Developing Multicultural Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Impact of a Multicultural Education Course

• In Event: Preservice Teachers' Transformative Journeys in a Multicultural Education Course

Abstract

The K-12 student population in the United States is becoming more diverse. At the same time, the teaching force remains overwhelmingly White, middle class, and female. Many teacher training programs across the country are prioritizing education that can foster preservice teachers’ multicultural competence to help them engage with the issues related to the increasing demographic divide between teachers and their students. Banks (1995) described the three constructs of multicultural competence as awareness, knowledge and skills. With these three constructs as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this short term, longitudinal study was to assess the impact of a multicultural education course on future teachers’ multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills in a land-grant university in the northeastern United States.

The participants of this study were the future teachers enrolled in a sophomore-level required course, Education in a Multicultural Society, in the fall 2017 semester. The majority of participants were White, female, and monolingual English-speaking. The course met in-person for 2.5 hours per week for 16 weeks. The instrument chosen for this study was the Multicultural Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills Form-T (MAKSS Form-T, D’Andrea, Daniels, & Noonan, 2003), a 41-item Likert-scale survey with three subscales: multicultural awareness, multicultural knowledge, and multicultural skills.

Participants took the MAKSS Form-T survey in the first class of the semester as part of the introduction to the larger course research investigation. At the end of the semester the MAKSS Form-T was re-administered to the same group of students. In total, 57 pairs of valid pre- and post-surveys were collected. A paired-samples t test was conducted for each of the subscales to evaluate whether students showed significant improvements in their scores after the multicultural education course.

Specifically, compared to before the course (M = 20.61, SD = 2.97), students became more aware after the course (M = 26.14, SD = 3.25), t(43) = 10.63, p < .001. In addition, compared to before the course (M = 30.60, SD = 6.03), students became more knowledgeable (M = 40.17, SD = 5.57), t(47) = 9.85, p < .001. Finally, compared to before the course (M = 51.87, SD = 9.47), students became more skillful (M = 65.35, SD = 7.76), t(51) = 10.56, p < .001. Findings suggested students perceived themselves to be more aware, more knowledgeable, and more skillful in the area of multicultural education after the required course.

This preliminary study provides evidence of the course’s effectiveness and has implications for the design and improvement of a multicultural education course. More research is needed to understand the impact of the course on its ability to advance multicultural teacher education. Future research should include a control group to account for non-specific increases in multiculturalism. In addition, future research should examine moderator variables such as demographics and information about students’ work experience, area of study, year of study, gender, race, ethnicity, language. This information will help researchers compare and determine whether the course has differential effects on students of different backgrounds.

Authors

• Bryan Silverman, University of Maine

• Ming-Tso Chien, The University of Maine