ABSTRACT
There is still a tendency in many schools to equate multicultural diversity with the need to keep children's sense of origins alive. The multicultural events that arise from this approach-such as international food evenings, national costume days, or even the celebration of various religious festivals-can often involve immigrant communities in performances of their difference rather than promoting real interaction with one another and those from other cultures. This then further others them, promoting an essentialist view of culture as unchanging and always impenetrable. The danger is that we do not acknowledge how children themselves prioritize fitting into their current local environments rather than holding an attachment to the past. Connected to this is the need to recognize how the meeting of cultures is a dynamic process of negotiation and change, both for the arriving and the receiving people and communities. This means that we should be focusing on what children already do to facilitate their entry into new places of residence and what resources they use to allow them to communicate and build social relationships with other children. It means that we should become more aware of where the meeting points are, where children have shared experiences, rather than focusing only on the differences and where their lives are separated. We need to learn more about the processes of change and what resources children draw on in negotiating new identities and new belongings.
