Essay On Becoming A Multicultural Teacher

Nieto (2000), argues that “becoming a multicultural teacher…means first becoming a multicultural person.” Without this transformation of ourselves, any attempts at developing a multicultural perspective for the teaching and learning will be shallow and superficial. This is particularly true for students whose skin color becomes a major focus or whose culture or language is different from their teachers and the schools. It is a transformative journey of acquiring more knowledge about ethnic and cultural diversity; confronting our own racism and ethnic biases; learning to see really from a variety of ethnic and cultural perspectives; challenging inequities in conventional school policies, programs and practices; concerns, and being change agents

We close by stating our belief that for the educational practitioner, the issue of multiculturalism is not primarily about learning the culture of a particular group or debating which groups should be included in a multicultural curriculum. Rather it is most important to understand that multiculturalism and education is a continuing drama of intergroup relations played out in schools and other education settings (La Belle, Ward,

Pre-service education must provide our educators with techniques to learn different cultural diversity aspects. Researchers found that a school may unwittingly contribute to student aggression through inappropriate classroom placement, irrelevant instruction, inconsistent management, overcrowded classrooms, rigid behavioral demands, or insensitivity to student diversity (Gable, Manning, and Bullock, 1997; Gable and Van Acker, 2000). Van Acker, Grant, and Henry (1996) collaborated with this assertion when they stated, “teachers require information on their pattern of interaction with individual students. Only then would differential treatment of specific students become evident” (p. 332).

Updating curriculum by incorporating race, gender, and multicultural perspectives can be beneficial in defining the classroom as a multicultural learning environment (Benns-Suter, 1993).

Educators must be self-aware and reflect on their own perceptions, in order to remove biases and stereotypes, engage students in self-awareness activities that lead to reflection on cross-cultural communication competencies. Sometimes beliefs about the instructional curriculum may differ completely, which may result in misinterpretations. Instructional blocks that are diverse, will enable the students to learn about their own differences, as well as giving them the opportunity