Abstract

This dissertation engages the relationship between educational theory and the sociopolitical phenomenon I call the multicultural condition. My general thesis suggests that critical educational theory can and must develop pedagogical strategies that will promote and propagate democratic community life. ;The musical category of polyphony represents a heuristic metaphor for community life that is multicultural and democratic. Within a polyphonic democratic public sphere diverse people are understood to be intersubjectively related to one another, and not simply enduring, "tolerating," or coexisting in a fragmented detente. Polyphonic democratic community life generates cultural symbiosis, cross-cultural and intercultural growth. Within this context, self and society are understood to be fluid and developing, rather than fixed and static. The polyphonic public sphere is thus based upon a notion of mestizo agency and described as a borderland culture. ;Chapter one argues that the pedagogical practices tied to identity politics produce an antimodern form of multiculturalism which maintains the status quo of fragmentation and marginalization. After discussing several categories of multiculturalism, I endorse a critical dialogic multicultural pedagogy. ;The second and third chapters explore the transformative potential of dialogue. In the second chapter Socratic elenchus is identified as the model of critical dialogue. The third chapter examines Jurgen Habermas' discourse ethics. Together, these chapters argue that critical and oppositional dialogue can build solidarity without silencing difference. ;The fourth chapter identifies examples of transformative dialogics within the educational theory of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and the contemporary school of Critical Pedagogy. This chapter presumes that education has the potential to contest the way difference is used to support fragmentation and marginalization. This contestation, I argue, is sponsored by a critical, democratic pedagogy that organizes the educational sphere as a polyphonic space of symmetric reciprocity, mutual recognition, and undistorted communication. ;The product of this dissertation is an educational theory that combines the dialogic, solidarity building predilection of critical theory with postmodernism's preferential option for dissensus and deconstruction. This dissertation concludes that the multicultural condition demands a critical multicultural pedagogy that is propelled through a dialectic of deconstruction and dialogue, and sustained through the empathetic imagination