Diversity: Gatekeeping Knowledge and Maintaining Inequalities

Diversity is a highly popular and oft-used term and concept in K-12 and higher education. This literature review examines the dominant discourse on diversity—a discourse that positions difference as deficit. Although traditional schooling has been resistant to system-wide change, this review will also consider research showing teachers as well positioned to make emancipatory choices—critically engaging in and demonstrating values and classroom practices that can counteract the limited knowledge and normative practices so common in schools today. This review concludes with a discussion of an emancipatory model of education that educators can build on as part of a paradigm shift grounded in the Black Studies intellectual tradition. This model represents an alternative to the hierarchy of human worth embedded in the predominant conception of diversity. By moving past the constraints of traditional schooling, emancipatory educators can affirm the collective humanity of all students-teachers-families and the cultures and groups they represent.