In 2004 multicultural education became an obligatory part of citizenship education as so called cross-curricula theme as a part of the largest reform of educational system in the Czech Republic since 1984. From the top-down perspective it brought Czech teachers a duty to implement multicultural education into their teaching. This fact is in a country with turbulent multicultural realities of 20th century a very peculiar issue, which challenges teachers own attitudes. Several researches show, that this fact brings teachers also new dilemmas. That is why especially bottom-up perspective was researched with a special focus on teachers’ ideas as well as practices in this research. The whole research was divided into two parts: the first part concentrated on teachers’ ideas and previous experiences with multicultural education. Teachers from 9 secondary schools were interviewed in 2004 when the school reform was introduced. The second part of the research concentrated on teachers ideas and concrete practices and took part in the same year when the school reform started to be implemented, which means 2007. Teachers from 5 secondary schools were interviewed and observed during their teaching. This part of the research will be presented also at the conference. As a theoretical framework for analysing changes in teachers’ professional identity Van Veen et al.'s (2001) concept was used, where the aspects of goals, instructions and the teacher's role within a school play an essential part. The central question was how Czech teachers try to cope with multicultural education. We have elaborated this general question into five research questions: 1. What are the opinions of the teachers in this research study about the role of education in present Czech society? 2. What do the Czech teachers in this research study understand by multicultural education? 3. What characteristics of the school culture are important for the implementation and presentation of multicultural education in present Czech schools? 4. What are teachers’ subjective educational ideas associated with multicultural education? 5. What are the characteristics of classroom practice of multicultural education?

The qualitative research on teachers’ practices with multicultural education was conducted in five secondary schools in Prague in 2007. The methodology consisted of interviews with twenty teachers, then the observation of their practices with multicultural education in their lessons and the second interview as a follow up of the observation. The research was divided into three stages: Phase 1. an interview study with 20 teachers Phase 2. an observation study in classrooms Phase 3. a second interview study with the same teachers Two types of schools were selected to participate in this research: three grammar schools and two secondary vocational schools. All of the schools are located in the city of Prague. The grammar schools are an exclusive sort of school and they are already working with the school reform documents mentioned previously. The secondary vocational school is something between a grammar school and vocational schools.

The research brought results on several levels. Multicultural education in the Czech Republic is not a clearly defined discipline and teachers understand wide range of contents and methods under this term. The only thing where they can agree is that multicultural education is a new discipline, which is strongly linked with personal attitudes of teachers and which enquires new teaching methods. Under this general agreement about multicultural education teachers were divided into three groups according to results of the research: Multicultural missionaries, who have a very strong personal experience motivating them to work hard on multicultural education, they use student-oriented teaching methods and their aim is to support especially students critical and plural thinking. Multicultural servicemen also have some personal experience, but it is not strong enough to work regularly on the topic. They implement multicultural education if they have time. They also stress especially critical thinking by their students. Multicultural officers do not usually have many personal experiences and they work on multicultural education only under the outside pressure, which is in present especially the school reform. They work with teacher-oriented methods and from the content point of view they bring usually information about other ethnic groups.