Reframing Banks' multicultural education: Democratic subjectification and decolonial perspectives on transformative citizenship in elementary education

This paper reinterprets James A. Banks' multicultural education framework, specifically its five dimensions and the concept of transformative citizenship, through the theoretical lenses of Gert Biesta's democratic subjectification and decolonial theory. The objective is to explore how elementary school multicultural education can transition from additive inclusion to transformative action. To this end, the study employs a conceptual case study of Indonesia's elementary citizenship education (PPKn) and the Kurikulum Merdeka, drawing on a critical-interpretive synthesis of peer-reviewed scholarship published between 2010 and 2025.The analysis reveals a practical re-specification of Banks' five dimensions. Key shifts include moving from content integration to dialogic content re-composition, and from prejudice reduction to critical solidarity grounded in subjectification and epistemic pluriversality (the co-existence of multiple knowledge systems). Ultimately, the findings yield an integrated framework for civic education that offers classroom and curriculum recommendations for the Indonesian context. The paper's contribution is twofold: it theoretically extends Banks' architecture with democratic and decolonial insights and practically provides a transferable heuristic for supporting transformative citizenship education in postcolonial democracies globally.