M5 U5 A2 - Multicultural Content and Multiple Perspectives

How can lessons in your subject field reflect diversity? 

Bringing cultural diversity into the classroom can be done more easily in some subjects rather than others. If you’re teaching English or history then there are a million different ways to make your lessons multicultural. Economics is a little trickier, as economic themes tend to be reasonably universal. For example every country has to deal with scarce resources and the need to make choices. People in every country go to work because of a monetary incentive. You can however take these broad economic themes and zoom in to make them country specific. I did this in my multicultural lesson plan when I took the broad theme of scarcity and choices and looked at how Korean students have to choose between playing computer games or studying, while children in parts of Africa might have to make very different choices.


Why is it important to introduce students to multicultural content and multiple perspectives?

I teach at a Korean international school in China that has almost 100% Korean students. A few of the kids have lived in Europe and South America, but the vast majority were either born in China to Korean parents, or moved to China recently because of their jobs. Korea can be quite a parochial old pace and it reminds me a lot of Northern Ireland where I grew up. Both are small countries, surrounded by larger and more powerful neighbours. This means that both Korean and Northern Irish people tend to be quite insular and obsessed with the goings-on in their own part of the world. This means that the majority of our Korean students are not possessed of a well-developed world view and often have a very limited knowledge or understanding of other cultures. It is vital, therefore, that the teaching staff at our school do our very best to introduce our kids to as many new cultural experiences as possible.


How do you know if your students are developing cultural competence in your classroom? 

It is all well and good designing and delivering lessons that include culturally diverse elements, but teachers need to know that their kids are developing cultural competence. Research (Irish & Scrubb, 2012) shows that there are a number of skills that teachers should be looking for students to develop. First, you should be checking to see that your students can critically reflect on their own cultural assumptions. Where before they may have made a remark about Africans being poor because they don’t work very hard, now they should be able to check themselves and point to reasons for low productivity in some African nations, which has nothing to do with work ethic. They should also show respect for others in their speech and behaviour, and they should be better at intercultural communication – although this may be difficult for my kids as they are all Korean.


References:
Irish, C., & Scrubb, M. (2012). Five Competencies for Culturally Competent Teaching and Learning. Retrieved February 05, 2018, from https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/five-competencies-for-culturally-competent-teaching-and-learning/