What Constitutes "Multiculturalism?" How Student Advocacy Reveals Understandings of Multiculturalism

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

Abstract

This study explored how students in a multicultural education course conceived of multiculturalism through analysis of a course assignment. The assignment asked students to write a letter to an educational institution affirming a policy that supported diversity. An exploration of the topics students chose to advocate for, and analysis of those topics and their interpretations of the topic, informed our understanding of the impact of the assignment and the course on student conceptions of multiculturalism. This research is significant to teacher educators’ knowledge of how the curriculum and experiences within teacher education programs impacts student understandings of multiculturalism. Expanding this knowledge is vital to pursuing our goals of fostering and supporting teachers who are committed to equitable and democratic education in a multicultural society.

The theoretical framework of the research employs social constructivism as its orienting lens (Creswell, 2009), in keeping with the theoretical worldview of the researcher. The goal of such an approach is to gather and analyze data that honors participants’ views of the phenomenon being studied (Creswell, 2009). In this study, the examined phenomenon was how a course assignment contributed to the development of pre-service teachers’ understandings of multiculturalism.

There were 53 participants in the study, enrolled in a required multicultural education course. The majority of the participants were white, female, and English speakers. Students in the course were required to compose a letter to a K-12 school or higher education institution that they had personal involvement with. The assignment asked them to write about a policy that the school or institution enacted in support of diversity goals, which they affirmed, or an improvement the school or institution could make to support diversity, which they advocated.

Qualitative analysis began with reading and re-reading the participants’ advocacy letters in a hermeneutic circle. I read the documents as discrete sources, and then how those parts comprised a whole, and then back again and so on (Josselson, 2011). This narrative process revealed themes in the data. Open coding was then used to distill those themes across participants’ work. The final step in the data analysis process was the comparison of themes and topics across participants. This analytical process revealed key findings concerning how students’ thinking about multiculturalism was evolving in response to the assignment and the course.

By asking students to write to an educational institution affirming a policy that supports diversity and/or multiculturalism, their beliefs about what constitutes multiculturalism were revealed. Students focused on three issues overwhelmingly; a generic notion of the importance of “multicultural education” programs or classes in schools, LGBTQ issues, and socio-economic “equality” within schools. The choice of these topics is unsurprising given the demographics of study participants and the overall context of the study but the lack of attention to racial and ethnic diversity was noteworthy given the focus of the course on racial and ethnic diversity. Consequently, efforts to expand student conceptions of “multiculturalism” encountered challenges based on students’ previous experiences in schools and the communities they lived in.

Author

• Evan Mooney, Husson University