School teachers have been used as heroic characters in movies for a long time. Their heroism compensates for the failures of social life in our society by treating problems in the classroom, not the real world, and by acting as the mediators between diverse sub-cultures and the larger society. They are the agents of rationality, scholarship, and…

"Bend It Like Beckham" revolves around a middle-class, Indo-British, Sikh girl and her struggle to beat the odds to play professional football. Analyzing the film using postcolonial theories of diaspora helps reveal the limitations of an understanding of "culture" as homogenous and static. Implications for multicultural classrooms are discussed.…