Moving Beyond “Dance, Dress, and Dining” in Multicultural Canada

Abstract

The mainstream curriculum is extremely efficient in furthering a neoliberal multicultural discourse, what is described as the dance, dress, and dining, or heroes and holidays, or Taco Tuesday approaches to diversity. Given this, doing anything else is an ongoing challenge. This paper shares details of a government-university-school collaboration in which the authors were participants in a national project to digitize ethnic group archives and create lesson plans based from those archives. The authors share insights and challenges about what worked for resisting the “zoo” approach.