Abstract

The paper reviews quantitative and qualitative research evidence regarding the relationship
between intercultural education and academic achievement among students from socially
marginalized communities. Intercultural education is conceptualized as including a focus both
on generating understanding and respect for diverse cultural traditions and challenging
inequitable distribution of resources and educational opportunities across social groups. As
such, intercultural education incorporates notions such as critical literacy and culturally
responsive education. By definition, socially marginalized communities have experienced
social exclusion and discrimination, often over generations. Thus, educators who adopt an
intercultural education orientation are also committed to challenging the operation of coercive
relations of power within their school environments. The operation of societal power relations
that affect marginalized group students’ academic achievement can be conceptualized along
a continuum ranging from structural/societal, through structural/educational, to interpersonal.
Structural/societal forms of discrimination are largely outside the scope of what educators can
influence directly (e.g. housing segregation). However, the research evidence suggests that
educators have considerable power to resist and challenge coercive power relations operating
at both structural/educational (e.g. curriculum materials) and interpersonal (e.g. classroom
interactions) dimensions of the continuum. Thus, the proposed framework represents an
explanatory model to account for patterns of school success and failure among marginalized
group students and a predictive model to specify educator behaviors that are likely to promote
academic achievement.

Keywords:

 academic achievement
 school-based policies
 multilingual students
 socially marginalized communities
 coercive relations of power

The rationale for intercultural education in complex social

contexts

What is the rationale for intercultural education? The answer to this question clearly depends
on how exactly we define ‘intercultural education’. For purposes of this article, I will adopt the
definition provided in the report Intercultural Education in the Primary School, produced by the
National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (2005) for use in Irish elementary schools:

At its core, intercultural education has two focal points:

It is education which respects, celebrates and recognises the normality of diversity in all areas
of human life. It sensitises the learner to the idea that humans have naturally developed a
range of different ways of life, customs and worldviews, and that this breadth of human life
enriches all of us.
It is education, which promotes equality and human rights, challenges unfair discrimination,
and promotes the values upon which equality is built. (3)

These two focal points are interdependent. In other words, intercultural education promotes
knowledge, understanding, and respect for diverse cultural traditions and beliefs to the extent
that these traditions and beliefs are consistent with social justice and human rights as
operationally defined in documents such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child (1989) or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, cultural practices
that are sexist, homophobic, or discriminatory in other ways would not merit respect within this
conception of intercultural education.

Obviously, however, there is active debate in societies around the world about the extent to
which particular cultural practices are consistent with human rights and merit protection under
the law. The banning of overt religious symbols from schools and government agencies in
France and Quebec in recent years is one example of how particular societies can interpret
elements of cultural distinctiveness as incompatible with the collective good. Another example
is the common practice in many contexts of prohibiting multilingual students from using their
home languages within the school (see for example, Agirdag 2010; Gervais 2012). This is
frequently rationalized as being necessary not only to create a coherent and unified society
but also to enable immigrant-background students to learn the school language quickly and
effectively. In Quebec, controversies surrounding the ‘management’ of diversity gave rise to a
commission that examined the extent to which the society should extend ‘reasonable
accommodations’ to the cultural practices of immigrant communities (Bouchard and
Taylor 2008). Potvin (2010) expressed the ‘Us versus Them’ character of much of the media
discourse surrounding this issue:

Distinctions are made between ‘good immigrants’ who ‘want’ to integrate into society (by
becoming ‘like us’) and ‘bad immigrants’ who demand accommodations (thereby rejecting
‘common norms’). Those who want to continue living ‘as they did in their country’ could never
be one of Us. (82)

This sentiment has been forcefully expressed by the leaders of several European countries
who have identified ‘multiculturalism’ as the culprit in encouraging ‘bad immigrants’ to refuse
assimilation into the wider society. Policies of multiculturalism, they argue, encourage
immigrants to remain enclosed in ethnic enclaves separate from the societal mainstream. For
example, in a speech in Potsdam, Germany, on 17 October 2010, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel questioned the legitimacy of a multicultural approach to creating societal cohesion,
saying that ‘multikulti’ has utterly failed. As reported by The Guardian newspaper, Merkel said
the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily side by side did not work
and the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society
(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-german-multiculturalism-
failed).

A few months later (5 February 2011), British prime minister David Cameron attributed the
radicalization of Islamic youth to ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism,’ which has ‘encouraged
different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.’ He argued
that young Muslim men find it hard to identify with Britain, ‘because we have allowed the
weakening of our collective identity’ and ‘have failed to provide a vision of society to which
they feel they want to belong’ (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-
staggers/2011/02/terrorism-islam-ideology).

A few days later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined the chorus by declaring that the
policy of encouraging the religious and cultural differences of immigrants was a failure:

Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want a society where communities
coexist side by side. If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which
is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in
France. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1,355,961/Nicolas-Sarkozy-joins-David-
Cameron-Angela-Merkel-view-multiculturalism-failed.html#ixzz3OcbRgEqa)

This discourse is identifiable in many societies. It appropriates the term ‘multiculturalism’ as a

scapegoat to represent mythical state policies that encouraged immigrant communities to
remain by their own volition outside the mainstream society. There is no acknowledgment of
widespread housing segregation, job discrimination, and the failure of schools to educate
students of immigrant background. Minority groups are solely responsible for their own failure
to integrate. ‘Multiculturalism’ is code for ‘being soft on immigrants’ and the consequent
solution is therefore to ‘get tough’ and force them to assimilate. The implicit wish is that
assimilation will cause them to ‘disappear’, thereby removing the problem they represent for
society.

How can intercultural education (or ‘multicultural education’ in the terminology used by US
researchers such as Nieto [2000] and Banks [1996]) be implemented in societal and
educational contexts that are so fractured by dissent in relation to diversity? A more
fundamental question is why should intercultural education policies be implemented in these
societies? In what ways (if any) does intercultural education contribute to educational
effectiveness and societal cohesion?

I argue that intercultural education contributes to societal goals in two ways. First, it promotes
social cohesion and respect across cultural groups by identifying and challenging patterns of
discrimination and exclusion within particular societies. Equality and protection of human
rights are intrinsic to the constitutions of most countries, although reality has seldom matched
rhetoric in this regard, as the history of any country will attest. The point, however, is that the
goals of intercultural education are entirely consistent with the aspirations and legal provisions
of most countries. Thus, the rationale for this dimension of intercultural education should be
self-evident and non-controversial. However, as noted above, the complexities of intergroup
power relations in different societies make attainment of intercultural education goals highly
challenging in many societies.

The second rationale for intercultural education is that it will promote academic achievement
and equality of educational opportunity for students from marginalized communities who
frequently experience much less success in schools than students from dominant societal
groups. This rationale is less self-evident than the first and there is relatively little direct
empirical support for the proposition. In the remainder of this paper, I will attempt to synthesize
the empirical data and theoretical rationale that support the proposition that intercultural
education promotes academic achievement for linguistically and culturally diverse students.
In the next section, I elaborate on how intercultural education might be implemented in
multilingual schools where a significant proportion of students speak languages other than the
dominant language of instruction and come from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds.

Intercultural education in multilingual schools

Orientation to linguistic and cultural diversity within schools

The description of intercultural education discussed previously highlights the importance of

recognizing, respecting, and celebrating diversity within the educational system. If we examine
students’ languages as one tangible dimension of diversity, it is evident that most schools
serving multilingual students in countries around the world do not recognize, respect, or
celebrate students’ languages. Certainly, in some countries, progress has been made insofar
as educators seldom punish or reprimand students for speaking their languages within the
school. However, a punitive orientation to students’ languages is still common in certain
contexts. Even in contexts that have matured educationally beyond this type of assimilationist
policy, the dominant orientation is one of ‘benign neglect.’ Educators, individually and
collectively, may be positively oriented to students’ diverse languages and cultures but they
see these languages and cultures as having little relevance for the curriculum they are
mandated to teach.
Recent documentation of a punitive orientation to immigrant students’ home languages and
cultures is provided in a study of Turkish-background students in Flemish secondary schools
carried out by Agirdag (2010). He concludes:

[O]ur data show that Dutch monolingualism is strongly imposed in three different ways:
teachers and school staff strongly encourage the exclusive use of Dutch, bilingual students
are formally punished for speaking their mother tongue, and their home languages are
excluded from the cultural repertoire of the school. At the same time, prestigious languages
such as English and French are highly valued. (317)

Agirdag’s findings are consistent with the account of French schools provided by Hélot and
Young (2006), suggesting that in many European educational contexts, immigrant-
background students are not encouraged to take pride in their linguistic accomplishments and
cultural knowledge.

These practices are clearly the antithesis of intercultural education insofar as they
communicate to students the inferior status of their home languages and devalue the identities
of speakers of these languages. Students’ identities are affirmed within the school only to the
extent that they reject their out-of-school identities and renounce their home languages as
legitimate vehicles of communication in public places. In schools that adopt this orientation to
students’ languages, it is highly unlikely that pedagogical practice makes any attempt to
connect with students’ lives or affirm their cultural, linguistic, or religious identities.

A second example illustrates the consequences of a benign neglect orientation to students’

languages and cultures. In a highly multicultural and multilingual school in the Greater Toronto
Area, the grade 5 teacher initiated classroom discussions about language diversity and how
languages are learned and maintained. She recorded the following recollection by one of the
students about her experience in grade 1 when she had to use her home language in the
school office in order to contact her grandmother.

I am not always comfortable speaking Cantonese when I have to go to the office for some
reason. I don’t like it because a lot of teachers are at the office and I don’t like speaking it in
front of them. I know that they are listening to me. I get nervous and afraid. For example, once
I didn’t feel very well in grade one. So my teacher sent me to the office to call my grandma.
My grandma doesn’t speak English and she also can’t hear very well, so I had to speak in
Cantonese very loudly for her to hear. So when I spoke to my grandma, I felt very nervous.

In this example, it is highly unlikely that the student would have been reprimanded for speaking
Cantonese in calling home. The school saw itself as positively oriented towards students’
languages and cultures although at the time this student was in grade 1, it had not been
proactive in communicating this orientation directly to students (at least with respect to
language). The student had clearly internalized the sense that school is an English-only zone
and no other language is legitimate within this space. This (implicit) devaluation of diverse
cultures and languages within the school reflects the status and power relations in the wider
society where knowledge of languages other than the two official languages (English and
French) is not highly valued. Intercultural education implies that in order to challenge these
coercive power relations, the school must be proactive in communicating to students that
knowledge of additional languages and cultures represents an intellectual accomplishment
and social advantage. Benign neglect of diverse languages and cultures is not sufficient – it
simply renders the school complicit with the power relations operating in the society at large.

The operation of these power relations emerges in Sleeter’s (2002) study of the content of
textbooks and curriculum frameworks in California. For example, her analysis of the History-
Social Science Framework for California Public Schools (California Department of
Education 2001) revealed that of the 96 Americans who were named in this document as
important to study, 77% were White, 18% African-American, 4% Native American, 1% Latino,
and 0% Asian American. Based on this and other studies, she concluded that ‘racial and ethnic
minorities are added consistently in a “contributions” fashion to the predominantly Euro-
American narrative of textbooks’ (2011, 2).

In summary, educators who adopt a benign neglect orientation to students’ languages and
cultures tend to pay little attention to the linguistic and cultural resources that students and
communities bring into the classroom. In Canada and the USA, they typically view ‘English
language learners’ in problem-oriented ways – students are defined by what they lack, namely
English proficiency, and the priority is to help them learn English quickly so that they can
develop academic skills in that language. Students’ home languages are typically seen as
largely irrelevant to this process. Even when teachers view the multilingualism in their
classrooms in positive ways, there are few guidelines or curriculum expectations that specify
how they might mobilize students’ linguistic diversity to advance their overall academic
development.

Intercultural resources within the classroom

Fortunately, in an increasing number of classrooms across Canada and elsewhere, educators

are beginning to shift their orientation from benign neglect of students’ languages and cultures
to an intercultural orientation that actively connects curriculum to students’ lives, and affirms
the cultural knowledge and linguistic accomplishments of students and communities. This
orientation has been referred to as teaching through a multilingual lens (Cummins 2014;
Cummins and Persad 2014) when the specific instructional focus is on developing students’
awareness of language and affirming their linguistic identities. However, the same orientation
can be referred to as teaching through an intercultural lens when the instructional focus is
broadened to include students’ cultural knowledge in addition to linguistic knowledge. There
is nothing radical about this approach – it simply takes seriously generally accepted
pedagogical notions such as teaching the whole child and connecting curriculum to students’
background knowledge. Theoretically, it also taps into the construct of funds of
knowledge (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Rodriguez 2013), which refers to the cultural
knowledge and distributed expertise that families and communities accumulate over time. In
a review of funds-of-knowledge research, Rodriguez (2013, 89) highlighted its focus on
enabling educators to learn more about students’ home lives ‘as a means to better connect
the knowledge production occurring within the school to that occurring beyond the school.’
Within this conception, intercultural education can also be viewed as a form of critical
pedagogy that focuses on language and cultural issues relevant to social justice and equality
of educational opportunity.

Thus, in schools characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity, intercultural education, by

definition, starts by connecting the curriculum to the lives of students and their communities.
This process goes far beyond simply a celebration of diversity – the focus is on social justice
and challenging unequal power relations. The pedagogical orientation is transformative rather
than concerned with transmission of information about particular cultural practices. Cummins
(2009) has argued that ‘transformative approaches to pedagogy [emphasize] the relevance
not only of transmitting the curriculum and constructing knowledge but also of enabling
students to gain insight into how knowledge intersects with power’ (6). The goal is to promote
critical literacy (Gorski 2008; Janks 2014; Lau 2013) in order to enable students to understand
and act upon the social realities of their own lives and of their communities. Clearly, this
interpretation of intercultural education is consistent with the definition provided by the National
Council for Curriculum and Assessment (2005) that emphasized the promotion of equality and
human rights and the importance of challenging unfair discrimination.
Numerous recent examples of intercultural education or ‘teaching through a multilingual lens’
have been described in previous publications (e.g. Cummins and Early 2011; Cummins and
Persad 2014; Cummins et al. 2015) and in most of the other articles in this issue. Projects that
have taken place across Canada include Armand, Dagenais, and Nicollin (2008), Chumak-
Horbatsch (2012), Lotherington (2011), Naqvi et al. (2012), Prasad and Stille (2015), and
Roessingh (2011).

Most of these studies have been qualitative in nature and have not sought to demonstrate
causal relationships between particular instructional approaches and academic achievement.
To what extent can a credible argument be made that intercultural education promotes
academic achievement among students from marginalized communities that are at risk of
underachievement? This question will be addressed in two ways: first, the quantitative
empirical data that does exist will be reviewed. This review will include a brief recapitulation of
the data on the effects of bilingual education for linguistic minority groups because bilingual
education clearly represents one instructional approach that recognizes and respects the
languages that students bring to school. As such, it incorporates one important dimension of
intercultural education. Second, the claims to credibility with respect to enhanced educational
achievement that qualitative studies of intercultural education make will be analyzed.

Does intercultural education promote academic achievement?

Quantitative studies: A. Bilingual education

Reviews of the outcomes of bilingual education for linguistic minority groups are consistent
and unambiguous. Programs that typically spend at least 50% of the instructional time in
elementary school through the medium of a minority language benefit students’ proficiency in
the minority language at no cost to students’ proficiency in the societal majority language. In
fact, most studies show moderate benefits to students’ literacy development in the majority
language despite the fact that typically students receive only about half of their instruction
through that language (e.g. August and Shanahan 2006).

The review of bilingual education outcomes conducted by Francis, Lesaux, and August (2006)
as part of National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (August and
Shanahan 2006) in the USA concluded that bilingual instruction exerts a significant positive
effect on minority students’ English academic achievement:

In summary, there is no indication that bilingual instruction impedes academic achievement in

either the native language or English, whether for language-minority students, students
receiving heritage language instruction, or those enrolled in French immersion programs.
Where differences were observed, on average they favored the students in a bilingual
program. The meta-analytic results clearly suggest a positive effect for bilingual instruction
that is moderate in size. (Francis, Lesaux, and August 2006, 397)

This finding is consistent with Lindholm-Leary and Borsato’s conclusions which highlight the
cumulative impact of bilingual programs on linguistic minority students’ achievement:

[T]here is strong convergent evidence that the educational success of ELLs [English language
learners] is positively related to sustained instruction through the student’s first language. …
most long-term studies report that the longer the students stayed in the program, the more
positive were the outcomes. (Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006, 201)
In short, programs that recognize and attempt to promote students’ home language and
literacy skills demonstrate more positive outcomes than programs conducted entirely through
the dominant language. Bilingual programs are defined on the basis of language of instruction
and are likely to vary in the extent to which they incorporate other aspects of intercultural
education (e.g. a focus on equality and human rights). The outcomes of programs with this
explicit focus are reviewed in the next section.

Quantitative studies: B. Culturally responsive instruction

Sleeter’s (2011) review of the impact of culturally responsive curricula that attempted to
connect instruction to students’ lives and cultural backgrounds found a variety of positive
outcomes. She interpreted these findings as indicating that when curriculum focuses on the
realities of students’ lives, including racism and poverty, and gives them tools to understand
and act on those realities, they become ‘insiders’ whose background knowledge is valued and
constructed as useful for academic learning. When schools challenge the exclusion of
students’ languages, cultural histories, and current realities from the curriculum, students
become intellectually engaged and see themselves as intellectually capable.

Two other quantitative studies reported positive outcomes on language and literacy skills as
a result of instruction that connected to students’ lives, and included their languages and
cultures within the curriculum. Bernhard, Winsler, and Bleiker (2004) evaluated the outcomes
of a preschool literacy intervention Early Authors Program (EAP) implemented in the Miami-
Dade region of Florida entitled the EAP, which is based on the work of Ada and Campoy
(2003). Young children and parents in the EAP created books that focused on family history,
observation of the world, and their own interests. The families involved were low-income and
came from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Over the course of the project,
112 educators, 800 families, and over 1000 children in 32 childcare centers wrote 3286 books,
many of them dual language. Students were able to import their own pictures into the books
and print them out and laminate them for ‘publication’ and display. The books were also
exhibited at a local Children’s Museum over the course of one month.

The evaluation collected pre- and post-testing data spanning one year from 367 children (280
EAP and 87 control, all randomly selected). It was found that children who participated in the
EAP made significantly greater gains in language development and overall learning profile
than those in the control group. Bernhard et al. (2006) summarize the results as follows:

There is evidence that the EAP project had a number of beneficial results for the participating
ELL children. The most salient evidence was the improvement in language and literacy scores.
The dramatic increase in EAP children’s scores can be explained, we suggest, by focusing on
the essential elements of the program. The children’s experiences as early authors allowed
them to see themselves in their self-made books and to talk about their own lives and interests.
This identity investment resulted in increased pride, both in themselves and in their families.
Additionally, in working with highly personally meaningful texts, the children were cognitively
engaged and developed an affective bond to literacy. (2399)

A two-year study carried out by Naqvi et al. (2012) investigated the effects of listening to dual
language books on kindergarten students’ language and literacy development. Classroom
teachers invited parents, grandparents, or other community members who spoke diverse
languages to join them in reading dual language books to students. Comparison of treatment
and control groups showed significantly greater growth in language and preliteracy skills (e.g.
graphophonemic knowledge) among students who listened to dual language books as
compared to students who did not have this experience.
Although relatively few in number, the results of these quantitative studies are consistent with
the proposition that intercultural education that connects with the lives of students and their
communities promotes greater academic growth than more typical programs that simply teach
the curriculum without explicit focus on students’ cultural and linguistic realities. The next
section examines what we can learn from qualitative studies of intercultural education.

Qualitative studies

The very large number of ethnographic and case studies (e.g. Bishop and Berryman 2006;
Cummins and Early 2011; Ladson-Billings 1994 1995; McCarty 2005) that address the
academic impact of societal power relations and patterns of teacher–student identity
negotiation have frequently been dismissed as having little policy relevance. For example, the
National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Students and Youth (NLP) concluded that ‘there
is surprisingly little evidence for the impact of sociocultural variables on literacy learning’
(August and Shanahan 2008, 8). The NLP reviewed a number of studies that documented
examples of teachers giving legitimacy to students’ personal, communal, or cultural
backgrounds in the classroom but argued that there was little evidence to conclude that these
forms of sociocultural validation benefited students’ literacy outcomes. As discussed
elsewhere (Cummins 2009), this problematic conclusion reflects the narrow criteria the NLP
adopted with respect to adequacy of research design and the need to isolate variables in order
to assess their unique and separate impact. This is rarely possible in field research where
multiple variables overlap and interact. When we adopt a broader frame of reference, however,
it is clear that qualitative research of various kinds is in the mainstream of scientific inquiry,
capable not only of generating hypotheses but also of testing and refuting hypotheses.
Cummins (2009) expressed this reality as follows:

Ethnographic and case study data contribute to theory (and knowledge generation) primarily
by establishing phenomena that require explanation. Across a range of scientific disciplines,
knowledge is generated by establishing a set of observed phenomena, forming hypotheses to
account for these phenomena, testing these hypotheses against additional data, and gradually
refining the hypotheses into more comprehensive theories that have broader explanatory and
predictive power. (385)

In other words, empirical observations cumulatively contribute to the development of rigorous

predictive models that can assess the credibility of different hypotheses. Any phenomenon
established credibly by observation (qualitative or quantitative) can refute theoretical
propositions or policy-related claims. Within this perspective, to what extent is there credible
evidence that intercultural education benefits students’ academic development?

The evidence that intercultural education promotes academic achievement among students
from socially marginalized groups derives from the following empirically supported
propositions:

• Societal power relations have historically played a significant role in the organization and outcomes of
education and continue to restrict educational opportunities for marginalized group students.
• The operation of societal power relations that affect marginalized group students’ academic achievement
can be conceptualized along a continuum ranging from structural/societal, through structural/educational,
to interpersonal.
• Intercultural education initiatives aimed at affirming the identities of marginalized group students have
successfully challenged coercive power relations operating at both structural/educational and interpersonal
levels.

This framework has been elaborated in various publications (e.g. Cummins 2001, 2015) and
will be briefly sketched here.
Societal power relations

The historical impact of societal power relations on educational opportunities is universally

acknowledged. There is widespread agreement that social groups characterized by long-term
educational underachievement tend to have experienced material and symbolic violence at
the hands of the dominant group over generations. Dolson and Burnham-Massey (2011), for
example, point out that stigmatized minority groups such as Native Americans, African-
Americans, and Hispanics have been historically subordinated through forms of violence such
as war, slavery, forced relocation, and genocide. In the Canadian context, the destruction of
identity in residential schools has been well documented (e.g. Battiste 2013).

These forms of societal power relations have been characterized as coercive by Cummins
(2001). Coercive relations of power refer to the exercise of power by a dominant individual,
group, or country to the detriment of a subordinated individual, group, or country. By contrast,
collaborative relations of power reflect the sense of the term ‘power’ that refers to ‘being
enabled,’ or ‘empowered’ to achieve more. Within collaborative relations of power, power is
not a fixed quantity but is generated through interaction with others. The more empowered
one individual or group becomes, the more is generated for others to share. The process is
additive rather than subtractive. Within this context, empowerment can be defined as the
collaborative creation of power.

The framework implies that classroom interactions are never neutral – they are always located
on a continuum ranging from the reinforcement of coercive relations of power (e.g. punishing
students for speaking their home language in school) and the promotion of collaborative
relations of power. Thus, in order to reverse historical patterns of underachievement among
students from socially marginalized communities, educators, both individually and collectively,
must challenge the operation of coercive relations of power in the classroom.

Structural/societal, structural/educational, and interpersonal dimensions of power relations

Coercive power relations operate in multiple ways and the potential influence of educators
who aspire to implement intercultural education will vary according to which dimension of
power relations we are talking about. Structural/societal factors reflect societal policies and
social realities over which educators have minimal control. These include unequal funding for
schools serving low- and high-income communities and school segregation that derives from
patterns of housing segregation (e.g. Kozol 2005). Another example is the well-documented
gap in multiple indices of teacher quality in US schools serving advantaged and disadvantaged
students. Goldhaber, Lavery, and Theobald (2015), for example, examined this issue across
all school districts in Washington State and found that ‘the most disadvantaged students are
much more likely than their peers to face low-quality teachers’ (305). This reality is classified
as structural/societal because it requires policy initiatives at the societal level to address these
inequities (e.g. providing a modest bonus to teachers who teach in schools serving low-income
and marginalized group students).

Structural/educational factors include aspects of the organization of schooling such as

curriculum standards and textbooks, assessment/accountability provisions, ability grouping
policies, and language-of-instruction mandates. Although educators within schools typically
do not have direct influence over these policy mandates and school organizational structures,
they do have the power, both individually and collectively, to resist or attempt to mitigate the
negative effects of policies that they see as detrimental to their students’ academic progress.

Interpersonal factors reflect the ways in which identities are negotiated between teachers and
students in schools (Cummins 2001). As an example, consider the very different messages
communicated to linguistically diverse students in a school that prohibits any use of students’
home languages in the classrooms or corridors compared to a school that acknowledges
students’ multilingualism as an intellectual and personal accomplishment and encourages
them to use the totality of their linguistic skills as cognitive tools to succeed academically.
Similarly, all forms of intercultural education, as conceptualized within this framework, will
attempt to connect curriculum to students’ lives and affirm their identities, thereby challenging
coercive relations of power.

Affirmation of identity and school success

In addition to the quantitative research discussed in a previous section, the findings of

qualitative research are consistent with the proposition that intercultural education can
promote academic achievement. For example, Portes and Rumbaut (2001) concluded on the
basis of their large-scale study of second-generation immigrant students that maintaining links
to the home culture and language is associated with higher educational achievement:

The findings from our longitudinal study consistently point to the benefits of selective
acculturation. This path is closely intertwined with preservation of fluent bilingualism and
linked, in turn, with higher self-esteem, higher educational and occupational expectations, and
higher academic achievement. (274)

Bankston and Zhou (1995) similarly point out that ‘identification with Vietnamese ethnicity,
Vietnamese reading and writing abilities, attitudes toward future education, and current study
habits all have significant [positive] effects on current educational outcome’ (14). Ladson-
Billings (1994, 1995) clearly expressed the relationship between achievement and identity
negotiation in arguing that ‘[t]he problem that African-American students face is the constant
devaluation of their culture both in school and in the larger society’ (1995, 485). She also
expressed the logical implication of this reality: ‘When students are treated as competent they
are likely to demonstrate competence’ (1994, 123).

Conclusion

There is a self-evident rationale for intercultural education as a means of generating respect

and understanding across social groups, thereby promoting a more cohesive and equitable
society. However, beyond this self-evident rationale, there is credible evidence that
intercultural education can play a significant role in promoting academic achievement among
students from socially marginalized communities whose members have historically
experienced widespread discrimination and whose cultures and languages are typically
excluded from school curricula and instruction. The framework presented in this paper builds
on the work of other theorists (e.g. National Council for Curriculum and Assessment 2005;
Nieto 2000) in conceptualizing intercultural education as challenging unfair discrimination and
incorporating the promotion of human rights – in other words, repudiating coercive relations of
power in favor of an instructional orientation aimed at empowerment – the collaborative
creation of power. The framework assigns considerable agency to educators, individually and
collectively, to resist and mitigate the effects of discriminatory forms of school organization
(e.g. curriculum that excludes the experiences and perspectives of minority communities) and
to orchestrate classroom interactions that connect with students’ lives and affirm their
identities. The logic is simple: if coercive relations of power play a causal role in students’
underachievement, then educators must identify and actively challenge how these power
relations operate in their school contexts. As Gorski (2008), Nieto (2000) and others have
pointed out, conceptions of intercultural education that fail to incorporate a focus on critical
literacy and culturally responsive instruction do not address the operation of societal power
relations and consequently are likely to be ineffective in promoting academic achievement.

Notes on contributor

Jim Cummins is a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto. His research focuses on literacy development in educational contexts
characterized by linguistic diversity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.