Interest Convergence in Intergroup Education and Beyond: Rethinking Agendas in Multicultural Education

Abstract

Intergroup movements in the United States in the 1920s-50s provided leadership to schools and communities grappling with rising racial and ethnic unrest. C. A. M. Banks (1996, 2004, 2005) argues that the conceptual limitations of the movement’s scholarship and its decline yield important lessons for multicultural educators. Building upon her work, I use Bell’s (1980) interest-convergence principle to analyze the movement’s successes and failures given the interests and values of prominent political, socioeconomic, and educational constituencies of the time. As an analytic lens, the interest-convergence principle simultaneously clarifies and complicates future agendas in multicultural education research, pedagogy, and curriculum.