Multicultural Citizenship Education Research Articles

The role of emotions in critical thinking about European politics: Confronting anti-immigration rhetoric in the classroom

The rise of anti-immigration arguments within the European Union (EU) poses significant challenges to our democratic existence. As such, the promotion of critical thinking (CT) for the development of a multicultural citizenship education has been underlined. Recent research also shows a close connection between emotions and cognition with positive effects over students’ motivation to engage in CT. Through the analysis of focus groups with 61 Portuguese secondary school students, this research shows that they are critical about democratic political values and practices at the EU level, and highly motivated to discuss controversial political and humanitarian issues that are emotionally engaging. Educational practices that encourage the discussion of controversial topics in the classroom, welcoming students’ emotional engagement with these topics, can increase their resilience to anti-immigration rhetoric.

Multicultural citizenship education as resistance: Student political development in an anti-immigrant national climate

This article examines multicultural citizenship education (MCE) as a form of teacher-driven resistance to oppressive macro-level policies and discourses. I present an analysis of how six English and History teachers at Castro Middle School describe their pedagogical changes following the election of Donald Trump. Findings reveal how teachers embedded MCE into the curriculum to resist the anti-immigrant national climate and support the cultural citizenship of Latinx, Asian, and immigrant-origin students. Teachers also strove to cultivate students’ critical awareness, political efficacy, and commitment to political action. I conclude that major political events, like elections, can be catalysts for resistance through MCE.

A Multicultural Citizenship Education Program Through a Virtual Learning Environment Platform: A Greek Study Under the EU ISOTIS Project

The article presents the activities taken place to design and implement activities that meet the criteria, aims and goals of ISOTIS project that aims to contribute to effective policy and practice development at different system levels in order to effectively combat early arising and persisting educational inequalities. We focus on the procedures and theoretical framework that the Greek team, as partner of ISOTIS project adopted to support diverse families both linguistically and culturally, to create effective and inclusive curricula and moreover to develop educational policy to combat educational inequalities. In this paper we introduce the criteria for selecting the sites according to the demographic and their pedagogical characteristics, the teacher’s experience, the children’s needs and the main issues, challenges and arguments for the co-design phase and the main principles and shared ideas according to ISOTIS criteria. This paper highlights positive family/parent-teacher interactions through ICT technologies, fostering to improve and promote inclusiveness and belongingness. Our theoretical framework lays in critical multicultural citizenship education and democratic governance in schools.

민족․문화 정체성 발달이론과 한국 다문화시민교육에의 함의

민족․문화 정체성 발달이론과 한국 다문화시민교육에의 함의

The tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and multicultural citizenship education: Toward an anticolonial approach to civic education

ABSTRACTIndigenous studies complicates and advances existing notions of citizenship education, in particular, by making visible ongoing legacies of colonialism and foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty. In this article, the author examines how the erasure of Indigenous citizenship, nationhood, and sovereignty permeates multicultural citizenship education. Theories of ignorance are then used to discuss various interests that underlie these erasures. By focusing on Indigenous studies scholarship that complicates structural inclusion as the goal of citizenship education, this article advocates for citizenship education that explicitly counters colonialism and supports Indigenous sovereignty. To support this aim, the author outlines an anticolonial approach to civic education—place, presence, political nationhood, perspectives, power, and partnerships—to challenge and complement existing citizenship education literature and practice.

Editors' Note to the Special Issue-Critical Multicultural Citizenship Education: Student Engagement Toward Building an Equitable Society

In this special issue we call attention to the role of "Critical Multicultural Citizenship Education" (CMCE) in schools, societies and global contexts. The fundamental goal of CMCE is to increase not only the students’ awareness of, and participation in, the political aspects of democracy, but also students’ abilities to create and live in an ethnically diverse and just community. CMCE challenges and transforms existing ways in which students engage civically and democratically in local, national, and global contexts. Ten articles in this special issue are grouped by three categories: (1) social studies classrooms and citizenship; (2) community and citizenship; and (3) global contexts and citizenship.

Civics Is Largely About Politics: The Possibilities and Challenges of a Citizenship Education Pedagogy that Embraces Democratic Politics and Recognizes Diversity

Research investigating the practice of citizenship education in multicultural schools is scarce. Drawing on classroom observations and teacher and student interviews in four multicultural Grade 10 Civics classrooms in Ottawa, Canada, this case study discusses one teacher’s unique citizenship education pedagogy, an approach that embraces democratic politics and affirms diversity. Vignettes of class instruction illustrate the teaching strategies implemented and the struggles faced in employing this pedagogical approach. The case study contends that a critical multicultural citizenship education must have a strong political orientation and, additionally, be responsive to the existing social and cultural diversity that defines our democratic community.

Critical Multicultural Citizenship Education among Black Immigrant Youth: Factors and Challenges

This study uses qualitative interviews with 18 participants across five states to examine the factors that promote enhancement of critical multicultural education for Black immigrant youth. Findings suggest that class discussion, influence of social media and technology, non-educational practices, and cultural and language differences are the leading factors that promote the advancement of critical multicultural citizenship education for participants. Participants utilized these factors to navigate the democratic education and the role of transnational identification. Findings support the need for teachers and educators to understand the cultures and best practices for teaching immigrant youth.

Going Global and Getting Graphic: Critical Multicultural Citizenship Education in an Afterschool Program for Immigrant and Refugee Girls

This qualitative case study reports on the experiences of six recent-arrival immigrant and refugee girls as they participated in an afterschool program designed to promote critical multicultural citizenship through graphic novels. Analysis of discourse data revealed how the girls explored the interdependence among nation-states and wrestled with the complexities in their new home country. The study’s findings challenge deficit perspectives that immigrant youth, who are learning English, are not ready to engage in deliberative discourse around social and global issues. The findings offer a different way of thinking about citizenship education for recent-arrival immigrant youth.

A Study on the Relationship between Multicultural Education and Democratic Citizenship Education

A Study on the Relationship between Multicultural Education and Democratic Citizenship Education

Multicultural citizenship education in Indonesia: The case of a Chinese Christian school

This study investigates how multicultural citizenship education is taught in a Chinese Christian school in Jakarta, where multiculturalism is not a natural experience. Schoolyard ethnographic research was deployed to explore the reality of a ‘double minority’ — Chinese Christians — and how the citizenship of this marginal group is constructed and contested in national, school, and familial discourses. The article argues that it is necessary for schools to actively implement multicultural citizenship education in order to create a new generation of young adults who are empowered, tolerant, active, participatory citizens of Indonesia. As schools are a microcosm of the nation-state, successful multicultural citizenship education can have real societal implications for it has the potential to render the idealism enshrined in the national motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ a lived reality.

Multicultural Teacher Education in Korea*: Current Trends and Future Directions

This study examines current trends in multicultural teacher education in Korea and offers directions for improvement. Curricula of pre-service teacher education and professional development programs for multicultural education are analyzed. The results of this study are as follows: first, pre-service elementary teacher education programs mostly offer lower-level survey courses for freshmen and sophomores as electives and as part of general education courses; second, most of the courses in the secondary teacher education programs are introductory courses similar to those found in elementary teacher education; third, professional development programs focus on the children from multicultural families. Suggestions offered for the future direction of multicultural teacher education include offering more advanced courses as requirement in pre-service education focusing on majority group students in terms of multicultural citizenship education.

Global Multicultural Citizenship Education in Singapore

Drawing on individual interviews with 24 students from three secondary schools and an examination of official curricular documents and materials, this study investigates how Singapore, a young, diverse, postcolonial nation with a history of ethnic and religious conflict, manages the promotion of a common national identity, ethnic and religious diversity, and global perspectives. The study critically examines the Singapore state’s deliberate attempts to incorporate both global and multicultural perspectives into the secondary Social Studies curriculum, particularly through the use of international case studies.

Challenges in Teaching for Critical Multicultural Citizenship: Student Teaching in an Accountability-Driven Context

As public schools become increasingly diverse, novice teachers are being called on to prepare their students for a multicultural democracy. This article presents a case study of three preservice teachers who attempted to teach for critical multicultural citizenship during their student-teaching semester in an accountability-driven school context. Although all three participants felt constrained by the culture of accountability, two were able to negotiate these constraints and implement critical multicultural citizenship education in their classrooms. Findings suggest that although participants employed successful strategies—such as de-emphasizing the test, sneaking in multicultural and critical content, and teaching multiple perspectives—feeling a sense of ownership in the classroom served as an essential prerequisite to enacting citizenship education that goes against the grain.

Global Multicultural Citizenship Education: A Singapore Experience

ABSTRACT In a world that is, on the one hand, determined to sustain distinct national and group identities and, on the other hand, becoming increasingly globalized, interconnected and interdependent, social studies educators are regularly faced with the challenge of supporting diversity, creating a unified national community, and promoting global perspectives through education. This paper explores how the Singapore education system addresses these disparate goals through its national social studies curriculum for secondary schools, particularly through its use of international case studies. The Singapore social studies curriculum also serves as an interesting case study of how a national social studies curriculum has been shifted away from an exclusive focus on a nation-centric paradigm to one that is more globally oriented in nature, while still being firmly anchored to the nation-state and its priorites.

Multicultural education and social justice actions

Multicultural citizenship education courses worldwide show promise in their ability to influence attitudes and beliefs supportive of social justice. However, many of these courses assume behavior change results from these attitudes changes. Quantitative analyses of pretest and posttest questionnaire data compare the impact of these unique curricular strategies on students’ social action. The results reveal that these curricular strategies produce limited influence on social justice action. I suggest a social influence model of behavior change as a possibility for making multicultural education more effective at influencing behaviors for social justice action, thus reducing current and future social inequality.

Case Studies of Preservice Teachers' Ideas About the Role of Multicultural Citizenship Education in Social Studies

In this article we examine preservice teachers' ideas about the role of multicultural citizenship education in social studies classrooms. We use qualitative techniques to explore data collected from observations and interviews with preservice teachers enrolled in a secondary social studies methods course. The findings suggest that even when teacher education programs are designed around goals of promoting multicultural citizenship education, preservice teachers' pre-existing and emerging ideas about social studies content and classrooms can limit their thinking and practice with transformative social studies pedagogy.

Educating Late Arrival High School Immigrant Students: A Call for a More Democratic Curriculum

Examining the vital relation between immigrants' race or ethnicity, language, documented or undocumented legal status, and multicultural citizenship education is essential in the reconceptualization of current curricula and practice. The analysis provides relevant critiques of the traditional American History and citizenship curricula that are often enacted in increasingly ubiquitous late arrival high school immigrant centers. The tensions provide educators with an opportunity to define and redefine American citizenship as a unique cultural, historical, and transformative learning opportunity via the broader use of World Geography Studies.

Multicultural Citizenship Education: Case Studies from Social Studies Classrooms

Although multicultural citizenship education has been theorized as a goal of social studies, there is a paucity of empirical research to illustrate what actually occurs in diverse schools and classrooms. In this study, I explore two teachers' efforts to integrate multicultural content into the implemented social studies curriculum. Although the various lived experiences of both teachers predisposed them to integrating multicultural content in their social studies classes, the findings of this study indicate that the multicultural content covered in the implemented curriculum is limited and emerged mostly from the textbook. The findings of this study have implications for social studies teachers and professional development programs, curriculum supervisors, and school administrators as they work to improve multicultural citizenship education.

From the Crick Report to the Parekh Report: multiculturalism, cultural difference, and democracy—the re‐visioning of citizenship education1

This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11th October 2000. The Parekh report is then used to critique the Crick report and re‐theorise the practical imperatives of multicultural citizenship education. I claim that the Crick report, typical of liberal analyses, is suspicious of departure from the presumption of a unified social structure, and represents citizenship education as the imposition of a uniform standard applied to all groups and peoples. On this basis it is claimed that, although the Crick Report’s conception of citizenship fails to adequately take account of cultural difference, it need not do so, as there is room within liberal approaches to citizenship education for a recognition of difference. The paper explains how such a resolution can be effected.