Multicultural Education: Developing Awareness and Tolerance
Multicultural education has three pillars—
(1) helping students learn about other cultures,
(2) increasing tolerance and appreciation for other cultures, and (3) creating “shared” cultures (McDonough, 2005).
Multicultural education is used worldwide and, in many countries, is the underpinning of democratic or citizenship education (Fujikane, 2003). Nieto (2004) explained an ideal for multicultural education:It challenges and rejects racism and other forms of discrimination in schools and society and accepts and affirms the pluralism (ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, economic, and gender, among others) that students, their communities, and teachers reflect... multicultural education promotes democratic principles of social justice. (p. 346)
Multicultural education seeks to prevent and reduce bias and prejudice, so some educators also use the term antibias education. These efforts are built on research that suggest basic conditions necessary to reduce hostility and intergroup conflict and bias: a supportive environment, maintenance of relatively equal status between groups, close contact among group members, and an environment of cooperation and task interdependence for achievement of a valued outcome. Pettigrew and Tropp (2000) conducted a meta-analysis of 203 studies on intergroup contact as an influence on prejudice. Ninety-four percent of these studies found that when contact occurred under these conditions, prejudice was significantly reduced.
One example of multicultural education and CRE designed to reduce prejudice was the Community Peace and Safety Networks project in South Africa in 1995 to 1997 (Jones, 2005). In 1995, a year after Nelson Mandela had been elected, a team of U.S. and South African educators and community members from diverse South African cultural groups developed mediation programs linking communities and schools in Johannesburg.
The South African team included members from two Black African townships (Soweto and Thokoza), an Afrikaans community, and a British community. In each community, a school-based conflict education and mediation program was created in a high school and linked with a community mediation center.Multicultural and antibias education addresses all aspects of difference and diversity that may separate people into in-groups and out-groups. For example, sexual harassment is a form of bullying based on gender discrimination. According to an American Association of University Women study of 2,064 K-12 students, four out of five students experience sexual harassment in school, approximately 33% first experience harassment prior to the 6th grade, and almost half of 7th to 12th graders experienced sexual harassment during the school year of the survey (cited in Lichty, Torres, Valenti, Valenti, & Buchanan, 2008). These problems are not unique to the United States. Attar-Schwartz (2009) surveyed a nationally representative sample of 16,604 students in Grades 7 through 11 in 327 Israeli schools about sexual harassment. About one fourth of the students were victims of at least one unwanted and unwelcome act of harassment by peers in the prior month.
Multicultural education also embraces linguistic diversity and multilingual teaching. Powerful examples can be seen in the use of bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) education in Palestinan-Jewish schools. Zvil Bekerman and his colleagues (Bekerman, Habib, & Shhadi, 2011) show how bilingual education in very high conflict situations changes children’s perceptions of ethnic and national identities and hopes for building a future together rather than a future “against” the other. They conclude that using the languages of the children’s cultures in their learning is a
“deep” infusion of respect for difference. This language sensitivity is increasingly relevant to U.S. schools as well, where the number of bilingual students has increased from 1 in 10 students in the late 1970s to 1 in 5 students today (Scanlan, 2011).