On the Multicultural Literacy of Teachers' Curriculum Ideologies and Pedagogical Practice: Multi-ethnic Views in Taiwan

Author(s):

Ya-Hsuan WangHsin-Jen Chen

Conference:

ECER 2008

Network:

7. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 09B, Multi-Ethnic Complexities

Paper Session

Time:

2008-09-12

10:30-12:00

Room:

B1 113

Chair:

Francesca Gobbo

Contribution

With the increasing trend on multicultural education, teachers are expected to appreciate other cultures and eliminate personal and national ethnocentrism so that they can understand that a specific culture is not intrinsically superior or inferior to another. Today school teachers in Taiwan have more opportunity to work with multi-ethnic students and parents. Multicultural literacy is therefore necessary for teachers to offer cultural responsive teaching and make good cultural communication. Some empirical studies however show that most teachers haven’t yet prepared well to practice multicultural education, but fortunately Multicultural Literacy Scale could help teachers evaluate their own multicultural competence and the multicultural training course they attend; it also helps students evaluate their school environment. In a word, Multicultural Literacy Scale with multiple functions could help teachers promote their multicultural literacy. In order to develop local instrumentation for evaluating teachers’ multicultural literacy in the future, this research, in the first instance, explores teachers’ understanding of multicultural literacy and their articulation of it into curriculum design and pedagogical practice. It is theoretically based on Thomas’ The Situation of Definition by which people give off cultural literacy drawn from one’s own and others’ cultural environments with reference to the formation of cultural identity influenced by local community and the wider society(Waller, 1965，p.292, p.294). This paper aims to construct the multi-ethnic views on the multicultural literacy of teachers' curriculum ideologies and pedagogical practice in Taiwan.

Method

Empirical data were collected by situation interviews and life-experiences narratives held with 43 school teachers from different ethnic groups in Taiwan. By mapping “Multicultural Teacher” based on the schoolteachers’ definitions of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic situations, this paper integrated a conceptual framework of multicultural literacy and further discussed from the viewpoints of critical multiculturalism.

Expected Outcomes

According to the qualitative data, the author rethinks the dialogue between qualitative researchers and schoolteachers and links the research findings into some discussing questions as follows. The Aboriginal school teachers in this study, when being asked to conceptualise the multicultural teacher, merely value Aboriginal cultures without referring to the non-Aboriginal cultures. It is discussed that the viewpoint seeing Aboriginal cultures as multicultural education is a sort of mono-cultural perspective or not. Furthermore, most teachers demand a 'due recognition' from others in an affective sense of understanding and appreciation. It is further discussed that if such a Taylorian recognition (Taylor, 1994) is mono-cultural ethnocentric, a sense of essentialist, or an ideal utopian. Finally, this paper suggests to design a localized Multicultural Literacy Scale with the multiethnic views of Taiwan’s teachers. It can be used to measure teachers’ multicultural literacy and to evaluate multicultural training models in which teachers could make use of their multicultural literacy. It also suggests to design a localized Multicultural Literacy Guide for school teachers’ use with practicing multicultural literacy in their pedagogy.

References

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Author Information

Ya-Hsuan Wang

National Chung Cheng University

Institute of Education

Chia-Yi

215

Hsin-Jen Chen

National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

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