Section archive - Multiculturalism & Diversity

This article concerns the relationship between social–educational goals and the school context. The authors used a questionnaire to map the educational goals of teachers in pre-vocational education in the field of social competence, and investigated whether these goals were related to the percentage of students from ethnic-minority groups and to the urban environment of the school. The results show that all teachers, regardless of the school context, value promoting the social development of their students as an educational goal.

In this article, the author uses James A. Banks’s conceptualization of the five components of multicultural educational practice—content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogies, and empowering school cultures—to examine the empirical evidence for the influence of each of these five different components on the academic outcomes of students of color and intergroup relations in schools. The empirical research reveals that all five components of multicultural educational practice outlined by Banks to have a strong, positive impact on the educational outcomes of students of color and to improved intergroup relations.

The article describes the use of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (TO), as a form of academic and social support used in a recruitment and retention program for bilingual teachers in the Southeastern United States. Bilingual teacher critical discourse is discussed in language tools, and individual relationships.

The article explores a multi-literacy approach for literacy teaching. The research examined 10 literacies professors, and 22 first year literacy teachers. It found that some of the difficulty was lack of clarity about the nature and purpose of multiliteracies pedagogy.