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Multicultural Education - Students handout

Multicultural education integrates diverse cultural histories, values, and perspectives into teaching to promote educational equity and remove barriers for students from various backgrounds. It involves adapting curricula, incorporating students' cultural experiences, and critically analyzing educational materials for bias. The approach aims to enhance learning for all students, particularly those historically underrepresented or facing lower achievement levels.

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4 views

Multicultural Education - Students handout

Multicultural education integrates diverse cultural histories, values, and perspectives into teaching to promote educational equity and remove barriers for students from various backgrounds. It involves adapting curricula, incorporating students' cultural experiences, and critically analyzing educational materials for bias. The approach aims to enhance learning for all students, particularly those historically underrepresented or facing lower achievement levels.

Uploaded by

Himali Thennakoon
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Multicultural Education

Multicultural education refers to any form of education or teaching that incorporates the
histories, texts, values, beliefs, and perspectives of people from different cultural backgrounds.
At the classroom level, for example, teachers may modify or incorporate lessons to reflect the
cultural diversity of the students in a particular class. In many cases, “culture” is defined in the
broadest possible sense, encompassing race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, class,
gender, sexual orientation, and “exceptionality”—a term applied to students with specialized
needs or disabilities.
Generally, multicultural education is predicated on the principle of educational equity for all
students, regardless of culture, and it strives to remove barriers to educational opportunities and
success for students from different cultural backgrounds.
In practice, educators may modify or eliminate educational policies, programs, materials,
lessons, and instructional practices that are either discriminatory toward or insufficiently
inclusive of diverse cultural perspectives.
Multicultural education also assumes that the ways in which students learn and think are deeply
influenced by their cultural identity and heritage, and that to teach culturally diverse students
effectively requires educational approaches that value and recognize their cultural backgrounds.
In this way, multicultural education aims to improve the learning and success of all students,
particularly students from cultural groups that have been historically underrepresented or that
suffer from lower educational achievement and attainment.
Instructionally, multicultural education may entail the use of texts, materials, references, and
historical examples that are understandable to students from different cultural backgrounds or
that reflect their particular cultural experience—such as teaching students about historical figures
who were female, disabled etc.

The following are a few representative ways in which multicultural education functions in
schools:
 Curriculum: Texts and learning materials may include multiple cultural perspectives and
references. For example, a lesson on different cultures in a particular country.
Ex: Colonialism in North America might address different cultural perspectives, such as those of
the European settlers, indigenous Americans, and African slaves.
 Student cultures: Teachers and other educators may learn about the cultural
backgrounds of students in a school, and then intentionally incorporate learning
experiences and content relevant to their personal cultural perspectives and heritage.
Students may also be encouraged to learn about the cultural backgrounds of other
students in a class, and students from different cultures may be given opportunities to
discuss and share their cultural experiences.
 Critical analysis: Educators may intentionally scrutinize learning materials to identify
potentially prejudicial or biased material. Both educators and students might analyze their
own cultural assumptions, and then discuss how learning materials, teaching practices, or
schools policies reflect cultural bias, and how they could be changed to eliminate bias.
 Resource allocation: Multicultural education is generally predicated on the principle of
equity—i.e., that the allocation and distribution of educational resources, programs, and
learning experiences should be based on need and fairness, rather than strict equality. For
example, students who are not proficient in the English language may learn in bilingual
settings and read bilingual texts, and they may receive comparatively more instructional
support than their English-speaking peers so that they do not fall behind academically or
drop out of school due to language limitations.

Ways of improving multicultural education in schools


 Curriculum planning and designing – In teaching materials and learning experiences,
the backgrounds and perspectives of all subcultures should represent in
school curriculum.
 Student instruction: For example, students with moderate disabilities and students who
are not proficient in English are increasingly being moved into regular classes (rather
than being taught in separate classes), where they may receive specialized assistance, but
where they learn the same material as their peers. In the classroom, teachers may also
employ “culturally responsive” instructional strategies (such as those described above)
that reflect the cultural identity of individual students.
 Learning assessment: for example, is to measure student learning progress using a wider
variety of assessment options, such as teacher-created tests, oral presentations, and
various demonstrations of learning that give students more opportunities to show what
they have learned.
 Teacher education: Multicultural education has also affected the preparation of teachers.
 School staffing: staffs from variety of cultural backgrounds
 Legislation

Source: https://www.edglossary.org/multicultural-education/

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