DR. GEORGE J. SEFA DEI

University of Toronto

Multiculturalism and Public Education: The View from Anti-Racism

My paper examines multiculturalism and public education from an anti-racist lens. The discussion raises some key issues of anti-racist praxis that both interrogates multicultural education, and further sheds insights on anti-racist and anti-colonial global futurity. In an era of Black Lives Matter and the rise of White nationalism and supremacist logics, the paper will offer critical pedagogies of subversion and educational activism teaching young learners to understand their Euro-ancestry privilege and to act for social change. The discursive relationality of Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty is raised in the interrogation of how settler colonialism has attempted to domesticate Black, Indigenous and racialized struggles within an anti-racist rather than anti-colonial framework of the settler state itself.

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George J. Sefa Dei

[Nana Adusei Sefa Tweneboah]

Social Justice Education

OISE, University of Toronto

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Ghanaian-born George Sefa Dei is a renowned educator, researcher and writer who is considered by many as one of Canada’s foremost scholars on race and anti-racism studies. He is a widely sought after academic, researcher and community worker whose professional and academic work has led to many Canadian and international speaking invitations in US, Europe and Africa. Currently, he is Professor of Social Justice Education; Director of the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Professor Dei is the 2015, 2016, 2018-19 Carnegie African Diasporan Fellow. In August of 2012, Professor Dei also received the honorary title of ‘Professor Extraordinaire’ from the Department of Inclusive Education, University of South Africa, [UNISA]. In 2017, he was elected as Fellow of Royal Society of Canada, the most prestigious award for an academic scholar. He also received the ‘2016 Whitworth Award for Educational Research’ from the Canadian Education Association (CEA) awarded to the Canadian scholar whose research and scholarship have helped shaped Canadian national educational policy and practice. He is the 2019 Paulo Freire Democratic Project, Chapman University, US - ‘Social Justice Award’ winner.  Professor Dei has thirty-five (35) books and over seventy (70) refereed journal articles to his credit. Finally, in June of 2007, Professor Dei was installed as a traditional chief in Ghana, specifically, as the Gyaasehene of the town of Asokore, Koforidua in the New Juaben Traditional Area of Ghana. His stool name is Nana Adusei Sefa Tweneboah.