Introduction
Multicultural education is a constructive way of pedagogical education and education for tolerance. It is intended to help students understand their culture, the role of stereotypes in the communication between different cultures, aware of his “I”, to answer the question “Who am I?”
The student population is very diverse with regard to language, ethnicity, religion, culture and socioeconomics. However, the faculty and administration are homogeneous. Faculty and administration recognize that there may be a cultural disconnect between students and teachers (including administration). The board of trustees has given a mandate to the administration that there must be a push for multicultural education in the school.
Multicultural education focuses on developing skills of interaction with people on the basis of understanding and acceptance of cultural differences, which allow realizing the essence to comprehend the reality, look for the causes and meaning of what is happening around, critically reflect contemporary realities of life. Formation of a critical way of thinking involves training depth and comprehensive analysis of the received information in order to identify the extent of its truth, which largely contributes to the formation of tolerant worldview (Koppelman, 2013).
Implementation of multicultural communication involves not only a person’s willingness to accept the representative of another culture with all its national and mental features, but also the ability to change you. Learning a foreign language in all its diversity, students are faced with linguistic and cultural phenomena and compare them with those in their native language. For example, learning the lexical and grammatical system of a foreign language, students must turn to the knowledge gained in the classroom of the native language to highlight the similarities and differences in the field of linguistic phenomena and their use. The study of foreign language culture also leads the student to the need to appeal to the cultural and historical facts of his country. Thus, learning a foreign language and engaging in multicultural communication, the student comprehends his native language and culture deeper.
Embracing Characteristics of Multicultural Education
Moving the school toward embracing characteristics of multicultural education include affirmation, solidarity, critique and culturally responsive teaching. So, in the process of mastering foreign language students learn the material that illustrates the operation of the language in a natural environment, verbal and nonverbal behavior of native speakers in different communication situations and reveals behaviors associated with folk customs, traditions, social structure, and ethnicity. First of all, it comes with using authentic materials (original texts, audio, video), which are the regulations in terms of language processing and contain the information of linguistic and cross-cultural nature.
It is important to know national and cultural features of the behavior of a foreigner in order to avoid potential conflicts with international communication. Thus, learning a foreign language, the student must not only learn his lexical, grammatical and syntactic features, but also learn to adequately respond to the situation replicas of native speakers, it is appropriate to apply the facial expressions and gestures, use the formula of speech etiquette and know the cultural and historical features of the language spoken (Banks, 2009).
Multicultural education is different from other educational areas by several parameters. The main difference is that the necessary knowledge and skills are acquired primarily through direct cultural contacts. This requires often full or partial abstraction from the usual interpretation of various cultural phenomena and entails significant cognitive and affective changes. These changes can be demonstrated by the example of the culture of taste representations: on a cognitive level, it is considered that the proposed unusual dishes of other cuisine must be tried. On an emotional level, this proposal could cause a violent emotional reaction and lead participants in the communication of balance. Obstacles of this kind in the majority of cases occur suddenly, often in a collision with elements of another culture. Therefore, facing their own experience with the similarities and differences of other cultures, students learn to mutually accept and respect each other.
Identifying Bias in the School Curriculum
There are many approaches how people can study about other people’s cultures and create relations simultaneously. The following steps, which are first listed, can be taken and then developed upon one at a time.
- Make mindful decision to build friendships with citizens from other cultures.
- Get together in situations of meeting people of different cultures.
- Inspect biases about populace from different cultures.
- Request populace issues about their cultures, traditions, and views.
- Listen to people tell their stories
- Notice dissimilarities in contact styles and principles; don’t suppose that the majority’s approach is the correct approach
- Risk doing faults
- Train to be a friend.
Many people face propaganda and typecasts about populace in dissimilar cultures. Particularly, when being young, people learn such information in bits and pieces from TV, communicating with other people, and from the traditions at large. This doesn’t mean that people are bad because they acquired this; nobody asked for being deceived. But with the intention of building relationships with citizens of unusual cultures, people should become responsive to the propaganda they acquired. An outstanding approach to become responsive to own stereotypes is to choose groups that people simplify about and write down defined opinions. Once people have, inspect the thoughts that came to their mind and where people got them. Another approach to become responsive to stereotypes is to speak about them with other citizens who have comparable cultures. In such locations people can talk about the propaganda they got without being unpleasant to people from an exacting group. People can have a meeting with a friend or two and speak about how they got stereotypes or doubts of other dissimilar people. The following questions can be answered, namely (Community tool box, 2014):
- How did student’s relatives feel about dissimilar cultural, national, or spiritual groups?
- What did student’s parents converse to the person with their procedures and words?
- Were student’s parents’ communicating with people from many dissimilar sets?
- What did people study at school about an exacting group?
- Was there a short of data about several people?
- Are there any people whom people can shy away from? Why?
Adapting Curriculum for Multicultural Classrooms
For example, the following game can help to adapt for multicultural classrooms. Its purposes are to simulate the situation of intercultural communication, to consider the aspect of linguistic diversity in multicultural interaction, to analyze the possibilities of non-verbal communication, to contribute to the emergence of interest and sympathy for the culture of others and to help develop the communication skills of participants. The number of participants should be 15-25 people.
Proceedings include:
1. The teacher divides the participants into equal groups. The number of groups depends on the total number of participants. For example, if there are 16 participants, four groups of 4 are formed.
2. The Group is offered over 10 minutes to come up with its own language, which must be different from all known languages and does not contain any elements of them. The language should consist of four words, namely hello, bye, any noun (e.g., apple) and any adjective (e.g., fluffy). Thus, through the allotted amount of time each group should have its own language.
3. Then the teacher asks the participants to form a new group, which will meet in one of the languages of each carrier. From this moment the participants allowed to talk only in their new language. The use of other languages or their elements is unacceptable, as record keeping. At this stage, before each task it is given 15-20 minutes to train new partners to its language and, in turn, “mastering” their languages.
4. At the end of the allotted time, participants returned to their original groups, which have the opportunity to exchange experiences.
Analysis:
1. What are the emotions experienced by participants at different stages of the game (inventing the language of the original group; teaching others their language, learning the language of other groups, returning to the “home” group)?
2. Which of the stages of the game was the most difficult? Why?
3. What are the difficulties experienced by participants in the game?
4. Have all participants to learn languages of partners?
5. What helped complete the task?
6. What game situation resembled any real life situations?
7. What conclusions can be drawn by analyzing the experience of participation in an interactive game?
Comments:
The optimum for this method is that amount of participants in which the number of people in groups on the first and second stages of method is the same (e.g., 16 (4 groups of 4) or 25 (5 of 5) members). But it is quite acceptable if the group has a different number of people. For example, if a group of 15 participants at the first stage is formed by three groups of five human, and the second – 3 groups of 5 persons. Desirably, the number of members was divisible by three, four or five, otherwise, it is difficult to use this method.
Typically, the method is very active and emotional. For another sometime after the end of the game participants can actively share their experiences and emotions. This is especially important to take into account (and use) the planning of programs and finding a place for this method.
Racism and Prejudice at the Individual and Institutional Levels
Considering cultural differences in thinking, opinions, attitudes, and behavior, it is easy to succumb to cognitive and emotional reactions to the material, begin to generalize, to form negative stereotypes about other people and even in advance to make a judgment about these differences and others, which is inherent in this behavior, before people really understand what lies at its core. These processes and reactions are common in today’s world, and to describe them the term ethnocentrism, stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination are often used. Unfortunately, these terms are often used without a clear idea about them that only exacerbates the problems that they have to clarify.
Some of today’s most pressing social issues connected with these processes, as the boundaries between countries and cultures are becoming more permeable as a result of the development of means of communication, technology and business. It is impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine or turn on the television news program and see the information about problems relating to ethnocentrism or racial and ethnic stereotypes. These problems range from international business to violence and wars caused by racial and ethnic differences. These issues are expected to become even more relevant in the future when technological progress more closely unite the diverse cultures of the world.
Institutional or structural racism means as the public, financial, instructive, and political forces or procedures that work to promote discriminatory results or provide penchants to participants of one group over others, obtains its origin from the genesis of race as a concept (de Silva & Clark, 2007).
One of the most important ways of making efforts to reduce discrimination (in addition to the recognition of ethnocentrism and stereotyping and to think critically about the shortcomings of these stereotypes) is learning how to control emotions. People need to learn to regulate their negative emotions when they arise, as well as its positive, reinforcing emotions when they are challenged. Just like learning to regulate emotional processes, people can do the exercises on critical thinking, studying the possible distortions in thoughts, feelings and actions and adjusting them accordingly. Without the ability to regulate emotions, such higher-order thought processes are not possible.
Conclusion
One of the first steps to improve understanding of intergroup relations is a better understanding of culture – particularly the impact of culture on the basic psychological processes, as well as the formation and maintenance of ethnocentrism and stereotyping. However, the improvement of understanding of culture and its influences is only the first of many steps along this road. It is necessary to probe own culture, to find out the reasons why certain stereotypes persist and how conservation can go to the benefit of culture. It is required to recognize the existence of substantial individual variability within groups and cultures, as well as the shortcomings of their cultural ethnocentrism and malevolent, limited stereotypes. The study of culture shows the importance of cultural environment, education and heritage, as well as their influence on behavior. The recognition of the contribution of culture in action, behavior and the reasons behind them helps people to understand, respect and evaluate these differences, when they see them in real life.
Several studies conducted over the years have highlighted the potential contribution of the extended cross-cultural experience in reducing the number of inflexible ethnocentric attitudes, fixed stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. Many of these studies have directed attention to the multicultural experience gained through the travel of participants and their living in other cultures than those to which they have joined.
And what if people were the victims of prejudice and discrimination? One of the first countermeasures is to see the flaws and sources of such thoughts, feelings and actions in others. Unfortunately, more often people have few means to combat deficiencies of thoughts and actions of others, because people change only when they want to do it.
References
Banks, J. A. (2009). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives. Wiley.
Community tool box (2014). Chapter 27. Cultural Competence in a Multicultural World. Retrieved from http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/culture/cultural-competence
de Silva, E. C. & Clark, E. J. (2007). Institutional Racism & the Social Work Profession: A Call to Action. Retrieved from http://www.socialworkers.org/diversity/institutionalracism.pdf
Koppelman, K. (2013). Understanding Human Differences: Multicultural Education for a Diverse America, 4th edition, Pearson.
Nieto, S. Bode, P. (2010). Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical context of multicultural education. (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Spring, J. (2010). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality. (6th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.
T-kit 4: Intercultural learning. Retrieved from http://pjp-eu.coe.int/ru/web/youth-partnership/t-kit-4-intercultural-learning
