5 Beyond Global Deficit Thinking and Lazy Multiculturalism: Embedding Global South Curricula in Australian Teacher Education
Genaro Oliveira
School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia
Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges and possibilities of embedding Global South epistemologies in Australian teacher education. Drawing on Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory, decolonial border thinking, and the concept of lazy multiculturalism, I reflect on my work designing and teaching an introductory humanities and social sciences subject that foregrounds Southern knowledge as theory, not token data. I conceptualise “global deficit thinking” as the tendency to frame the Global South as perpetually behind, and propose epistemic and curriculum justice as an alternative, embedding diverse epistemologies as core, not peripheral. Through curriculum design examples, student reflections and collegial responses, I explore both the transformative engagement and epistemic resistance such content provokes. The chapter argues that moving beyond superficial cultural inclusion towards epistemic democracy requires rethinking teacher education as a site of mutual learning on a planetary scale. This is not an optional enrichment but a curricular obligation if Australia’s stated educational aims for global critical citizenship are to be realised.
Keywords
Global South, Southern theory, decoloniality, epistemic justice, teacher education, lazy multiculturalism
I remember discovering John Cage’s 4′33″ for the first time. The avant-garde piece is celebrated not for any musical notes, but for its 4 minutes and 33 seconds of uninterrupted silence. Yet, far from empty, the symphonic soundlessness is charged with intent. It invites listeners to note the unacknowledged noises of the world around them, to sit with themselves, to endure social awkwardness, as artistic norms quietly invert.
Without presuming any comparison to the maestro’s intent, my life as an immigrant has been marked by its own repertoire of silences: awkward and difficult, predictable yet unplanned. They arrive when my identity unsettles the expected script, and conversations collapse into a pause that is both uncomfortable and revealing. Having lived in the US for many years, I still carry an indelible North Carolinian accent. This often prompts people, seeing it as an opening to some imagined conversation, to ask, “Are you American?” When I answer, “Yes, South American”, there’s an instant crack in the conversation. The curiosity evaporates, the tone changes. While my interlocutors seem rarely to notice this shift, the silences that follow speak loudly to me. They signal the cognitive and cultural dissonance of the other person, an abrupt withdrawal of interest, or simply an unspoken inability to connect my story with their own frame of reference. In educational jargon, it is the absence of prior knowledge on which to continue the intercultural and interpersonal exchange.
A similar silence met me years into my PhD in New Zealand when a pākehā (European descendant) colleague approached me one day, confident as if he had deciphered an enigma. After years of sharing an office, and, as I was about to realise, of silently scrutinising my physical features, he finally said, “I can see some Māori in you’” It was his way of telling that he could detect the mixed heritage behind my glasses. The comment felt at once intimate and brave, a small act of breaking the multicultural ice, so to speak. But I felt both exposed and speechless. The conversation ceased. Yet it also laid bare the unconsented and defective ethnography that so often unfolds in academic spaces, where bodies are taxonomised without mutual agreement, where European framings curate words and worlds. Like Columbus, who, uninvited and tropically illiterate, could only describe the Caribbean lush as ‘green’ and ‘very green’ (Columbus, 1989), my colleague also lacked the vocabulary to read the multilayered histories inscribed on my landscape-body: the Azorean, the Bantu, the Indigenous strands of ancestry messily woven through generations of Brazilian mestiçagem.
In both these moments, the silences and the misreadings are not merely interpersonal. They are epistemic. They expose the theoretical and conceptual deficit that emerges when the dominant frame of reference is too narrow to apprehend the Global South on its own terms. In this conceptual chapter, drawing on Connell’s (2007, 2014) Southern knowledge and the concept of lazy multiculturalism (Watkins & Noble, 2019), but also on decolonial border thinking (Grosfoguel, 2006, Mignolo, 2011), I reflect on my lived experience as a mestiço Brazilian migrant teacher who transitioned into a teacher education program, first in Aotearoa New Zealand and now on Birpai Country in Australia, to advance a set of concepts and strategies grounded in my professional practice. I build on recurring moments of silence and misrecognition, not only as personal anecdotes but as critical data points for examining how Global South knowledges are either ignored, constrained or embedded within teacher education spaces. Specifically, I focus on my current work to expand Global South knowledges and perspectives within the curriculum of a teacher education subject I am designing, outlining both preliminary achievements and the barriers and resistances, explicit or subtle, encountered from staff and students alike.
From Individual to Global Deficit Thinking
In educational discourse, deficit thinking refers to explanations of students’ underachievement that locate the problem within the individual or their community, such as family background, language proficiency or cultural practices, rather than in societal structures. It is a blame-the-victim mindset that attributes educational failure to perceived individual or cultural shortcomings while ignoring systemic inequities (Davis, 2019). This individual deficit discourse has been extensively critiqued for its role both in justifying and perpetuating inequities and for deflecting attention from structural barriers (Valencia, 2012). Less discussed, however, is what I call in this chapter global deficit thinking. This is the often-unspoken framing in which the Global South appears as the planet’s “slow learner”, perpetually catching up to the west. In this view, non-Western, peripheral societies are treated as incomplete versions of the metropolitan centres, their knowledge projects overlooked unless they confirm to Northern priorities. It is the epistemic equivalent of a classroom where only certain students’ contributions are deemed worthy of being written on the board.
Scholars of decoloniality and epistemic justice have long examined the geopolitics of knowledge and the hierarchies that position Southern knowledges as inferior (Mignolo, 2002; Quijano, 2000; Santos, 2015). However, my use of deficit thinking terminology is deliberate. It draws on a concept well established and debated in educational circles and extends it explicitly to the global scale. Just as strengths-based and growth mindset approaches have been championed to counter deficit framings of individual learners in classrooms, there is a parallel need in curriculum design and educational policy for an analogous approach to Global South populations and knowledges, one that moves away from silencing them, tokenistically including them, or patronisingly casting them as ‘developing” and “not yet there”. Instead, these knowledges must be recognised as generative, sophisticated and essential in their own right.
Much of my teacher education experience and experiments in Australia build on earlier work to Indigenise and decolonise initial teacher education in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly through learning from kaumātua colleagues and kaupapa Māori approaches (Oliveira et al., 2024). It is also shaped by my own origins and continuous academic connections to a land of deep Afro-Brazilian resistance and ongoing decolonisation (Oliveira & Moraes, 2024). More recently, a profoundly transformative experience came from taking 10 courageous New Zealand student-teachers to Brazil. Despite their understandable gringo-biases and ethnocentrism at departure, they returned humbled, enriched by the intercultural knowledge and the power of Brazilian Global South pedagogical concepts and practices they encountered in the streets and institutions of São Paulo (Oliveira et al., 2024). This reaffirmed for me the possibility of thinking about the Global South in decidedly different terms, not as backward or lacking, but as a source of educational and epistemic futures (Carvalho & Oliveira, 2025).
From Lazy Multiculturalism to Mutual Learning on Planetary Scale
Since arriving in Australia, I have, like most migrants, tried to understand and situate myself within the ever-shifting and often contradictory national narratives of belonging. As a HSIE educator, I instinctively turned to history and geography to locate the coordinates of time and space, to deepen my understanding of land and Country, past and dreamings.
In tracing these stories, I learned that a pivotal turning point in Australia’s national discourse came in the 1970s, with the transition from assimilationist White Australia policies, rooted in the racist post-Federation order, to the adoption of official multiculturalism (Rizvi, 1988). This policy shift responded to the realities of mass migration and demands for equity, but it has never been entirely successful, stable or linear, marked by alternating moments of endorsement and backlash (Colic-Peisker & Farquharson, 2011). For example, the early 2000s brought a reorientation towards what has been termed a New Integrationism (Poynting & Mason, 2008), marked by conditional belonging and intensified state control over cultural expression, especially for Muslim communities. While there has been a shift in the official discourse of multiculturalism, it has largely continued to operate within a white national imaginary and hegemony, where cultural diversity is managed rather than fully embraced. A clear expression of this is neoliberal multiculturalism, which commodifies diversity, most visibly in the ethno-dollars generated by international students, and which, paradoxically, incentivises the very whiteness it purports to transcend (Seet & Zhao, 2021). Yet, research shows that Australians have broadly embraced multiculturalism as part of the self-expressed national identity, even as some advocate for interculturalism as a needed complementary approach to fostering interaction, exchange and dialogue within Australia’s increasingly “super-diverse” landscape (Elías et al., 2021).
As both a scholar and a parent of two young pluri-ethnic girls attending early childhood and primary school, I have found what has been termed “lazy multiculturalism” (Watkins & Noble, 2019) particularly useful, not only to understand educational settings but also in the streets and everyday spaces of life. In schools, it surfaces in tokenistic programs and classroom activities that repackage cultures into neat, static categories, detached from the complex, hybrid and evolving identities migrants actually live. In public life, it appears in surface-level gestures, festivals, food stalls or ethnic dress days that showcase difference without engaging with the multilayered realities of migration, power relations, inequality or intercultural negotiation. As a teacher educator, I have witnessed similar patterns at my university: despite inclusive labels and sincere attempts by staff to embrace diversity, institutional practices often remain confined to symbolic representation rather than transformative engagement, while hierarchies of leadership and epistemic power relations remain largely untouched.
In the next section, I share a small and admittedly bumpy attempt to shift lazy multiculturalism into something more active, and to move beyond what I have termed global deficit thinking towards what Connell (2007, p. 224) described as “a mutual learning process on a planetary scale”, in which the Global North countries learn “at least as actively as the periphery”.
Beyond the Western Canon in Teacher Education
This year, I was given the task of creating a subject from scratch, an introduction to the Humanities and Social Sciences for first-year education students. The story of these disciplines, as it is often told, follows a familiar grand narrative, linear and teleological arc: beginning with the Greeks and flowing smoothly to the present liberal nation-states, or, in a slightly shorter version, from 19th-century thinkers such as Weber and Marx to postmodern theory. The names are overwhelmingly Euro-American. In some “Western-plus” textbooks, a handful of non-Western contexts and contributors are inserted as token additions to this linear narrative.
One of the central aims of EMH112, by contrast, was to draw the often-ignored link between the rise of the social science disciplines and the age of imperialism; how these fields not only coincided with imperial expansion but were often the intellectual tools that enabled it. That’s the story of their entanglements. The second aim was to embed Indigenous perspectives, made possible through a partnership with the School of Indigenous Australian Studies and the co-authorship of a proud Wiradjuri woman who helped shape this component.
The third, and the focus of this chapter, was to create a module on the Global South. not as a peripheral footnote, but as a site of producing original, powerful knowledge and frameworks. To give the module a strong theoretical foundation, all students are required to read Chapter 3 of Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory (2007). In this chapter, Connell examines how mainstream globalisation theories, produced in the Northern metropoles, tend to treat the South either as a source of data to be explained by Northern frameworks or as an incomplete version of the North. The South appears as an object of study, but rarely as a generator of theory in its own right.
Connell closes with a central provocation: much of what passes as “global” in sociology ‒ and, by extension, the social sciences more broadly ‒ remains fundamentally shaped by Northern perspectives. Even sophisticated and critical theorists such as Bauman, Giddens, Hardt or Negri, despite their ideological differences, share a Eurocentric orientation. Their work seldom acknowledges thinkers from the peripheries, and knowledge largely continues to flow in one direction: from North to South, producing epistemic asymmetry. When the Global South does appear, it is most often as a site of empirical research ‒ not as a source of conceptual innovation.
Building on Connell’s analysis, Module 3 challenges students to rethink globalisation and other core social science topics through Southern lenses by:
- Starting with Southern theories, not just Southern data, engaging with thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemologies of the South), Paulo Freire (critical pedagogy), and others explored in the module’s activities (see details below).
- Recognising the effects of colonialism as ongoing (decolonialidad), understanding globalisation as shaped by centuries of empire and continuing logics.
- Valuing vernacular and subaltern knowledges, including Indigenous philosophies, oral histories, grassroots pedagogies, and everyday practices.
- Inverting the question by asking how global processes look from the South, rather than how the South fits into global processes. For example, how do African, Latin American, Pacific Islander, or Asian scholars understand “modernity”, “development”, “democracy” or even “sociology”? This shift moves us from inclusion to transformation.
In short, the module aims to change the grammar of the conversation ‒ opening space for alternative genealogies of thought and creating conditions where theory flows in multiple directions. We close the module with a collective exercise titled Journeys Beyond the Northern Canon. In this activity, each student undertakes a small act of intellectual travel. The journey begins with choosing a thinker, concept or movement from our curated list of Global South perspectives ‒ or selecting another relevant example that sparks their curiosity. From there, students engage in a brief exploration: watching a video, reading an article, listening to a podcast ‒ whichever medium best helps them connect with the new perspective.
Figure 5.1
Discussion Forum: Intellectual Journeys Beyond the Northern Canon: Concepts and Frameworks
Figure 5.2
Discussion Forum: Intellectual Journeys Beyond the Northern Canon: Key Thinkers
This journey culminates in a short reflection of no more than 200 words, shared in the discussion forum. In it, students distil the key insights they discovered, explain how the experience challenged or expanded their understanding of the social sciences, and consider whether it shifted how they see the world. Finally, they reflect on how they might draw on this perspective in their future teaching.
Achievements, Scepticism, and Pushback
The creation of this subject, and this module in particular, was in many ways an attempt to push beyond lazy multiculturalism towards an active one, making room not just for diverse cultures, but for diverse ways of knowing. As Connell puts it, this means proposing the “generalisability of alternative knowledge frameworks” so that student-teachers might see how “Southern theories include knowledge projects that provide for alternative universalism” (2017, p. 12). One of the few Global South intellectuals to achieve the status of a truly universal theorist in education has been Paulo Freire. In that speculative spirit, and thinking about the politics of language in ways Freire himself might approve, what I have tried to do here is not simply teach “Paulo Freire” as a proper noun, but to paulofreireanise Global South knowledges: to show its value in the international debates that shape how we think about everything from education to democracy, theories and practices.
Seeing Australian students genuinely engaging with, citing and wrestling with concepts such as buen vivir from Aymaran cosmogonies, decoloniality from Aníbal Quijano, and Afrofuturism from across the diaspora was deeply gratifying. Several students said they were “excited” by the material and could already imagine applying these perspectives in their own classrooms. Those moments made the long hours, the trouble and the sleepless nights worth it.
However, this was not a universal experience. Many students found Connell’s chapter in particular “too difficult”, despite the scaffolding provided, breaking down key points into student-friendly language in the modules, offering recorded explanations, and connecting theory to teaching practice in the tutorial workshops. While some degree of discomfort was expected when introducing unfamiliar theory, what proved more surprising was the reaction from certain colleagues. In email exchanges and informal conversations, colleagues often repeated students’ concerns about ‘difficulty’ and ‘theoretical’ content. One described how their students initially dismissed the Global South material until they were told it would be assessed, at which point they engaged with it pragmatically, rather than from genuine interest. Even in that telling, there was a hint that the lecturer themselves was unconvinced of the material’s practical value, viewing it more as a compliance requirement than a necessary part of a teacher’s intellectual toolkit. In a context where multiculturalism is official policy and collegial civility matters, no one, staff or student, dared to openly say that Global South knowledge is inferior or irrelevant. Yet the recurring language of ‘difficulty’ seems to function as a kind of code: signalling not only the challenge of unfamiliar names, concepts and languages, but also a perception that this knowledge sits outside the ‘real’ curriculum for future Australian teachers.
This reveals a deeper epistemic barrier. Many educators have already accepted that “culture” is fine, and should even be celebrated, hurray, in schools. However, the conversation changes when the challenge is to think with and incorporate other epistemologies and politics into teaching and learning. It is here that the shift from lazy multiculturalism to active epistemic dialogue encounters its greatest resistance, not in overt rejection, but in the quiet deflection of “difficulty” and the unspoken question: Do we really need to teach this? Isn’t it too far, geographically and geopolitically?
The subject, thus, tried to reverse global deficit discourse: instead of treating the South as remedial, it approaches it as a co-equal site of theory-making and a source of past, present and future alternatives for being and seeing the world. Despite the rhetoric of a “world-focused” curriculum, the Australian education system is generating learners who are mostly globally illiterate, or perhaps suffering from a kind of global lobotomy we might call globotomy. Instead of fostering active citizenship, it produces students who are still labelled “global citizens” simply because they can afford a plane ticket to Bali or Europe, not because they possess the intellectual capital or curiosity to travel further in thought and understanding.
The point is simple: if the curriculum truly means what it says about preparing students for a globalised world, then integrating Southern epistemologies is not an optional add-on; it must be a core requirement. Anything less risks leaving our future teachers fluent in the language of diversity, yet illiterate in the substance of global knowledges. And before any eye-rolling at the suspicion of “curriculum wokeism”, this is not a radical departure from official policy, but rather the most conservative, plain reading of ACARA’s aims ipsissima litteris: that the humanities and social sciences should foster in students “wonder, curiosity and respect” about places, people, cultures, and systems “throughout the world” alongside “knowledge of people, places, values, and systems” in local to “global contexts”. These aims cannot be met if “the global” continues to be defined solely through panoptic ‒ yet myopic ‒ Northern eyes.
Author Note
Genaro Oliveira 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3552-3827
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Genaro Oliveira. Email: goliveira@csu.edu.au.
SDG Alignment
Goal 4: Quality education
Goal 10: Reduced inequalities
Cite This Chapter
Oliveira, G. (2026). Beyond global deficit thinking and lazy multiculturalism: Embedding Global South curricula in Australian teacher education. In L. Naidoo, S. Gannon, C. Woodrow, C. H. Díaz, V. Lopez, & J. F. Salazar (Eds.), Sur-Sur Southern knowledges: Education, sustainability and social transformation. Western Open Books. https://doi.org/10.61588/HGMT4758
Attribution
Except where otherwise noted, this work by Genaro Oliveira is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Research Integrity Statement
Ethics approval was not required for this publication as it does not report primary research involving human participants, identifiable human data, or animals
The author declares no known competing financial or non-financial interests that could have influenced the content of this publication.
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