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Superdiversity now highlights the complexity of diverse societies. Celebrating and encouraging diverse populations, therefore, remains a priority to ensure fair and equitable treatment for all. Multiculturalism, once seen as part of the solution to diversity issues, is now regarded as problematic, although this is by no means new. Asian contexts have rarely been hospitable milieus for liberal multiculturalism. Although diversity and heterogeneity characterize most Asian societies only responses consistent with 'local values', are allowable. In the West, many scholars (and politicians) have advocated the abandonment of multiculturalism creating a contested agenda for responding to diversity. In the current context there are no commonly agreed attitudinal or behavioral norms capable of responding. Attention needs to be paid to identifying alternatives that can contribute to the development of positive relationships, irrespective of social and political contexts. This paper seeks to do this by considering the role of care ethics.

This Paper presents and discusses the findings of an empirical qualitative study that was conducted in one school district in British Columbia, Canada. The paper explores the perspectives of the educational leaders and their understanding of multicultural education and how they implement it in the school district's teachers' professional development (ProD) and in-service education. It discusses the theoretical frameworks that shape the participants' choices and actions concerning how they educate and support teachers to handle the complexities of diversity and the changing demographics in the school district. The findings highlight the dominant liberal framework of multicultural education, the systemic barriers to move beyond the tokenistic approach of cultures and the organizational constraints to move towards transformative, critical multiculturalism and anti-racism education in teachers' training and professional development. The paper proposes critical transformative multiculturalism as an alternative to transform teacher education and engage with educational reform from a social justice framework.

The major purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which multiethnic Korea and Thailand are cultural democracies. The primary conceptual framework guiding this study is the powerful but largely ignored concept of cultural democracy. Bereday's classic model of comparative research is another major theoretical and methodological framework utilized. The major methodologies used are comparative qualitative case studies, meta-synthesis, and participant-observation. Comparative national case studies are rare. A number of striking similarities between the two countries are identified. The very low fertility rates of both nations drive a critical need for guest workers and international students. Both countries in general have pursued assimilationist policies not conducive to cultural democracy. The final part of the paper offers suggestions for strengthening cultural democracy in both nations. Their long-term potential can be enhanced if both these societies recognize the 'diversity advantage' and move actively to realize the ideal of cultural democracy.

This essay examines how the projects seeking to promote "damunhwa," literally translated as multi-culture, in South Korea inadvertently reinforce cultural stereotypes and reproduce cultural hierarchies. Unlike many studies that focus on discrimination against racial or ethnic minority populations, this paper argues that the seemingly benevolent acts of the majority towards ethnic minority populations in Korea produce unintended consequences. Based on descriptive content analysis of Internet news stories, this paper demonstrates the manner in which the dominant Korean society develops an oppositional binary between citizen and foreigner. Building on Edward Said's work, this paper introduces the concept of "internal Orientalism" that highlights the teleology of cultural distinction by rendering minority populations with weak subjectivity and stigmatizing them as vulnerable populations through a multitude of policies and programmes designed to help them. Doing so ironically and simultaneously constructs opportunities for the Korean society to create a benevolent society, thereby crystallizing an interdependent binary between the dominant and minority populations.

This paper includes an analysis of legal acts concerning primary and lower secondary teacher education in Norway. The objective is to determine how multicultural education is perceived in these acts -- whether it is regarded as a supplementary subject or as a mindset that underlies teacher education. The theoretical framework includes critical multiculturalism and multicultural education theory. A document content analysis approach has been applied during the analytical process, in order to reveal patterns related to culture, diversity, inclusion, multicultural education and multicultural competence. Furthermore, the findings have been placed in the Norwegian context, in order to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the documents. The main findings indicate that multicultural education is assigned a limited space and, according to the legal acts, should be included as a module integrated with the subject of pedagogy and pupil-related skills in teacher education.

This paper focuses on the language policy of the European Union (hereafter, EU), which is applied in the case of European Schools (hereafter, ES). It is based on a case study conducted at postgraduate level. Our purposes were: (a) to examine and analyse the official EU policy on language and multilingualism, (b) to find similarities and differences between the official EU texts and the praxis followed in ES regarding language learning, and c) to explore the perceptions of ES teachers, emphasizing on the effectiveness of this model as far as language learning and multilingualism are concerned. The results of this study have shown that European Schools are considered effective in terms of teaching students their mother tongue while promoting foreign language acquisition. Moreover, certain measures and necessary changes are being discussed in order to have similar multilingual and multicultural school systems developed in modern societies.

The context for this paper is the rapid globalization and international migration occurring across the globe. An insightful metaphor for this era is "the death of distance." The influx of new migrants into countries such as Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the United States presents many challenges for those societies. In Minnesota, people of Karen culture from Myanmar (Burma) are arriving daily and the state currently has over 100,000 individuals of Hmong ethnicity. With its incredibly low fertility rate (lowest among OECD countries), Korea is necessarily needing to import large numbers of workers from diverse countries of the Asia-Pacific region such as Vietnam and the Philippines which presents many challenges for Korean educators and policy-makers. In the first part of the paper as background, the different genres of people moving across national borders are carefully differentiated. Among the major groups are so-called "gastarbeiter" (guest workers) and those working in another country for a defined period, actual migrants (legal and illegal), and various kinds of refugees and/or those seeking political asylum. In this paper, the focus is on permanent migrants. In the early 1970s, Ramírez and Castañeda developed the important construct of "cultural democracy" which unfortunately was largely ignored. The US government's focus, for example, has been on fostering political, not cultural democracy with many adverse effects. The concept of "cultural democracy" is far more relevant today than when it was developed. Cultural democracy is a key theoretical construct used in this paper. Other key theoretical constructs used are social contact theory developed by Allport and subsequently researched extensively by Thomas Pettigrew; the Protean individual developed by the political scientist, psychologist Lifton; and the important construct of intercultural competency. Drawing upon these four important theoretical frameworks, a model for effectively integrating new migrants in Korea is proposed for consideration and review.

Korean society and schools have become more demographically diverse than ever. To support this increasing cultural diversity in schools, the Korean government has been developing multicultural education policies since 2006. This study aims to examine how multicultural education has been articulated by the government and how the national vision has affected teachers' interpretations and implementations of multicultural education. By drawing on a review of policy documents and teachers' interviews, this study analysed Korean teachers' perceptions of the national multicultural education policies from the perspective of Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing. The results revealed both narrow and broad definitions of multicultural education, and these double definitions were also reflected in the teachers' perceptions and practices. This paper concludes by presenting the implications of the findings and suggestions for improving multicultural education at the national and school level.

This study investigates how South Korean students perceive migrants by interviewing 21 ethnic Korean adolescents. This study shows the parallel of popular discourse with Korean students' discourse on migrants. Similar to competing popular discourse, half of the students in this study relied on the humanitarian discourse, depicting migrants as victims, fellow humans, and contributors while another half of the students showed the anti-multicultural discourse, portraying migrants as beneficiaries, competitors, and troublemakers. In contrast to the strong influence of the media on Korean students' ideas, school learning was the least meaningful source of information when the students learned about migrant-related issues. These findings illustrate the greater influence of societal discourses on students' understandings of migrants compared to the official school curriculum. This paper suggests that educators need to address prevailing societal discourses surrounding students more directly in the classroom to encourage students to participate in the meaningful conversation about immigration issues.

Around the world, the twenty-first-century secondary classroom is based on growing cultural diversity. Educators that employ a culturally responsive curriculum with a proposed framework of existential pedagogy for secondary education seek to promote the academic success of culturally diverse learners. It is argued in this paper that in culturally responsive curriculum, existential pedagogy holistically engages the learner to critically reflect on how knowledge is constructed within cultures while exploring what it means to exist as an individual person in a diverse world. As a result, culturally diverse classrooms begin to understand the human experience in a more significant context and explore existential concerns through cultural differences. Existential pedagogy is integral for multicultural secondary educators and students to work for social justice by bridging the gaps between cultural differences.

Along with its multicultural transformation, Korea is experiencing structural challenges of multicultural education that has been often criticized as assimilation driven and immigrant education oriented. In fact, multicultural education targeted at the Korean public should be as equally important as the newly arrived migrants, if not less. The paper seeks to identify existing complications of multicultural education in Korea by reviewing its practices in the sociopolitical context, while providing alternatives from the perspectives of geography. The importance of localization and place-based pedagogy is exemplified by the strength of geography education, emphasizing its compatibility and contributory potential to multicultural education. In addition, geography field trip lessons of Daegu that may be of interest to multicultural educators are presented as reference lessons in further developing multicultural education in Korea. By teaching multicultural education more 'multiculturally,' geography education not only outright reflects the richness of Korea's growing cultural diversity, but also lends its flexibility nature and all-encompassing approaches to enhance social cohesion and inclusion.

This paper seeks to understand why the educational experiences of ethnic minority Chinese lag behind the educational experiences of Han Chinese through the lens of multiculturalism education. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of educational laws and policies from 1982 to 2012 to trace how multicultural education is articulated in Chinese national policies. We find government support for bilingual education and linguistic diversity, but a patriarchal relationship exists between students from both Han and ethnic minority backgrounds. Moreover, a disconnect exists between encouraging languages of ethnic minority groups and an absence of teacher knowledge and awareness of the cultures of ethnic minority groups. In order to address the educational gap between Han and ethnic minority groups, we argue for the creation of a transformative, two-way conduit of multiculturalism, both theoretically and pedagogically, that empowers and actively engages students from ethnic minority groups, their Han counterparts, and bilingual teachers.

Taiwan has cast multicultural policies as a remedy for inequalities and injustices its 16 Indigenous groups face. Such policies aim to revive Indigenous languages and cultures and create a more welcoming and inclusive environment in schools. Despite the fact that Indigenous people are expected to be primary beneficiaries of these policies, not much is known about how they have affected Indigenous students and communities, if at all. Relying on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 16 Indigenous participants, this paper explores whether the policies have accomplished or are on the way to accomplishing the goals set, as seen by Indigenous people. The findings show that the multicultural approach to education is still informed by assimilationist logic that expects Indigenous people to adjust to the culture and orientations of the dominant group, and as such, does not redress the existing injustices and inequalities.

In many societies, single-sex education is embedded in a culture that maintains women subordination with possible ramifications to their language performance and role in society. This paper seeks to explain the cultural grounds for Palestinian female direct refusals in their L1 culture and the consequences for their linguistic behaviour in multicultural educational contexts. For data collection, the study employed a self-reporting survey followed by interviews with 10 Palestinian female study abroad students. Results showed that fear of gossip-mongering, reputation and family, and inter-group anxiety constricted the females' refusals pushing them to terminate communication at an earlier stage in their home educational context. However, in a western study abroad context, the students were more responsive to the culturally diverse context. They conceived their home culture as constraining their refusal performance at home, becoming more self-sovereign and their reactions were more engaging, elaborated and less direct in the foreign educational context.

The necessity to include multicultural education policies and practices in schools and teacher education has been widely recognized both in Finland and internationally. However, terms such as 'multiculturalism' and 'multicultural education' have contested and vague meanings in educational discourse. This paper investigates discourses on multicultural education from critical multicultural education and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The focus is on the teacher education policies of all the eight primary teacher education programmes in Finland. Discourse theory analysis revealed six diverging discourses within a framework of conservative, liberal and critical multicultural education. The results show that it should not be taken for granted that policies including multicultural education contribute to social justice in education and teacher education. Consequently, policy-makers need to question the rhetoric regarding multiculturalism and to focus on how inequality is reproduced and upheld in discourses in teacher education and schools, and how this can be challenged.

With current migration trends, Norwegian classrooms have become increasingly diverse. The setting that constitutes the workplace for Norwegian teachers has changed from one of monolingual classrooms to one of multilingual classrooms, and from classes compromised solely of pupils with a Norwegian background to classes including pupils from different migrant groups. This paper focuses mainly on teachers' perceptions of intercultural competence. The data materials used in this research include qualitative interviews with primary school teachers as well as students' assignments submitted for a part-time online module on intercultural competence. Through these, teachers' perceptions of intercultural competence are illustrated by experiences of collaboration with parents of multilingual pupils. In Norway, the issue of cultural diversity in education often focuses on second language learning and mother tongue teaching. There is less of a focus on intercultural competence, including cultural awareness without stereotyping and personal attributes like openness and empathy. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of teachers' intercultural competence in the diverse Norwegian educational setting.

In order for hope to be a sufficient state of mind, deliberate efforts, energies and actions are required in a way that embraces the other side of hope, namely, pain and/or despair. In other words, there must be an agreement that life consists of hopes/dreams and pain/despair. In the work of Duncan-Andrade, he gives us a reflective framework for our explicit and implicit hope and pain inside and out of the classroom. In this paper, we examine existing literatures related to hope theories and create a framework of postcolonial hope, we attempt to revisit Duncan-Andrade's audacity and robust hope that are used as an analytical tool for our explicit and elusive hopes inside and out of our professional contexts. Lastly, we offer a pedagogy with/for an understanding heart in pre-service teacher education intended to show a way in which we connect our present pain to our future hope.

In today's multicultural world, digital tools may become a powerful means to building a culture of dialogue that supports "culturally responsive" teaching within imaginative multicultural learning environments. Students can develop global competencies, learning more about others' and their own culture as part of their personal development. Our paper presents the experience of "Rete Dialogues", a network of Italian state schools that have created a professional learning community and enacted the international project "Generation Global". Through technologies such as videoconferences and online communities, students, supported by their teachers, can meet peers from various cultures. After referencing the development of the notion of multiculturalism, we interpret our experience through the lenses of Banks' five dimensions. We then focus on a "teamblogging" initiative that involved 2000 students and over 200 teachers, discussing examples from students' digital dialogues and brainstorming next steps in the practice of multicultural education.

Racial and ethnic minorities experience misrecognition, prejudice and discrimination in Hong Kong. In response to these challenges, multicultural education there aims to enable young people to recognize diversity in a more tolerant, open-minded way. Educators have been encouraged to not rely only on textbooks, but to include news and digital media in such teaching. This paper examines online media representations of diversity in Hong Kong in the context of multicultural education, focusing on "Apple Daily" ("AD"), a popular liberal Hong Kong news source. We analyze how "AD" represents ethnic minorities, contributing to the construction of a particular multicultural environment and identity among Hong Kong people. Despite its multicultural orientation, "AD" remains problematic as a learning tool. In relation we recommend that more alternative digital media be used to learn about diversity in Hong Kong. We give as an example the use of student self-authored digital texts during the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, which enabled ethnic minorities to engage in performative citizenship. We identify a focus on multiple, self-authored perspectives as part of critical media literacy, which we regard as essential for young people to better understand diversity, in contrast to straightforward reliance on multicultural news sources.

The composition of today's school classrooms is now more diverse in a world of greater global mobility and communication. For teachers, this adds further complexity to the task of ensuring each child has the most appropriate opportunity to learn. This paper posits that future teachers are more able to cater for cultural diversity by developing broader cultural perspectives than just a local one and are therefore better prepared both personally and professionally. This study investigates the engagement of undergraduate preservice teachers in an experience where they are not only required to explicitly focus upon the aspects of their professional practice, but are also challenged to reflect upon their personal development through exposure to a linguistically and culturally different professional setting. They are challenged to think differently. The analysis of the preservice teachers' perceptions demonstrates that an overseas professional placement has a significant and meaningful impact upon their knowledge, perspectives and future practice in multicultural settings.

This paper examines the level of multicultural education awareness among Korean pre-service teachers (PSTs) and suggests a teaching and learning approach to enhance their multicultural competencies. This research utilized a South Korean educational television and radio network, Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), particularly, its programme called Multicultural biographies of a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law [다문화고부열전] as a diagnostic tool to assess PSTs' recognition of multicultural education. The programme focuses on the challenges faced by married migrant women in Korea. The study used survey materials based on the EBS docudrama to investigate PSTs' perceptions of multicultural education. The results showed that most PSTs understood the significance of teaching and learning about cultural diversity but had limited understanding beyond the dichotomies of the mainstream and minorities or Korean and immigrant students. The study recommends the use of docudramas as an effective tool for promoting multicultural education among PSTs in Korea [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of intercultural understanding in the context of multicultural education. It emphasizes the importance of viewing education as a bridge between individuals and cultures, rather than a means of individual social mobility. Intercultural understanding involves recognizing surface-level differences between oneself and others, but also understanding deep commonalities at a fundamental level. The article cautions against a superficial understanding of interculturalism, highlighting the need for genuine interaction and solidarity with people from different backgrounds. The inclusion of intercultural understanding in school curricula is seen as a way to foster empathy and create a more peaceful world. [Extracted from the article]

Spain is one of the European countries that attracts the most immigration, and the Valencian and Murcian regions have a large immigrant population. To our knowledge, no studies have analysed the representation of cultural diversity in visual representations of the body and musical practices in their music textbooks. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to describe the representation of cultural diversity in Spanish music textbooks from a critical and comparative perspective that analyses visual representations of the body and its interactions with the main musical processes. The results show a greater presence of students with white European features, as well as certain cultural stereotypes perpetuated by visual representation with musical instruments. Thus, although a greater variety of human types can be observed in the graphic representations of music textbooks, these take a reductionist and simplistic view of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at exploring family language policies and practices of immigrant families in Iceland as well as educational practices and partnerships in their children's preschools. The article draws on interviews with preschool principals and teachers in three preschools in Iceland, and presents findings related to state, municipal, and school language policies as well as multilingual practices in these preschools. The findings indicate that despite the generally positive attitudes and interest in multilingual practices among preschool personnel, there is room for improvement in terms of more structured and systematic integration of the diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds of families, as well as fostering stronger partnerships with parents from different linguistic and cultural communities. Furthermore, teacher education should include both theoretical and practical knowledge of multicultural and multilingual education to better equip teachers for cultural and linguistic diversity in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, undertaken in a predominantly monolingual area of England, examines pre-service teachers' (N = 293) suggestions of how they could reflect linguistic diversity in primary classrooms (ages 4-11). Trialling a mixed method approach where open-text data are quanticised, a combination of content analysis and statistical analysis are used to ask a) what methodsare identified as ways of reflecting linguistic and cultural diversity? And b) is there a difference in the methods suggested by the pre-service teachers according to their own experience of learning languages and the institution they train at? The methods most commonly suggsted were likely to be isolated events and fit with existing structures (e.g. "show and tell" time, multicultural days and guest speakers). Overall, substantial differences in pre-service teachers' pedagogic repertoires were found, highlighting the need to ensure practice, research and rhetoric supporting multilingualism reaches all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Hong Kong, teaching ethnically diverse children (e.g. Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis) has recently become a pressing issue. As teacher educators, we believe the crux of the issue lies in teachers' understanding of cultural diversity. Specifically, this study adopted the theoretical framework of phenomenography to investigate the question of: What are precisely the qualitatively different ways teachers see ethnically diverse children? We recruited 81 in-service kindergarten teachers and conducted interviews and/or collected documents related to their practice of teaching. Four ways of seeing were identified: Ethnically diverse children are seen as: (A) of one and the same group, (B) not local to Hong Kong, (C) in need of support and deficient, and (D) overly devoted to their own cultures. We recommend teacher educators to discuss the descriptions of the four ways of seeing with teachers. The results of this study contribute to pedagogical knowledge of teacher educators for professional development of teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that citizens must be woke and engaged in multicultural activism in order to bring about social justice and equity in the Twenty-First Century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, cross-sector perspectives were sought on how teachers of visual arts in a sample of early childhood centres, primary schools and secondary schools in Auckland were responding to the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of young people in New Zealand. The research was contextualised within national curricula, demographic statistics and literature on multiple approaches to pedagogy that foreground engagement with culture(s). The findings, presented through the voices of teachers and art works by children and students, provide insightful perspectives about the place of visual arts across these three sectors, and how teachers are responding in differing ways to the diversity of the young people they teach. This research provides a starting point for conversations within, and beyond New Zealand, about the role of visual arts education for equity and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]