MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

WHAT IS MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION?

Multicultural education relates to education and instruction designed for the cultures of several different races in an educational system. This approach to teaching and learning is based upon consensus building, respect, and fostering cultural pluralism within racial societies.

Multicultural education is a field of study and an emerging discipline whose major aim is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. One of its important goals is to help all students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to interact, negotiate, and communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good."

Multicultural education not only draws content, concepts, paradigms, and theories from specialized interdisciplinary fields such as ethnic studies and women studies (and from history and the social and behavioral sciences), it also interrogates, challenges, and reinterprets content, concepts, and paradigms from the established disciplines. Multicultural education applies content from these fields and disciplines to pedagogy and curriculum development in educational settings. Consequently, we may define multicultural education as a field of study designed to increase educational equity for all students that incorporates, for this purpose, content, concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms from history, the social and behavioral sciences, and particularly from ethnic studies and women studies.

*THE DIMENSIONS OF

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

*JAMES A. BANKS (1979) FORMULATED 5 SPECIFIC DIMENSIONS AS:

*CONTENT INTEGRATION*KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS*PREJUDICE REDUCTION*EQUITY PEDAGOGY*EMPOWERING SCHOOL CULTURES

CONTENT INTEGRATION

DEALS WITH THE INFUSION OF VARIOUS CULTURES, ETHNICITIES, AND OTHER IDENTITIES TO BE REPRESENTED IN THE CURRICULUM.

In the Philippine context, which activities/sports taught or initiated by the teacher best represent this?

KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

Involves student in critiquing the social positioning of groups through the ways that knowledge is presented.

Recalling some activities done in the classroom during the basic education years may be classified under this

PREJUDICE REDUCTION

DESCRIBES LESSONS AND ACTIVITIES THE TEACHERS IMPLEMENT TO ASSERT POSITIVE IMAGES OF ETHNIC GROUPS AND TO IMPROVE INTERGROUP RELATIONS.

What subject in your teacher education course allow you to go through this process?

EQUITY PEDAGOGY

Modifying teaching styles and approaches with facilitate the intent of facilitating academic achievement for all students.

What are some of the modifications done by your teachers in order to facilitate students’ achievement?

EMPOWERING SCHOOL CULTURES

Describe the examination of the school culture and organization by all members of school staff with the intent to restructure institutional practice to create access for all groups (Banks, 2004)

What activities can you initiate as a future teacher, in order to empower the school’s culture of addressing multicultural learners?

*GOAL OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION (an

education for freedom)

It should help students to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to participate in a democratic and free society.

It should also promote the freedom, abilities, and skills to cross ethnic and cultural boudaries to participate in other culture and groups. It should enable kids to reach beyond their cultural boundaries.

It should provide students with the skills to participate in social action to make democratic and free.

* FOUR LEVELS OF Multicultural Education (contibutions, additive,

transformational, and social action approaches)

*CONTRIBUTION APPROACH

Deals with heroes, holidays and discrete cultural elements. Teachers conviniently infuse cultural themes like holidays and heroes into the curriculum.

ADDITIVE APPROACH

Where teachers add content, concepts, themes, and perspectives that are multicultural without changing the structure of their instructional materials. Here teachers work hard to infuse multicultural themes, content, and perspective into the main curriculum. This usually entails worksheets and reading materials on specific cultural activities’ related to the main topic being taught.

TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACH

Requires teachers to change the structure of their curriculum to enable students to engage concepts, issues, events, and themes from a multicultural perspective. Here the teacher uses the mainstream subjects like mathematics, the arts, and language and literature to acquaint students with the ways the country’s culture and society has emerged from a complex synthesis and interaction of the diverse cultural elements that originated within the various cultural, racial, ethnic and religious groups that make up the society

SOCIAL ACTION APPROACH

Allows the students to make decisions on important social issues and take actions to help solve them.

LESSON PLANNING FOR THE MULTICULTURAL

CLASSROOM

There are seven steps to which order may vary but the content remains the same:

(1) goals and objectives(2) materials and resources(3) anticipatory set or entry(4) instructional input(5) guided practice (6) independent practice(7) assessment/evaluation

Goals and Objectives

This is where the teacher articulates her expectations from students based on the K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum Guide, and it is also in this part where she articulates any multicultural and behavioral objective that she wants to achieve through the lesson

Materials and Resources

This is to include all the materials the teacher will use for the lesson including the references, printed and non-printed, facilities that enhance the presentation of the lesson.

Anticipatory set or entry

This step is to excite, arouse interests in, and prepares students for the learning experience. Some activities to use here may include but not limited to; reading of a relevant story, playing a short game, viewing a film teaser and using the KLW Chart which asks students (K) what they already know about the subject, (W) what they want to know and (L) what they have learned.

Instructional Input

This step is where the teacher presents, explains basic concepts, definitions and clarification for learners to grasp the lesson. Here is where concepts are introduced.

Guided Practice

This step is where teacher and the learner go through the process/steps of the required activity. Instructions may be given by the teacher to the whole group or may distributed it individually. The challenge is to make sure they understand or know what to do.

Independent practice

This step is where learners are to do the tasks by themselves. Creativity and uniqueness are to be encourage and respected in order to respect diversity.

Assessment/Evaluation

This is where comments and suggestions are solicited from viewers and where teachers can give encouragement. Rubrics may be used so that peer evaluation and sharing will take place.