Aporias, responsibility, and the im/possibility of teaching multicultural education

Abstract

Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's notions of aporia and responsibility, this essay discusses the dilemmas of multicultural education and the pedagogical responsibility of multicultural educators. Derrida emphasizes that there is no responsibility without experiencing aporia as the possibility of the impossible. To promote personal transformation and social justice in the multicultural classroom, we must acknowledge the aporias of teacher authority and student agency, self and other, center and margin, and intellect and emotion, and refuse to reduce them to any easy resolutions. The Derridean notions of aporia and responsibility ask us to approach multicultural education as a poetic experiencing of contradictions in order to invent new modes of subjectivity for both teacher and student. The complexity of teaching about social differences calls for creative pedagogy in which identity and community are destabilized while ambiguity and paradoxes are embraced, thus allowing us to imagine the world otherwise.