Browsing by Author "Reinilä, Leena"

We are saturated and surrounded by intertwined cultures, by multiculturality. Multiculturality has to do with both our individual identities and more extensively communities and societies consisting of individuals. Constant change and internal diversity are characteristics of identities and cultures. However the discussion concerning them has often a very stiff and a segregational tone to it. As a consequence we create seemingly natural distinctions between the categories generated and reconstruct an idea of "us" and "others". Diversity and the mechanisms of separation occur also in the school world. The objective of this study is to examine how teachers talk about multiculturality and what kind of meanings and implications are associated with multiculturality within this discussion. I also try to illustrate power relations both between and inside the narrational discourses and present possible rationale behind these discourses, all in the theory frame of critical pedagogics. In this qualitative study I interviewed four teachers working in the Helsinki metropolitan area. I collected the research data through theme interviews. In the analysis I used thematic analysis and discourse analytic methods. In the teachers' narrations of multiculturality a childcentric, pragmatical realistic and a natural multiculturality discourses were present. The core of the discourses was based on the division between a child-origininating and a societal frame. All the discourses created based on the data were seemingly positive, in accordance with a fair equality understanding and acceptable speaking manners. However, a deeper examination of the nuances and functions of the discourses showed hidden mechanisms creating and sustaining otherness. Due to the use of language in a way that it creates otherness, school does not appear and actualize similar to all children, as the institution sustains ethnocentric and segregation-creating reality. On the basis of the results of this study the structures and discourses determining the practises of schools should be more critically examined. Furthermore, becoming aware of this discussion should not only happen at the individual and societal level, but it also should concern the education of future teachers.