Learning to live peacefully and with meaningful connections to others in a diverse society is arguably an educational imperative for children and young people living in a rapidly diversifying Europe, and for those tasked with educating them. This imperative speaks not only to attempts to secure the long-term flourishing of European societies but also to immediate educational challenges and practicalities. In many parts of Europe, as well as the wider Global North, these challenges manifest as chronic educational inequities and inequalities affecting racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, such as low attainment, disproportionate exclusions, and teacher and peer racism (e.g. Archer and Francis 2007; Bochaca 2006; Gilliam 2023; Wallace and Joseph-Salisbury 2022). They also relate to the well-documented issue of de facto segregation inside many classrooms (e.g. BBC 2017). These problems persist despite decades of dedicated policymaking aimed at tackling them.

This paper addresses two reasons why the challenges of conviviality and educational inequity continue to exist. Firstly, we argue that following the fraught history of dealing with difference in education, ideas and practices of intercultural education have ended up as somewhat detached from the social and political realities of living and schooling in diverse contexts. That is, they do not sufficiently address the unequal effects of policymaking or indeed the politics of education. Secondly, we draw attention to a sort of ‘museumification’ of diversity, not least in educational settings, and argue that ‘diversity’ has come to be reified as an object (of celebration, of critique, of attainment, of teaching and learning). In these conditions, there is often an expectation that racial and religious minority people perform ‘their diversity’; that they represent a static, often ‘exotic’, and essentially different culture in ‘high fidelity’. We aim to demonstrate that such curated and performed diversity is at quite some distance from the empirical reality of diverse lives in towns and cities across Europe.

Based on empirical research in Birmingham, UK, one of Europe’s most diverse cities, we call for a move towards educating for ‘living diversity’, which comprises the complex, entangled, competing and ongoing currents of diverse people’s lives. Diversity, thus, is not an object or discipline; it is a lived and living reality that is constantly in play, including at the intimate levels of individual and familial life. We thus intend for the idea of living diversity to both challenge dominant approaches conceptually and operationalize an alternative educational model. As we aim to demonstrate, such an educational turn depends in part upon strong collaborations between multiple stakeholders dedicated to social justice, and artistic practice is one of its central components. Furthermore, it depends upon adopting a more sophisticated understanding of identity, reflexivity, and agency – both individual and communal. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall (1990) and Margaret Archer (2012), we argue that educational attempts to ‘pin down’ identities or discover their ‘historical essence’ are doomed to fail. Instead, educators should pay attention to the ‘points of suture’, often straddling numerous places and times, which constantly animate people’s sense of self, other, and belonging, and which individuals use as definite positions of reflection, analysis, and action. 

This paper is derived from a research project which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and started in 2020 just before the Coronavirus pandemic. Its aim was to co-construct educational knowledge and practice with diverse social and educational actors in Birmingham, UK. The project’s methodology can be described as multi-stakeholder participatory research (MSPR), as it involved several partners (educational and community stakeholders) including artists, activists, non-formal educators, Third sector actors, local state-funded schools, local policymakers, and academics, who worked collaboratively to promote a process of ‘co-learning and capacity building among partners’ (Israel et al. 2008: 52), with the aspiration to problematize dominant discourses of migration, belonging and diversity within local schools. One of the key advantages of MSPR is that it is, per se, an educative space and process, through which partners learn to work together, developing professional intercultural sensitivity. This means recognizing the differences among partners’ priorities and aims and finding ways to constructively negotiate them to achieve meaningful collaboration. Each organization can be thought of as a loosely defined cultural unit, as people working there probably share broadly similar aims, philosophies, and methods of practice. However, as the initiators of the project and responsible for its funds, we emphasized the concept of social justice as a basis for collaboration, a sort of common denominator to which all partners should be committed, and which would ultimately guarantee the project’s coherence of trajectory and outcomes. Between October and November 2021, severely challenged by Covid-19 restrictions, we conducted a series of face-to-face semi-structured interviews and photography sessions with Birmingham denizens who either had refugee status or would describe themselves or their families as settled immigrants. The participants were recruited via a network previously established with a leading migrant-led organization that is both active locally and nationally. Furthermore, the fieldwork was organized in collaboration with Vanley Burke, a renowned British-Jamaican photographer. In a series of intimate and generative sessions, Burke took portraits of the participants while we collected in-depth stories from them about their lives, especially how they came to be ‘Brummies’ (someone from Birmingham). A total of seventeen people were photographed, and among those, thirteen agreed to be interviewed. Interviewees were from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, including white Eastern Europeans. The interviews were voice-recorded, transcribed, and then thematically analysed using NVivo.

Participants clearly articulated the complexities of diversity and belonging during the interviews, challenging the hegemonic reproduction of static and passive depictions of their identities. Given our findings, a central aim of our collaboration was to develop a model for co-constructive education that could be readily adopted by schools across Europe and beyond. Following a series of successful exhibitions of Burke’s portraits, we worked with our partners to produce educational activity packs for primary and secondary schooling featuring the portraits and some of the stories shared by our participants. The packs provide authentic learning materials for teachers and children to discuss and problematize issues around migration, belonging and diversity through artistic engagement – i.e., both by ‘decoding’ the images and bringing their analyses to bear on important questions of diversity and by engaging in their own artmaking to articulate their questions and experiences and communicate these with their peers. Our approach assumes that the arts are valuable not just for introducing children to critical enquiry but also enabling them to explore or ‘excavate’ (Gholami 2017) aspects of selfhood/otherness that may not be readily accessible via logocentric educational interactions. Gonçalves (2016:18) argues that in the field of intercultural communication and dialogue, arts ‘add to the learning process a way for learners to combine emotions and feelings with intellectual insights in a form of expression that is at the same time safe and powerful’. Our educational packs are permanently available as a free download on the website of one of our partners, the internationally respected Ikon Gallery. A first round of trialling/evaluating the packs took place between February and March 2023 with seven schools in Birmingham, involving 320 children ranging from Year 2 to Year 7, and their teachers. The results, which we will discuss in the paper, are highly encouraging.

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