ABSTRACT
Creating a multi-ethnic community is not an easy task. Learning together, including others in cooperative learning groups and setting a cooperative classroom environment actively promotes mutual care and respect for others. In this way, positive peer relationships are built, other ways to communicate ideas develop and, most importantly, the perspectives of others are more easily understood. But not all classmates are willing to view others as equals with a right to share in the democratic process. To illustrate this point, I draw on data collected during a full year spent as a researcher of the social lives of literacy learners in an urban, ethnically mixed elementary school in Canada (67 per cent of the school population were from the ‘plural’ cultures).
