Supporting Critical Multicultural Teacher Educators: Transformative teaching,social justice education,and perceptions of institutional support

ABSTRACT

In most teacher education programmes in Canada and the United States, educators’ opportunities to develop equity-related skills are concentrated into single ‘multicultural’ courses. These courses tend to have a conservative or liberal orientation, focused on appreciating diversity or cultural competence, rather than a critical orientation, focused on preparing teachers to address inequity. In this study, based on a survey of instructors of multicultural and intercultural teacher education courses in Canada and the US (N = 186), we examined the relationship between the criticality of their multicultural teacher education courses and their perceptions of institutional support for the values they teach. We found a negative relationship between the two – the more critical the instructors’ approaches, the less institutional support they perceived.     

Addressing religious plurality – a teacher perspective on minority religion and secular ethics education

The Finnish education system recognizes religious plurality by offering education in pupils’ own religion or in secular ethics. However, little research has been undertaken on how plurality is addressed in classroom practice. This study investigates how 31 minority religion and secular ethics teachers view the task of supporting and including plurality within their classrooms. The findings of this study show how instruction places high demands on teachers due to religious and cultural diversity, as well as age differences in the classroom. Teachers generally made an effort to take diversity into account by considering the different backgrounds of pupils in instruction and engaging pupils in class. However, teachers frequently took a traditional rather than a modern perspective on plurality in religious instruction by assuming pupils’ religious belonging. Confessional elements such as religious family background and religious practice outside school were also commonly seen as vital. Consequently, teachers had at times difficulties in supporting pupils with plural or little religious affiliation. The findings show a need to strengthen the non-confessional character of Finnish religious education so that both modern and traditional plurality among pupils occupy an equal position in the classroom.     

Religious multiculturalism and intercultural education: Reflections on the educational experiences at the Waldensian Collegio della Santa Trinità in Torre Pellice (Italy)

In this paper the author reflects on the educational experience of students attending the Waldensian high school in Torre Pellice (Italy), drawing on the findings of her own ethnographic fieldwork in the Waldensian valleys. The original research aim was to explore the meaning that education and schooling traditionally have for this religious minority group, and their relevance to the latter's identity construction as minority persons, as well as Italian citizens. But additional findings emerged which allow for an interpretation of the Collegio della Santa Trinità as a place where intercultural education has also been achieved. Fifteen fifth year high school students describe in in-depth interviews how this denominational high school is both open to diversity and attentive to a pluralism of views. As a consequence the school is perceived as providing its students not only with high quality education but also with a distinctive cultural perspective built around the common concerns of its students.     

Issues in the integration of religious education and worldviews education in an intercultural context

ABSTRACT

The Council of Europe’s 2008 ‘Recommendation’ advocates the study of ‘non-religious convictions’ in schools in addition to religions. In 2018, there is evidence of growing academic interest in the inclusion of non-religious worldviews in the school curriculum, but few European countries include such a study within religious education. The guidance document, Signposts, recognises that the integration of religions and non-religious worldviews is problematic for policy makers, teacher trainers and schools and that there is a need for further research. Norway and England are at significant but different stages in the process of integration. This article presents a comparative study which draws on the findings of research in both countries which has investigated the process at classroom and policy levels, and issues raised by this. Four issues are explored: practical challenges; differing understandings of the concept of worldviews; the inclusion of non-religious worldviews as a political issue and influences on the selection of worldviews. The article concludes with a discussion of issues and findings within a supranational context and makes recommendations which highlight the value of integration and the need for both contextual studies and further comparative research.     

Antigypsyism,education and the media: ways forward

ABSTRACT

This article is a self-reflection of my work over a decade of challenging school segregation of Roma across Europe. I look at how segregation has been framed and how communication around equality in education with the public took place. The education system is an important pillar in producing and reproducing antigypsyism in society. I see school segregation as an important mechanism that perpetuates antigypsyism. I explore ways to attract support for equality measures in education. One important strategy is to engage with media in transmitting messages to an audience that was usually not the target of inclusive discourses that promote diversity and equality as societal values.     

Anti-Homophobia Education in Public Schooling: A Canadian Case Study of Policy Implementation

SUMMARY

An 18-month study investigating the implementation of a Canadian anti-homophobia school policy found that such policies need to address homophobic ideas, institutional forms of homophobia and heterosexism, and individual expressions of homophobia. Teacher development is identical as an area in which Canadian policy implementation can be improved. More resources are needed to support the complex negotiations that educators must undertake when their professional and personal commitments to equity and human rights education collide with their own and others' personal and community religious beliefs about homosexuality.     

Multi-ethnic school environment from the school leader’s perspective: challenges and approaches to improve multi-cultural competency among teachers in Malaysia

This study aims to identify the challenges and approaches to improve a multicultural competency among teachers in multi-ethnic schools environment based on school leaders’ perspective. Data collection method used in this study is qualitative method. A total of nine school leaders from the states of Kedah, Penang, and Perak were included in the interview session. The results of this study show that the challenges faced by teachers in practicing the multicultural competency are lack of experience toward cultural diversity. A late exposure to cultural diversity makes it difficult for teachers to accept and adapt in a multi-ethnic school environment. The approaches suggested by school leaders to improve the multicultural competency are as follows: (1) Courses on cultural diversity should be organized to enhance the knowledge about cultural diversity; (2) the development of more open and better policy for education system in Malaysia in order to prepare teachers with a higher multicultural competency for teaching students from diverse ethnic and cultural groups; (3) an early exposure to cultural diversity in order to increase the multicultural competency, especially during teaching practicum.     

Distance education and international social work education

As a result of the development of new communication technology, distance education has become a rapidly growing area over the last few decades. Market and commercial pressures are major factors in its developing impact. Distance education has also been applied to social work education. Because it is a small field it may be both positively and negatively affected. Social work education requires face-to-face communication training. Educators need to respond to the limitations of distance education technologies and processes to provide for cultural and linguistic diversity, through openness to joint work across different cultures, anti-standardisation and -discrimination, reflexivity, user control and resources, and cultural and language translation.     

Social work students’ perspective on environmental justice: Gaps and challenges for preparing students

ABSTRACT

The integration of environmental justice into social work education, research, and practice has grown substantially in the past decade. However, social workers still report feeling unprepared to address these challenges with their clients and communities. To understand the disconnect between education about and application of environmental justice principles, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with graduate social work students (n = 14). Findings suggest this disconnect is catalyzed, in part, by the environment’s meta nature and a lack of facilitated education on the dynamic feedbacks between the physical environment and social justice issues. Implications for social work educators are discussed.     

Utilization of the interprofessional education,practice, and research model in HBCU social work education

ABSTRACT

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are often overlooked as a resource to address the need for a diverse healthcare workforce even though they are an essential component of ensuring diversity. In order to meet the needs of the current patient population, HBCUs’ social work programs must move from silo education, practice, and research pedagogy to inter-professional education (IPE), practice (IPP), and research (IPR) modalities when developing partnerships that promote the elimination of health disparities. This article discusses the contributions of a HBCU’s School of Social Work to the growth of IPE, IPP, and IPR utilizing the Ujima principle of Nguzo Saba. The projects developed were an attempt to provide meaningful and relevant education to social work students while exposing them to a collaborative inter-professional education, practice, and research experience. The three social work projects included intra-university and social community collaborations and exposing students to experiential inter-professional education, practice, and experimental learning. This is an opportunity for social work students to become involved in the evolving best practices pedagogy for inter-professional education, practice, and research which social work must embrace in order to fulfill the National Association of Social Workers imperative of preparing students to work in collaborative health care teams. The expected outcomes of these inter-professional ventures reflect a HBCU’s commitment to increasing the competency in inter-professional modalities aimed at supporting, empowering, and preparing high caliber diverse graduates who will grow the future and lead the world as a diverse healthcare workforce.     

Between rhetoric and reality: disabled Rwandan young women’s perspectives on gender inequality in school

Abstract

This article examines the limits of national discussions on gender equality in Rwanda from the perspectives of disabled young women. Based on 16 in-depth interviews and three focus group interviews with disabled Rwandan young women, this article points out that the barriers to gender equality are interpersonal and institutional. The empirical analysis reveals that gender biases at Rwanda’s largest inclusive secondary school are reinforced by wider cultural and religious norms, which endorse the subordination of disabled girls and young women in school. The study suggests that the equality rhetoric/reality gap will remain in Rwandan schools and society if the wider cultural and religious institutions are not examined and transformed.     

Facilitating intercultural education in majority student groups in higher education

ABSTRACT

The present article critically analyses the pedagogical efforts of two teachers to promote values education and intercultural reflection in their own educational practice. They teach in higher education in Norway and most of their students have majority backgrounds. Based on their teaching experiences with VaKE (Values and Knowledge education), the article discusses opportunities and challenges when working with values education in majority student groups. It concludes that discussing values is difficult but can be eye opening. It also raises the question of which dilemmas can prevent stereotyping and foster more complex intercultural thinking and shows that intercultural education requires a discussion of one’s own cultural position. The article highlights the teacher’s crucial role in the VaKE-process regarding the aims of intercultural values education.     

Qur’anic education and non-confessional RE: an intercultural perspective

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reported experiences of Muslim students that regularly shift between Muslim ‘supplementary education’ (including its traditional confessional focus on learning to read Arabic and then memorise and recite the Qur’an) and mainstream school education (including its ‘inclusive’ form of religious education’). The aim has been to better comprehend how these students make sense of this dual educational experience while negotiating the knowledge, skills, and values that are taught to them by two often seemingly disparate institutions. A further aim is to place our findings within the growing field of intercultural education. Though both types of education are often thought to be distinct and oppositional – the former as non-confessional and ‘modern’, the latter as confessional and ‘outmoded’ – both English and Swedish students were able to identify a degree of symbiosis between the two, particularly in relation to the process of memorisation. Thus, it became increasingly clear to the researchers that Muslim student reflection on their participation in both traditions of education had an intercultural dimension in the sense of encouraging dialogue and discussion across educational cultures prompting new knowledge and understanding. This article lays out some of the evidence for this conclusion.     

Preparing social workers for global gaze: locating global citizenship within social work curricula

Institutions of higher education have been particularly vulnerable to the pressures of globalization, resulting in policies and ensuing curricula that look to address the needs of students to be better prepared for living and working in a world in which global awareness, and perhaps even global identity, are requisites for success. Social work education is uniquely positioned to adapt its curricula for successful student outcomes in an increasingly globalized world. The challenges associated with social welfare, which have intensified under globalization, has been a long-standing concern of social work policy and practice. This article suggests strategies for integrating global citizenship education within social work studies, recognizing the affinities that exist between contemporary conceptualizations of global citizenship and social work practice. The article proposes four interrelated components that might be strategically implemented within existing social work curriculum, in consideration of the contextual ethos of the respective school of social work.     

Exploring challenges and lessons learned in cross-cultural environmental education research

The field of environmental education (EE) has been criticized for scarcity of research findings that can be used to compare the approaches and outcomes of various interventions and contexts. This is particularly problematic for EE programs that are implemented across multi-cultural settings because very little academic attention has been devoted to cross-cultural EE research methods. Intending to address this gap, we set out to develop and pilot a pre/post survey in Costa Rica that could help us investigate the impacts of a bird-focused curriculum on Latin American children’s knowledge, attitudes, behavioral intentions, and behaviors toward birds and the natural world. This article describes the challenges encountered and subsequent adaptations made throughout our ongoing, iterative survey development process, in order to appropriately address language, sociocultural context, audience, and research-to-practice tensions. We present key lessons learned, including the importance of having strong local partners, the need to create a realistic research timetable that accounts for unique challenges involved in undertaking cross-cultural EE research, and the limitations of quantitative methods in this sort of research.     

What Affects Hispanic Volunteering in the United States: Comparing the Current Population Survey, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the AIM Giving and Volunteering Survey

This study examines Hispanic formal volunteering and the cultural, social, and community context factors that affect their decision to volunteer. Using data from three surveys in the United States, the study finds that religious attendance, cultural background, and education are the most consistent and significant predictors of Hispanic formal volunteering. Religious attendance has a stronger positive impact on Hispanic volunteering than on non-Hispanics. The impacts of income, social resources, and community characteristics on Hispanics’ volunteering vary by surveys. Secular organizations serving children and youth and religious organizations are the favorite organizations for Hispanic volunteers.     

Challenges and opportunities to eLearning in social work education: perspectives from Spain and the United States

ABSTRACT

eLearning has become an academic tool used to provide access to education for multiple segments of the population, which otherwise would have little to no access to it. While other academic disciplines integrated it into their curricula early in the digital revolution, in many countries, social work education is just beginning to address the opportunities and challenges web-based learning may bring to these programmes [Blackmon, 2013. Social work and online education with all deliberate speed. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 10(5), 509–521. doi:10.1080/15433714.2012.663672; Phelan, 2015. The use of eLearning in social work education. Social Work, 60(3), 257–264. doi:10.1093/sw/swv010]. This international collaborative research study seeks to better understand the challenges and opportunities faced by social work educators teaching at universities who are already using some form of eLearning in the United States and in Spain. A quantitative, non-experimental research design was employed. Results show that there are similarities as well as differences in the ways the two subsamples perceive the challenges and opportunities of eLearning. Findings reveal that there are some significant differences between the way the two subsample respondents perceived challenges and opportunities to eLearning. Recommendations for online social work educators and administrators are provided regarding overcoming challenges and capitalizing on opportunities applicable to the US, Spain, and the larger European and global contexts. Recommendations for further research and practice are also included.     

Intercultural education and communication in second language interactions

This article analyses intercultural education outcomes produced in the setting of teaching Italian as a second language (ISL) in an Italian school. Intercultural education is produced in interactions which are based on specific cultural presuppositions, i.e. expectations regarding learning, role hierarchy and evaluation of student performances. Sixteen hours of interactions associated with ISL teaching in a multicultural classroom were audiotaped, transcribed and analysed. The analysis highlights three ways in which cultural diversity becomes meaningful. First, cultural diversity is constructed as one task of learning. Second, cultural diversity is constructed as conflictive interaction. Third, cultural diversity is constructed as a point of departure for positive school performance. These three ways of giving meaning to cultural diversity reveal a prevailing ethnocentric form of ISL teaching, as a consequence of educational presuppositions which do not take the difficulties of intercultural communication seriously. Recently, ‘dialogue’ has been invoked to address ethnocentrism; however, the conditions of effective intercultural dialogue are uncertain.

Questo articolo analizza l’educazione interculturale prodotta nell’insegnamento dell’italiano come seconda lingua (ISL) in una scuola italiana. L’educazione interculturale è realizzata in interazioni che sono basate su specifici presupposti culturali, che sono aspettative di apprendimento, di gerarchie di ruolo e di prestazioni degli studenti. L’educazione interculturale si occupa del problema della diversità culturale, basata su presupposti culturali diversi che emergono nella comunicazione. Sono state audioregistrate, trascritte e analizzate 16 ore di interazione durante l’insegnamento di ISL in una classe multiculturale: l’analisi ha evidenziato tre modi in cui la diversità culturale è resa significativa. La diversità culturale è costruita anzitutto come compito di apprendimento, in secondo luogo come interazione conflittuale, infine come punto di partenza per conseguire una prestazione scolastica positiva. Questi tre modi di costruire la diversità culturale rivelano una forma prevalente di tipo etnocentrico per l’insegnamento ISL, che è una conseguenza di presupposti educativi che non permettono di prendere seriamente le difficoltà della comunicazione interculturale. Recentemente, si è proposto di usare il ‘dialogo’ per superare l’etnocentrismo; tuttavia c’è incertezza sulle condizioni di un dialogo interculturale efficace.