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Recognizing Diversity: The Incipient Role of Intercultural Education in Thailand

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Learning from Difference: Comparative Accounts of Multicultural Education

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 16))

Abstract

Thailand has a long and consistent policy of denying concessions to a pluralist vision of its identity which would arise from formal recognition of differences, and has never embraced, at the official level, any discourse approximating multiculturalism. Instead, it has stressed the importance of minority assimilation to established and privileged norms, and succeeded in propagating a general perception of itself, both domestically and internationally, as ethnically homogenous. Despite this attempt to create an image of cultural homogeneity, as the first section of this chapter demonstrates, Thailand has a long history of diversity, from the polyethnic foundations of the Kingdom of Siam to the geophysical demarcation of its territory. Suppression of diversity in Thailand has resulted in ethnic stratification, the consequences of which reverberate throughout modern society. The second component of the chapter focuses on an education commission undertaken through the UNICEF Language, Education and Social Cohesion (LESC) Initiative, a component of the UNICEF Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy (PBEA) Programme. Activities undertaken through the LESC Initiative, and through this particular mapping exercise, represent important groundwork in creating a dialogue around difference and how it is represented and engaged with in the Thai education system. In the context of the exercise in curriculum mapping, some reflections on the relevance of the notions of multicultural education for the specific setting and historical circumstances of Thailand are elaborated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Materials in the second component of this chapter have been adapted from Lo Bianco and UNICEF 2015, An Upper Primary and Junior Secondary School Intercultural Education, with the permission of UNICEF EAPRO Bangkok.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Joseph Lo Bianco & Yvette Slaughter

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  1. Joseph Lo Bianco
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  2. Yvette Slaughter
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Correspondence to Joseph Lo Bianco .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Joseph Lo Bianco

  2. Department of Rehabilitation Psychologya, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Aydin Bal

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Lo Bianco, J., Slaughter, Y. (2016). Recognizing Diversity: The Incipient Role of Intercultural Education in Thailand. In: Lo Bianco, J., Bal, A. (eds) Learning from Difference: Comparative Accounts of Multicultural Education. Multilingual Education, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26880-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26880-4_10

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