Integrating multicultural education in pre-service teacher training courses

Abstract

1 IntroductionMulticultural education promotes values such as respect for diversity, understanding of other cultures, tolerance and equal opportunities for every member of society. This approach is a student-cantered one since it assumes that people with different cultural will learn differently, the way they learn being deeply influenced by their cultural heritage, linguistic particularities, cultural identity, values and patterns of thinking, personal history. The term is defined in a broader sense, encompassing not only ethnicity or language, but also gender, social-economic status, religion, special needs or ethical orientation. In school practice, a critical point is abandoning one general/national curriculum and offering to students' particularised curricula that recognize and reflect their cultural identities. Classroom activities and teaching processes should be contextualized, encouraging diversity of opinions and critical thinking. The students coming from traditionally disadvantaged groups benefit from a particular focus. Teaching implies understanding the students' own and personal experiences and using them as a foundation for learning. The approach aims to contribute to equity in education, and ultimately to learning improvement and school success.Another main goal of the approach in education is to enhance cultural awareness and respect for the others, for different people and cultures, to consolidate peoples' social identity and to build a harmonious environment. It attempts to transform individuals and society as well. In a world with a rapidly changing demographic structure, multicultural education seeks to ensure educational equity for members of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups, and to facilitate their participation as critical and reflective citizens in an inclusive national civic culture (Banks, & Ambrosio 2011).Historically, education has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S.A., with the emergence of the civil rights movement when ethnic groups demanded that their cultural contribution be presented in the curricula in schools, colleges, universities. In the 1970s, James A. Banks was one of the first scholars to argue for the benefit of a multi-ethnic approach to the curriculum and the author of a comprehensive theoretical model of multicultural/ethnic education. If in the 1960s-1970s the main focus was on the inclusion of the African-American cultural heritage in the curriculum, form the 1980s the ethnical perspective has been extended to other groups or social categories, such as language, gender or social class.In a comprehensive definition 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 (c.f. Abbott 2014). In a more pragmatic formulation multicultural education is intended to decrease race, ethnicity, class, and gender divisions by helping all students attain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they need in order to become active citizens in a democratic society and participate in social change (Valdez 1999).In a society growing in mobility and diversity, education plays an increasingly important role. In order to ensure equal opportunities of learning for all children in a democratic society, education should gain its place in the teacher training programs. Starting from a pilot investigation, opportunities to include education in the primary school curricula are explored in this paper.2 Dimensions of educationBanks (1995/2004a) describes five critical dimensions of education: content integration, the knowledge construction process, an equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction and an empowering school culture. Although for explanatory reasons each of these dimensions is conceptually distinct, in practice they overlap and are highly interrelated (Banks, & Ambrosio 2011). …