in their inner cities, has been very keenly felt by those on the front lines of the classroom: the teachers. Having virtually no history of immigration (and certainly nothing on the present scale), most teachers in these countries had not been educated to address cultural or linguistic diversity in the classroom, and there were few tools available to help them.

Although this is now evolving as these nations race to catch up with the rapid changes in classroom composition, the discussion of what these developments mean to national identity and how the core values of the nation are to be expressed in the classroom is very much under way.

Regardless of country history however, international mobility is likely to continue to increase. For countries where such mobility and immigration (and emigration) are new, the rapid pace of change poses an additional challenge for school systems and teachers, who may have had very little training in strategies to address the challenges of diversity. Countries that hitherto perceived diversity issues as low on the agenda (e.g. Korea, many Central and Eastern European countries) are now also facing debates on whether national core values should be changed to reflect these increasing demographic shifts.

How this is expressed in education for all countries will continue to emerge as part of the tradition and history of a country and its experience of diversity through immigration or different native populations (including, for example, the Roma).

National responses to diversity and the priority given to diversity issues in teacher education programmes thus depend to a large extent on history and tradition. However they are also determined by the scale of the challenge and the perceived relevance of the topic at any given time. The scale of the challenge has a direct impact on the capacity and thresholds to adequately address diversity issues within systems. The scale can be determined nationally or system-wide, but often plays out locally, at the level of the classroom or school. For example, the presence of one student in the class who is not fluent in the language of instruction is a very different issue for a teacher than five or ten students who not only do not speak the language of instruction but also may or may not share the same first language as each other.

Similarly, difficulties with retention or low graduation rates of particular populations (e.g. the Maori of New Zealand) manifest themselves very differently in classrooms with small numbers of these students versus classrooms (or schools) with a majority Maori student body. Yet strategies and policy responses to deal with these issues are generally decided at the national or regional levels and are usually not solely the realm of educational authorities.

In discussions about migrant students in European countries, for example, the “concentration” of immigrants in schools and communities and the resulting impact on student achievement is a central theme of discussion. Yet the proportion of students in particular schools is strongly influenced by patterns of residential segregation, and this is in turn affected by housing and employment policy, discrimination and immigrant settlement practice (OECD , 2010).

Given the great sensitivity of these topics and debates, it is crucial to base analyses of the issue on a strong evidence base. The following section outlines challenges for the classroom being faced by a variety of OECD
countries.
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