Commentary on 'Family obligations in Micronesian cultures: implications for educators'

Abstract

The paper makes some interesting observations about the need for educators to understand the cultural positionings of Micronesian students and by implication challenges readers to extend these understandings to other migrant and minoritised student groups. I would like to take up this challenge and illustrate how useful it is to theorise from a relational discourse when seeking solutions to what many educators are suggesting as the greatest problem we face in contemporary education, i.e. the seemingly immutable and growing educational disparities that accompany the increasing diversity of our student bodies in association with the continuing dominance of monocultural and deficit explanations by teachers about the causes of the disparities. This problem negatively affects indigenous students and students of colour along with migrant students and the paper rightly points to the need for solutions.