Section archive - Multiculturalism & Diversity

The initiative 'Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005‑2015' was planned in order to eliminate the marginalization and discrimination of Roma in the areas of housing, health care, employment and education. Each of the 12 European countries, which took part in this initiative, developed a Decade Action Plan. However, this initiative did not succeeded. This article critically examines why the Decade of Roma Inclusion has failed.

This paper looks at the role of special schooling in driving labour market inequalities between Roma and non-Roma in the Czech Republic. The authors find that the discriminatory streaming of Roma into special remedial schools for the mentally disabled influences both labour market outcomes and the level of educational attainment; the latter effect being particularly strong. Special school attendance explains a small part of Roma labour market discrimination as typically measured. However, its main impact is through lowering Roma educational attainment suggesting an additional discriminatory element in Roma and non-Roma labour market outcomes. Thus, the authors propose that labour market inequality should be understood as a complex outcome of cumulative discrimination.

This article explores teachers’ perspectives on enacting environmental education (EE) in a multicultural context. In understanding teacher strategies in adapting EE to a multicultural context and teacher views on the obstacles encountered, the authors found that teacher strategies reflected aspects of progressive EE in extending beyond simple knowledge-awareness to emphasizing changes in behavior and nurturing of ownership. The findings revealed that challenges included value clashes, a lack of common lived experiences, and reconciling contradictory educational perspectives and political policies, which often placed teachers in paradoxical positions. The findings suggest moving toward practices of culturally-responsive environmental education (CrEE) that demand more than awareness but include interactive dialogue.

This article provides a deeper understanding of critical mass, a concept that has become central in litigation efforts related to affirmative action admissions policies that seek to further the educational benefits of diversity. The authors demonstrate that the concept of critical mass requires an understanding of the conditions needed for meaningful interactions and participation among students, given the particular institutional context. To highlight this contextual definition of critical mass, they offer the term dynamic diversity and outline four main components of dynamic diversity that institutions can attend to.