Spear Fishing in Wisconsin: multicultural education as symbolic violence

Abstract

In this article the authors describe how multicultural teacher education can preserve familiar institutional and ideological mechanisms that validate social inequalities. The authors drawn on their own teaching experiences in state and liberal arts colleges, analyzing student discourse collected during activities concerning recent conflict between Native Americans and groups opposed to the exercise of their treaty rights to fish on non-reservation lakes. The analyses employ Bourdieu's analytic framework of sociology of culture to draw distinctions between the positions taken in the state university context, in which the pre-service teachers are mostly working class and white, and the liberal arts context, where the majority of students are from more privileged backgrounds. The findings suggest that multicultural education in its current institutional form puts white workingclass students in an indefensible position in so far as they may identify with those who protest the exercise of Indian rights. The same kind of multicultural education presents less conflict for students in the liberal arts setting. It is conclude that using terms like ' racism ', intended or unintended, to describe the students' underlying dispositions can be an act of symbolic violence, and the authors offer some alternative approaches to multicultural education.