Human rights education: a vehicle for negotiating the challenges posed by global migration?

In this seminal collection, renowned multicultural education scholar James Banks brings together key findings and perspectives of scholars and educators from eighteen nations across the globe on theory, research and practice in multicultural education and citizenship in an age of global migration and diversity. This collection builds on insights gleaned some 15 years earlier on the growing challenges of balancing national unity with diversity in multi-cultural states, insights that were published in Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives (Banks, 2004).The precise focus of this new book is to consider how citizenship education in schools can facilitate the structural inclusion of immigrant students from diverse ethnic, cultural, racial, religious and linguistic groups into their nation states. ‘Structural inclusion’ is defined by Banks in the preface to the collection as ‘...a set of attitudes and beliefs among students that are characterized by a feeling of political efficacy, political empowerment, and a belief that they can influence political and economic decisions that affect their lives by participating in the political system of their nation’. Given the unprecedented levels of migration in the intervening years and the now well-documented evidence of structural exclusion and marginalisation of minoritised groups in nation-states around the world, the book’s ambition is a timely addition to the previous volume and a compelling one for exploring possibilities on how to adapt to a pressing global reality.