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Intercultural education (ICE) is a priority for schools and schooling systems worldwide. While extensive policy and academic literature exists that describes how ICE should be done in schools, relatively little has been published about the pragmatics of implementing and enacting ICE, despite evidence that principals, teachers and schools feel ill equipped to teach and engage in ICE. This article investigates how schools implementing ICE are confronted with distinctive challenges. Engaging methodological tools of social constructivism (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005) and an analytical lens supported by social cultural theories of identity and representation (Hall, 1997; Gee, 2004), we argue that the everyday experiences and practices of teachers need be explored, but also interrogated and understood otherwise (Lather, 1991). We draw on qualitative data from a large-scale study conducted in schools in Victoria, Australia. We present three vignettes that elucidate how ICE was enacted at the principal, curriculum and teacher levels. Each vignette is based upon a key challenge confronted by schools and illustrates the processes different schools used to tackle these issues and to embed ICE into the daily schooling practice.

Increasing numbers of Australians identify with a multiplicity of religion groups or have no religious affiliation. Despite this, the representation of religious groups other than Christian--and the implications of this for anti-racist pedagogy in Australian schools--is seldom explored. This article interrogates the ways in which the most prominent of these minority religious groups (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish) were spoken about in two Melbourne newspapers and considers the implications of this interrogation for multicultural pedagogy in globally integrated local school contexts, such as those in Australia. Methodologies of social cultural theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA) are used to investigate newspaper discussions from the different viewpoints of their experiential, systemic, and normative focus. I find that notions of religious identity described in the media are stylized in form and an almost-silent normative self-identity is defined against clichéd typologies made within a crucible of race, identity, and belonging.

This paper explores the consequences of these discourses for the ways that international students are identified and positioned within school communities. My argument is developed in four sections. The first describes my ongoing exploration into the impact of international student programmes in Australia. The second exemplifies my argument: exploring the day-to-day experiences of vice principals in two Victorian government state secondary schools as they market their schools, and examining the systemic and ontological discourses played out within those conversations. The third interrogates discourses of identity and difference, neo-liberalism and nave cosmopolitanism which I find shape teacher conversations about international student programmes. In the final section, I argue that the impact of the discourse formations implicit in teacher talk about international student programmes has been the objectification of international students and their ambivalent inclusion within the school community. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper suggests new directions understanding the impact of international students in schools. It is concerned with the ways that community representatives discuss these students and their impact on the community of the school. Recent literatures describe communities such as those of schools as ones of perception and materiality whereby some are included differently than others. Discourses such as multiculturalism and monoculturalism, which have traditionally shaped these discussions about community relations, have always been ambivalent. They take on new forms as local/global interaction, and the individualistic and market-driven changes that lead to the arrival of international students have consequences for the everyday lives of school community members. These need to be investigated if the location of international students in local school communities is to be properly described and interrogated. (Contains 19 notes.)

Beneath discussions about race and ethnic relations is an unease, "a whispering in our hearts" these debates that need to be understood "otherwise". In more recent times, they seem increasingly complex and dangerous as the essential differences that underpin modern notions of identity appear negotiated, contingent, and disjunctive. In this paper, I examine the ways in which teachers and parents in one Melbourne secondary school spoke about these notions in 1988 and 1998. Taking up suggestions in the postcolonial and race literatures, the article argues that the normalised notions which make up these conversations need to be made explicit, and the near silences that negotiate the parameters of these discussions should also be the focus of analysis. While at one level teachers and parents discussed their unease and their excitement about the ways their school had changed, their conversations remained underpinned by taken-for-granted understandings about the ways people belong differently within the school community. (Contains 8 notes and 1 table.)

New demographic patterns as well as new communication and information technologies and administrative and marketing practices have irrevocably altered schools in Australia's large cities. This study examines the ways that teachers and parents in one urban school speak about race and ethnicity in the midst of these changes. Beneath the ironic relationship between difference and sameness which underpins multicultural debate are different understandings that determine ways some belong and some do not belong within the school community. This paradoxical relationship persists, despite increasingly post?modern definitions of identity that underpin the field of this debate. I conclude that the examination of multicultural curricula must include the normalized ways of knowing and "being" identity, which underpin conversations about race and identity.

The material and conceptual terms and conditions of identity and difference as they were represented at the end of each decade in a particular local Melbourne school at a time of increasing demographic change and global transformation were examined. Teachers and parents were found to define their identities and the identities of others in ways that were increasingly fragmented, changing and complex.