Multicultural education is a flourishing—though sometimes controversial and increasingly contested—field of study. Its major aim and purpose has been described as to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse social, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds to help them acquire the knowledge, aptitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society. Multicultural education draws its content, concepts, paradigms, and theories from specialized interdisciplinary domains such as ethnic and women’s studies (and from history and the social and behavioural sciences), as well as by interrogating, challenging, and reinterpreting the work of other established disciplines and applying it to pedagogy and curriculum development in educational settings.

As academic thinking about and around multicultural education continues to develop, this new title in the Routledge series, Major Themes in Education, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the field’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by James A. Banks, one of the world’s leading authorities on the topic, this new Major Work brings together in four volumes the canonical and the best cutting-edge scholarship. The editor has drawn on the most important and influential research from a range of countries—including the UK, the US, South Africa, Japan, China, and Canada—to create a one-stop ‘mini library’ which describes and analyses the nature, scope, and principal issues of global multicultural education today.

Multicultural Education is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as by educational policy-makers—as a vital research and pedagogic tool.