ABSTRACT
Drawing on the findings of two separate research projects carried out in Australia over the past three years, this chapter describes some of the ways in which teachers think about cultural difference and its implications for multicultural and antiracist pedagogy. One of the projects was conducted in a multiracial school in Adelaide, and sought to examine the manner in which the school's taken-for-granted assumptions about the appropriate ways of structuring pedagogic and social relations articulated with the constructions of minority categories, and in particular those involving Aboriginal students. The other project sought to identify the part, if any, racism played in defining interracial discourse, social relationships and organizational practices of four multiracial schools in Melbourne. The ideology of culturalism is linked to the discourse of ethnicity, based on an understanding that was once anthropological, concerned with documenting differences between societies, and which has more recently become appropriated by sociologists and policy makers to study intergroup behaviour.
