reflection due in 14 hours

Running head:  MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

 MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION 6

Multicultural Education

Catherine Baulkman

EDU372: Educational Psychology

November 23, 2020

The education institutions in the United States are dominated by multiculturalism. There are many students from diverse cultures from various parts of the world. Multiculturalism has a huge impact on how students learn. It makes the work of educators more challenging as they have to consider all the educational requirements of the students regardless of their ethnic and cultural background. Multicultural education comprises of an idea, a reform movement in education, and a process that aims to offer equal education access opportunities to all students from diverse religion, racial and social class groups without discrimination (Cherng & Davis, 2019). Multicultural education transforms the school environment to create equal educational opportunities for all students. This paper aims to explore the following dimensional of multicultural education; content integration, prejudice reduction, making teaching equitable, and empowerment of learners.

Content integration encompasses the efforts of the teachers in deploying cultural variety in making illustrations. Students need not feel excluded during the teaching process. When making illustrations, teachers should be sensitive to the cultural diversity among the students. Teachers deploy various approaches in integrating racial, ethnic, and cultural groups into the education curriculum. The contribution approach is one of the most favorable and ideal approaches. During the deployment of this approach, teachers tend to insert isolated facts about various cultural and ethnic heroines and heroes in the curriculum (Yang & Mindrila, 2020). This, however, does not change the lesson units and lesson plans in the structure. Under this approach, lessons that touch on the ethnic minorities are confined to ethnic celebrations and holidays.

However, this notion the ethnic minorities are not an integral component of the mainstream United States society. The other approach used to integrate content in multicultural education is the addictive approach. This approach is integrating cultural and ethnic minorities into the school curriculum. Under this approach, the structure of the entire curriculum and the organizational structure does not change. The curriculum is supplemented with special units from the minority ethnic and cultural groups; they include units touching on the culture and ethnicity of African Americans, especially those in the west, the Indian removal, and that of the American Japanese students (Cherng & Davis, 2019). However, under the addictive approach, there is a challenge since cultural and ethnic minority groups are left at the margin of the mainstream curriculum. Content reduction incorporates the information that should be integrated into the curriculum, the process of integrating that information, and the location in the curriculum.

The second element in multiculturalism in education is prejudice reduction. Children tend to develop prejudicial attitudes and beliefs at a very young age. However, according to research, it is possible to reduce prejudice by integrating multicultural values and knowledge. Prejudice reduction encompasses the activities and lessons deployed by teachers to enable students to develop a positive attitude towards the various cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. According to Phinney, students are dominated by many negative thoughts and perceptions about how other students will perceive their culture and ethnicity misconceptions (Sultanova, 2016). Research indicated that the units, materials, and materials used in learning influence how other students perceive minority student's racial and ethnic backgrounds. Teachers have a huge role to play in ensuring students understand and overcome negative misconceptions about other student's cultures and ethnicity during the teaching procedures and activities. Through prejudice reduction, students develop inclusive, democratic, and positive attitudes towards their counterparts from different races and ethnic groups. It enables the learners to understand and appreciate how ethnic diversity is influenced in learning and the beliefs and attitudes of the diverse student groups. There are various situations and activities in the classroom that help to encourage the reduction of prejudice. Such methods include encouraging students to work in groups to grasp various content and ideas (Yang & Mindrila, 2020). In the process, students understand and learn to appreciate other student's cultural diversity. During the teamwork engagements, all students should be encouraged to participate regardless of their racial and ethnic background.

The third element of multicultural education is making teaching equitable. The aspect of equity pedagogy encompasses the creation of an ideal learning environment that supports students from various ethnic backgrounds to acquire the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required to operate effectively. The objective is to perpetuate a democratic society and humane society. Students are prepared to fit into the larger society and acquire experience in social class mobility, especially within the existing structures. Teachers have a role to play in encouraging equity in the learning process by modifying the teaching programs. The improved programs should facilitate academic achievement from the minority groups. According to research, academic achievement in Mexican Americans can be improved through cooperative teaching programs instead of competitive strategies (Sultanova, 2016). Cooperative learning strategies enable majority groups of students to develop positive racial attitudes towards the cultures and ethnicity of the minority groups of students. There are essential features that cooperative learning need to entail to achieve the desired positive benefits. The students from the racial and ethnic minorities need to feel incorporated into the group interactions without any feeling of discrimination. The students need to be working together in cooperation to achieve the desired objectives.

The fourth component of multicultural education is the empowerment of learners. The social structure and school culture need to be empowered. Students are empowered when the school culture is transformed to enable learners from minority ethnic majorities to experience equal status and equality. Implementation of this aspect requires that the entire schooling environment be reformed, such as the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of administrators and teachers (Yang & Mindrila, 2020). Other aspects that need to be changed to empower learners include transforming the course of study and the overall curriculum. The procedures of testing and assessing learners should be evaluated. Essential activities, such as labeling practices, grouping, and participation in sports, need to be assessed carefully. Empowerment of students helps to provide teachers with access to opportunities for instruction and collective planning. Through this process, demographic structures are created, giving parents, teachers, and other staff in the school environment responsibility in overall school governance.

The four elements of multicultural education have played an essential role in the achievement of the positive benefits of multiculturalism in the United States. The system of education in the United States is characterized by reducing the dominance of the majority of white students and an increase in the number of students from minority groups (Sultanova, 2016). Many minority groups of students are feeling more accommodated in the United States system of education. However, the components need to be implemented continuously to achieve the full benefits of multicultural education. The increase in immigration patterns has seen an increase in the number of students from minority students accessing studies in the United States. During the learning process, all students need to be protected from any form of discrimination and harassment on the basis of their gender, race, and culture of any other ethnic aspect.

References

Cherng, H. Y. S., & Davis, L. A. (2019). Multicultural matters: An investigation of key assumptions of multicultural education reform in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 70(3), 219-236.

Sultanova, L. (2016). Origin and Development of Multicultural Education in the USA. Comparative Professional Pedagogy, 6(2), 49-53.

Yang, Y., & Mindrila, D. (2020). Probing the Underlying Structure of Modern Expectancy-Value Theory in Multicultural Education: A Bayesian Exploratory Factor Analysis. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 9(1), 55-81.