Australia’s migration history has produced one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, but this has presented challenges for educational equity. The introduction of multiculturalism in the 1970s coincided with an increasing focus on structural inequities in education. In this essay, we examine the context of changing educational policies and programs over the last half century, arguing that there has not been a steady process of reform involving measures redressing various inequalities but a period of policy turbulence. We consider the impact of the competing logics of multiculturalism—incorporation, recognition, civility—upon educational policy and practice to argue that, together with the consequences of neoliberal reforms, the equitable delivery of multiculturalism in schools has proved challenging. We conclude that multicultural education must refocus on the critical capacities that teachers and students alike need to understand the cultural complexities of a globalized world.

“Probing Human Origins” explores, from various perspectives, how humans became human. This collection of papers acknowledges the importance of genetic ‘blueprints’ but rejects the idea that the DNA sequence of the human genome contains a book of instructions that defines being human. Instead, it promotes the idea that during humankind’s evolutionary history, genic changes occurred in ancestral genomes that were positively selected to help shape the distinctive human phenotype.