Creative activities for enhancing multicultural understanding in education

The following facts have been established with regard to preschoolers' cultural understanding, tolerance, influences and attitudes:

• At the early preschool age, kids begin developing definite attitudes with regard to their own ethnic and racial group, and other ethnic/racial groups.

• Toddlers are able to tell if people they interact with are different from themselves, and by the time they reach preschool, they are easily able to grasp negative stereotypes.

• Caregivers' cultures, views and mindsets are readily adopted by preschoolers. Hence, a caregiver's views of other racial and ethnic groups may shape children's attitudes towards racial/ethnic minorities.

• Early childhood instructors may elicit positive attitudes among preschoolers through getting to know and promoting their pupils' diverse cultures.

• Preschoolers may begin stereotyping other cultures if their elders fail to highlight the similarities among human beings (Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective Article).

An issue underlying the existing emphasis of multicultural education at the preschool level is its lack of focus (or inadequate focus) on teaching kids to identify victimization of fellow human beings because of bigoted societal attitudes. To eliminate societal oppression towards ethnic/racial minorities, there is a need to (Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective Article):

• Acquire knowledge of the depth and forms of oppression.

• Look at one's own reactions to cultural diversity, dedicating maximum possible effort towards altering them if they are unfair or biased.

• Nurture diversity and make multicultural education an active societal process to ensure clarity with regard to one's societal status and ascertain how to improve it.

• Include multicultural literature in school curricula to help kids discover the important contributions of different cultures to human civilization.

Multicultural education aims at:

• Familiarizing students with other nations and cultures.

• Helping them understand and get used to the concept of diverse ways of living, views, languages, and cultures.

• Developing positive feelings towards multicultural learning experiences to ensure all kids feel appreciated and included, as well as develop respect and amicability towards other cultural/ethnic groups.

• Ensuring both parents and educators realize that they are also unavoidably influenced by societal bias and stereotypes.

The "process" of multicultural education (Bode, 2009):

• Emphasizes constant, active development of people, schools, colleges and universities that involve relationships between individuals.

• Indicates multicultural education's intangible aspects less perceptible compared to definite curricular matter like child achievement expectations, classroom settings, cultural factors and learning preferences impacting their experience at school/college.

"Critical instruction" draws on pupil experiences via their scholastic, linguistic, cultural, artistic, familial, and other knowledge forms and helps pupils go beyond personal experiences, understand viewpoints conflicting with their own, and undertake critical analysis regarding multiple standpoints, resulting in praxis, or deliberation plus action.

Activities Parents and Teachers Can do to Promote Multicultural Understanding

• Howard M. Miller's idea of a classroom multicultural library (Fish):

• This simple process will help incorporate multicultural content and ideas into the lesson.

• Irrespective of the subject, teachers can build a multicultural library.

• A mathematics book authored by somebody belonging to the African-American ethnic group will convey a good message to kids who normally see math books exclusively featuring European-American craftsmanship and writing styles.

• Educators who fail to do this will end up buying standard, always-utilized books, or books considered as "good enough" and will ultimately realize, at the end of the school year, that they were suggesting all along to their pupils that only Whites are mathematicians. This wrong message is being communicated to scores of school students today, irrespective of their ethnic/racial background.

• Classroom organization and appropriate lesson plan formulation (Fish):

• A key step in making kids contented with and proud of their culture is: encouraging and recognizing their contribution to small group discussions.

• Group members ought to come from different ethnic/racial backgrounds.

• "Different backgrounds" normally means two kinds of pupils having separate learning styles.

• Children hailing from socialized cultures which value group achievement, compliance, respect for those in positions of power, and cooperation, are typically externally motivated, rely on significant others' approval and reinforcement, and respond better to socially-oriented curricula. Germany, Italy and Israel are a few nations that use social curricula and structures at school.

• Children hailing from cultures which stress independence, confidence, material security, and personal initiative (e.g., the U.S., Vietnam, and Japan) are typically rational, driven, task-oriented, and objective.

• While evaluating students individually is important, they do normally tend towards one of the two categories, to some extent at least.

• Cooperative learning models (Zirkel, 2008):

• Perhaps the most researched equity instructional model; this approach should be planned carefully to ensure required impacts on equity issues.

• Cohen and coworkers have offered exceptional analyses and evaluations that are geared expressly at comprehending how and whether varied cooperative learning student groups are able to successfully improve low performers' learning outcomes.

• Several research works have demonstrated the effectiveness of heterogeneous group activities in increasing low performers' learning outcomes.

• However, heterogeneous groups prove most effective if:

i. The group project is an open-ended project that doesn't have a definite "right answer," and necessitates advanced-level work;

ii. It involves work that group members are proficient at; and iii. Educators efficiently and actively work towards subverting or deconstructing pupils' status differences.

• Educators must particularly exert active efforts against pupils' personal status-based hierarchical evaluations of one another using strategies like making sure every child contributes, actively seeking and employing lower status pupils' skills and abilities, and ensuring children know that the project cannot be completed with the skills of any one student alone (i.e., a group effort is imperative to project completion).

• Single-Group Learning (Sleeter and Grant analysis) (Bode, 2009):

• It aims at engagement in thorough, comprehensive studies capable of moving particular groups out of the periphery by offering information on their history, including persecution experiences and their resistance to it.

• It also aims at lowering stratification and improving access to positions of power.

• Although there are a number of positive aspects incorporated in this approach, considering it an entry-level multicultural educational approach might be the perfect description of it.

• Self-reflexive multicultural education:

• Sleeter and Grant clarify the above technique using this apparently redundant title, as numerous other practices are occasionally called "multicultural education."

• They quote Gollnick, for explaining the approach's promotion of various goals: the importance of cultural, racial and ethnic diversity, social justice, human rights, equality of opportunities, equitable power distribution, respect for cultural differences, and alternative lifestyles.

References

Bode. (2009). Education.com - #1 Educational Site for Pre-K through 5. Multicultural Education - Education.com. Retrieved October 29, 2016, from http://www.education.com/reference/article/multicultural-education/

Fish. (n.d.). Edchange - Diversity & Equity Education Resources and Workshops. Building Blocks: The First Steps of Creating a Multicultural Classroom. Retrieved October 29, 2016, from http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/buildingblocks.html

Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective Article

ZIRKEL, S. (2008). The Influence of Multicultural Educational Practices on Student Outcomes and Intergroup Relations. Teachers College Record, 110. (6). Retrieved, from https://www.mills.edu/academics/faculty/educ/szirkel/zirkel%202008%20tcr.pdf