Cultural awareness among preschool teachers in Selangor, Malaysia

Abstract

Malaysia is a multiracial nation and has engineered nation building through its education system. The preschools being the first stage of education has been earmarked as the mechanism to create multicultural awareness. The National Unity Preschools (JAPNIN) addressed the issue of national unity through teacher training and curriculum for unity. This paper reports the findings of a study on multicultural awareness among preschool teachers in Malaysia. A stratified random sample of 144 preschool teachers in the state of Selangor was selected. The instrument of the study was adapted from the Cultural Diversity Awareness Inventory (Gertrude,1986). Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The main finding highlighted that the majority of preschool teachers have high level of cultural awareness in both homogenous and heterogenous classes (3.77 and 3.64). Independent T test results showed there was no significant difference for teachers’ multicultural awareness between homogenous and heterogeneous classes. The results indicated the need for further training to sustain and enhance multicultural awareness as well as to improve documentation of the findings for future references. Further research should focus on a qualitative approach.