Negotiating the diversity of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism: teachers’ enactments in an inner city secondary school

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ABSTRACT This paper explores the presence of multiculturalism in teachers’ professional practice in a British inner city co-educational secondary school, which featured in two predominant ways: first, as a form of ‘diversity management’ through interventions including a formalised staffing structure to ‘respond’ to the school’s ethnically mixed student body, representation of difference, and same ‘race’ role models; and second, through its sedimentation into everyday practices, whereby teachers enacted multicultural approaches in varied ways. The multiple meanings teachers attached to multiculturalism and its subsequent translations into ‘everyday’ professional practice suggest that the term ‘everyday multiculturalism’ should be used beyond its ‘convivial’ meaning of living in/with ethnic diversity to also reflect the diverse professional enactments of multiculturalism through everyday practice in institutional settings. Further, an analytical focus on professionals in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism elucidates how teachers’ diverse enactments of multiculturalism perpetuate micro-processes of racialisation in schools.