ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a description of the work of three teachers — two class teachers and a polytechnic lecturer — in very different schools, attempting to meet the challenge of Swann. It focuses on the teachers’ and children’s perspectives, and is thus very much the viewpoint of insiders. Park School, a recently amalgamated junior mixed and infants school, was racially and culturally mixed, but almost entirely working-class. Riverside School was socially but not racially mixed. A common problem the two teachers shared was posed by the problematic nature of educational theory in the field of multicultural and anti-racist education and have in mind the polarised debate between anti-racist education and multicultural education. Park School entertained Riverside to a Diwali celebration which included a shadow puppet play, the cultural resources of Park School being presented positively to the Riverside children.
