El modelo europeo de participación (el Proyecto EPOC)

Banks (1981) explains that the curriculum should respect the ethnicity of the child and use it in positive ways. The goal of the curriculum should be to help students learn how to function effectively within the common culture, their ethnic culture and other ethnic cultures. Further Banks (1994) identified three multicultural approaches. Curriculum reform is one of them. He explained that the major goal of curriculum reform is

inclusion of content about different cultural groups in a curriculum in order to develop a new practice. For example he suggested including important dates and celebration to honour heroes in a culture as a new practice in the USA.

May (1994) explained that while society can be seen as a system of roles, schools are seen as agencies which require that students become successful performers of future roles. Therefore the curriculum can be seen as selections of culturally universal features including common value orientation and specialised aspects of culture concerned with training students for specific roles.

Over a long period of time there has been an expectation in England that the curriculum should reflect a sympathetic understanding of the various cultures and races that make up UK society. For example, The Labour Government’s Green Paper on education (1977) explained that UK society is multicultural and multi-racial. Leicester (1989) concluded that British educationalists believed in the multicultural period in England that teachers must recognize and address racial bias in learning materials. The National Curriculum in the 1988 encompassed material from a range of cultures in the subjects of English, history, geography, art, music and physical education. Specific grants (for example Section 11 funding which ended early in 2000) were provided to local education authorities for innovative work in schools related to meeting the educational needs of minority ethnic children, promoting racial harmony and in other ways preparing pupils for

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life in a multicultural society. Findings from the English schools indicated that they incorporated such materials across the curriculum.

The literature review noted that the aim of multicultural education is to understand and celebrate difference through education. This difference can be reflected in the curriculum through acknowledging all cultures in the classroom and through education about different cultures (Bartlett and Burton, 2001) as is apparent in the data collected for the English school study. For example, the history teacher commented, ‘In the National Curriculum, multiculturalism is integrated completely through the history curriculum to GCSE level’. In the English Baccalaureate the students had to study multiculturalism as was also evident in the history course. If multiculturalism was not taught in the history subject ‘students can get it through geography’. Students ‘look at a lot of different cultures within geography’, but ‘from a slightly different perspective’.

In order to achieve social cohesion, there is a view that every citizen should have the opportunity to access progress (Council of Europe (2001). The section of the Curriculum Policy and Process Plan (1999) document in Sri Lanka indicates the main principles for the curriculum and states that the broad curriculum framework should serve the needs of a multicultural, pluralistic, but nationally integrated society, in addition to learning from home and community environments. The Curriculum Policy and Process Plan further specifies that the national curriculum should be designed to recognise that children are unique, and that they come from different communities and backgrounds. Reference is made to a Quality Control Mechanism, with units to be set up at the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the Education Publication Department to ensure that there is no bias in the curriculum against ethnicity, religion, gender and social and economically

disadvantaged groups and the curriculum is to be pretested among groups where different languages and ethnicities are represented. This was implemented in the Presidential Commission on Youth Unrest Report (1990) that highlighted some of the systemic features that had not been addressed in the educational system.

This became the basis for both the 1992 and 1994 National Education Commission Reports and the 1997 reforms. The overall education policy of Sri Lanka is consistent with nine national goals. Among these goals three are relevant to social cohesion and peace. The goals reflect the expectations of the nation.

• The achievement of national cohesion, national integration and national unity. • The establishment of a pervasive system for social justice.

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• The active partnership in nation-building activities to ensure the continuous nurturing of a deep and aboding concern for one another.

(NEC Report 1992 cited by ESCP report (2008) p.3). The views of all the policy makers that were interviewed reflected these goals. All policy makers said that minority groups have a right to see their cultures positively reflected. One said, for example: ‘Yes in my view all minorities have a right to see their cultures acknowledged’. To change people’s stereotypical attitudes towards people of other backgrounds they use the school curriculum, and textbooks to include information about minority ethnic groups. They also use the curriculum to increase the activities students who come from different backgrounds can participate in to build a strong foundation. One policy maker said that, in Sri Lankan history, there is evidence that Sri Lankan people may have positive attitudes about different ethnic groups. For example

Dutugamunu a Sinhala and Elara a Tamil fought a war but came to respect each other as people. Therefore, this policy maker emphasised the value of positive attitudes and he hoped it would be effective in building good ethnic understanding among different ethnic groups in the country.