Narrative Inquiry and Multicultural Education

Abstract

Narrative as a methodological approach to inquiry has a long history of making meaning for the human social world. Multicultural education began in North America as an extension of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement and has been taken up globally as a vehicle to include the voices of historically marginalized populations. The intersections of narrative inquiry and multicultural education, narrative multiculturalism and cross-cultural inquiry, are used by educational scholars as an approach to understanding educational issues of social (in)justice and social (in)equity. The interdisciplinary natures of narrative inquiry and multicultural education have allowed multiple disciplinary perspectives to intermix interpretations of lived experiences. How cross-cultural experiences are storied has opened spaces for new methodological possibilities. Narrative multiculturalism thrives on learning from examination of social relations. Within this understanding, multiculturalism within narrative inquiry is not something to be defined, allowing for fluidity in the conceptualization of what constitutes narrative multiculturalism.