Texte rédigée par Rola Koubeissy et Geneviève Audet dans Accès à la Justice dans les Amériques.
The Americas and many other nations have been engaged in a process of social, political and educational transformation due to a massive global migration. Banks and Banks (2020) stated that racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity is on the rise in the USA and other countries. The same applies to Canada, who took in around 321,000 immigrants in 2018. In the same year, the province of Québec alone welcomed 51,100 (Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2019). This phenomenon has altered demographics and changed the economical and sociopolitical aspects of societies.
The impact of immigration can be felt in the educational systems as well; school structures, residents, and environment have all been transformed. Therefore, teachers are faced with both the challenge and the opportunity of instructing students from diverse sociocultural backgrounds (Banks, 2020). Teachers must support both the students and their families in their sociocultural integration. As Armand (2013) stated, teachers adapt and adjust their practices in a multi-ethnic context. In such a context, the USA, Canada and many other countries have long advocated for multi- cultural education and this was supposed to become common practice in all schools decades ago (May and Sleeter, 2010). Banks (2020) defined multicultural education as an educational reform movement and a process whose goal is to change the structure of the school to allow students from diverse backgrounds to have an equal opportunity for academic success. Likewise, Sleeter (1992 in Akkari, 2001) argued that multicultural education is a process in which schools work with the oppressed, and not against them. In this context, many countries have developed governmental policies, measures and action plans to manage diversity in schools. However, the transformational role of multicultural education as a process to change the school structure is not necessarily reflected in governmental policies and practices.
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