Ratchaneekorn Tongsookdee, Ph.D.
Faculty of Education, Chiang Mai University
1. Introduction
The phenomenon of multicultural diversity in many societies, workplaces, and classrooms has become a prominent feature in the 21st century.
Observations of multicultural classrooms reveal how students from different linguistic, cultural, racial, religious, gender, age, regional, and social class backgrounds and with special needs are provided with the opportunity to bring their enormous experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and insights to the learning environment. In such multicultural classrooms, teachers are required to possess the appropriate attitudes, experiences and skills to be able to work effectively with these children, and more often, advise their parents. How qualified are our teachers today to meet this educational challenge? Unfortunately, most current pre-service development for teachers is simply not adequate and effective enough to train and support them teach children in multicultural and inclusive classrooms. Thus, most teachers are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to meet the learning needs of the existing as well as the incoming student population.
Undoubtedly, pre-service teacher preparation and continuing staff development for in-service teachers are necessary and essential part of educational system because provide the teachers with the opportunity to improve their competence in teaching students in multicultural and inclusive classrooms. Teacher preparation for better multicultural and inclusive classrooms describes a system of increasing teachers’ awareness and understanding of the content, sensitivity to students’ needs, and to foster individual’s difference and potentials.
2. Diversity among our Population
UNESCO (2010; 2012) found that, globally, about 61 million young children and 71 million adolescents of primary and lower secondary school age were drop-out from their schools. Researches have also shown that the two main reasons for dropping out of school included living in poverty conditions and/or having disability. It is undisputable fact that diversity in our student population is alive and well in all societies of the world. Take for example, a large and developed country like the United States of America, 43% are students in public schools are ethnically classified as Hispanics, African Americans, Asian/ Pacific Islanders, American Indian/Alaska Natives, and
others. Approximately 10% of students speak a language other than English at home, and approximately 13% of these students have an identified disability (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2015). To add to this diversity, approximately 12 percent of students in public schools are labeled as gifted and talented (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education (2008). Like their peers with disabilities, gifted and talented students also are integrated into the general education classrooms. Despite the extensive nature of student diversity in the US public schools, educational opportunity has been provided to all of them.
Obviously, the quality of education the US public schools offer to this diverse student population is open for debate. In this paper, the author intends to describe the diverse nature of the Thai society and the urgently for implementing multicultural and inclusive education in the northern region of the country. While it would be unfair to compare the nature and characteristics of diversity among student population in the US public schools with their Thai counterparts, a lot could be learned on how to implement and system effective education with the aim of providing education for all of the children/students in the society.
Thailand is the 50th largest country in the world (Indonesia is the 11th); There are approximately 65 million people in Thailand. More than 90% of the population speaks Thai or its regional dialects, i.e., central, northern, northeastern, and southern Thai dialect. Among the population of these four regions, there is great linguistic and cultural diversity. The majority are ethnically Thai, though people of Chinese, Indians, Malay, Khmer, Burmese, Lao origin are also represented to varying degrees. Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, has the greatest diversity, including a large number of expatriate residents from across the globe. Other geographic distinctions of the population include the Muslim majority in the south near the Malaysian border, the Laos in the northeastern, hill tribe ethnic groups, foreigners, and both legal and illegal migrants settled in northern part of Thailand.
According to Quality Learning Foundation (QLF) (2012), there are 6.4 million underprivileged children nationwide. Included among them are 200,000-300,000 stateless children, 250,000 children of migrant workers, 2.9 million children in poverty, and 1 in 5 children aged 3-18 or 2.5
million children are diagnosed with disabilities and attention deficit hyperactive disorders (ADD/ADHD).
In 2014, more than 6.1 million people lived in eight northern provinces, namely: Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Lamphun, Lumpang, Phae, Nan, Phayao, and Mae Hong Son. About 10% or 586,693 of the northern population were minority, including hill tribes, migrant workers, and immigrants (Ministry of Interior, 2010). These people, with their stateless children, have brought with them their rich and distinctive cultures and languages that are quite different from the rest of the population.
Some schools in certain areas, more than 80% of the student population were of minority parents. In addition, more than 4,000 students with disabilities (excluded ADD/ADHD) were then in grades 1-9 (Special Education Center, Regional 8, 2013).
3. Teacher Education is the Key to Successfully Multicultural and Inclusive Education/
Education for All
Certainty, there are more children of minority groups and children with disabilities who are currently enrolled in our schools even though access to education is limited to children who are largely from low socioeconomic status such as those from remote rural areas, whose parents are migrant workers, whose parents are urban migrants without house registrations or live in the slums, and from diverse ethnic communities found in remote areas in the Northeast, North, and deep South.
However, I strongly believe that equitable access should be ensured for all children as described by UNECSO (UNESCO, 2011). As an educator and teacher trainer, I am keenly aware that the quality of Thai education provided to these particular minority groups has recently been called into questioned in terms of its effectiveness and adequacy. As a consequence of these quality issues, these students who do access education often do not participate on equal terms with their majority and/or non-disable peers, or achieve their educational goal to their full potential.
The Faculty of Education at Chiang Mai University, the largest university in the north, has taken the first step to address the challenge of providing quality education for all. To this end, greater attention is paid when recruiting, training, and supporting teachers to respond to the diverse needs of these students.
While there is strong evident of increasing numbers of children from diverse backgrounds and with disabilities in the classrooms, there is a global shortage of sufficiently trained and motivated teachers to teach competently in multicultural classrooms. Humanitarian News and Analysis (2015) reported that in Niger, for example, there are just 1,059 trained teachers at lower secondary level for 1.4 million children, with a ratio of 1,322
children for every trained teacher. This compares badly to UK where the student to trained teacher ratio is approximately 16 students for every teacher in secondary education. The similar situation in Thailand does not fair very well either, in 2013 there are about 397,000 teachers in public schools under the Office of the Basic Education Commission and only 1,636 of them have a special education degree (National Statistical Office, 2014). Unfortunately, there are not any teacher to teach multicultural education since there is not any curriculum for teacher training throughout the country.
The existence of the wide range of diversity among teacher and student populations in today’s school settings requires that teachers responsible for providing in-service teacher and staff development re-evaluate their teaching content and strategies in order to effectively prepare teachers to meet the learning needs of a diverse student population. In one class, a teacher might have some children who use with hearing aids, have developed sophisticated social skills, have recently moved to the area and live in a slum quite far from school, or whose native language is not Thai. That is the reality a teacher faces in today’s classroom environment.
Montgomery (2001) indicated that many teachers are faced with limited understanding of cultures other than their own and that there is a possibility that this limitation would negatively affect their students’ ability to become successful learners. To sufficiently train pre-service teachers or teacher candidates, Blanton and Pugach (2007) offered three useful types of programs for teacher preparation, i.e., discrete, integrated, and blended.
The authors indicated that general and special education teachers have historically been prepared mostly in separate or discrete programs. For example, general education teacher candidates might take one or two inclusive courses taught by a special educator while special education teacher candidates take a course in the teaching of the specific subject matter with a general teacher educator. The two programs require little or no systematic collaboration and function on parallel tracks, independent of one another. Pugach and Blanton (2009) suggested a collaborative approach that involved faculty from general, multicultural, and special education teachers working together to redesign and implement programs that prepare all teachers to successfully teach all students.
Villegas (2012) indicated that teachers teach children whose identities are influenced by their various locations in the social hierarchy based on race, ethnicity, class, language, ability/disability, and the intersection of all these factors. For instance, a teacher might teach a child who has intellectual disability, is also of Burmese decent and poor. To successfully teach this student, the teacher needs to understand how her/his experiences within
these different social groups combine to shape her or his identity and define the strengths and needs she/he brings to the learning process. Equally important, the teacher must have a unified or integrated pedagogical framework to make informed instructional decisions that appropriately address not only the learner’s disability but also her or his needs and strengths associated with her or his racial, ethnics, linguistic, and social class background.
In trying to bring attention to the needs of better teacher-education programs rather than the quantity of teachers, Thailand implemented a five- year teacher education program in 2004 to replace the previous four year program. The change has provided the so desperately needed time to cover more and diverse content areas. It is also hope that a well-trained and competent teacher would be effective in meeting the diverse needs of the students while helping to elevate the standing of the teaching profession to a higher level than previously.
This five-year teacher education is based on Thailand
National Qualifications Framework for Higher Education or TQF (The Commission of Higher Education, 2003). The curriculum content is composed of 156 credit hours when are divided among four areas: general education with at least 30 credits, teaching profession with at least 46 credits, specialization with at least 78 credits, and free electives with at least 6 credits. In 2004, Faculty of Education, Chiang Mai University, required all student teachers to take a single teaching profession course on special education with 2 credit hours, and in 2007 a minor in special education was implemented. The graduate follow-up indicated that the course and the minor benefited them immensely in their work especially when dealing with students with disabilities in classroom during their student teaching and also as professionals. They also recommended that more credit hours and some basic hand-on activities be added in the teaching profession course. In addition, many students who graduated with minor in special education were be able to get jobs more easily than their peers who did not have a minor.In 2013 the Faculty of Education undertook a curriculum revision, where two additional teaching profession courses were added. They included, Contemporary Special Education (3 credit hours) and Multicultural Education (3 credit hours). These two courses were unique and valuable addition to the curriculum for teacher training because they place more emphasis on diversity that is appropriate for the diverse students in the northern area. Also, the Faculty decides to offer double majors to undergraduate students studying early childhood education and special education. A minor in multicultural education was also made available to undergraduate students. This is a huge step for
Chiang Mai University since there is no other university in the country that offers a major in multicultural education and only a few universities provide special education programs. For in-service teachers, the faculty has been offering special education master’s program since 2004 and both master’s and doctorate programs in multicultural education since 2014. Nevertheless, the special education and multicultural education are offered in discrete manner since these two programs are quite new, a comprehensive evaluation to determine their effectiveness in teaching and learning is still on- going.
In regard to effective preparation for better multicultural and inclusive classrooms, Voltz, Sims, and Nelson (2010) have recommended the four instructional approaches that support inclusion in diverse classrooms. They include differentiated instruction, universal design for learning, sheltered instruction, and multicultural education, and they could be summarized as flows:
The differentiated instruction is a supportive approach that embraces the academic needs of diverse student populations, especially those who are gifted or have disabilities. The differentiation of instruction can be conducted in different ways. For example, the instructional content could be customized to meet the specific needs of a particular student. The teacher could also modify her/his own teaching methods to appropriately accommodate the learning characteristics and efficacy of the student. Likewise, the learning content of difficulty level of assignments could be adjusted to match the student skill and ability levels.
A universal design for learning places greater focus on students who have physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. It ensures that learning activities are provided using multiple means of representation or modes of presentation (i.e., auditory, visual, and varying levels of complexity).
Also, the learning activities must provide students with the opportunity to react to what they are learning in various modes. Equally important, the design of the learning activities should be made appealing to learners with varying interests and aptitudes.
Like differentiated instruction and universal design, sheltered instruction also encompasses the needs of diverse learners, especially learners of other languages apart from their own native tongue.
Echevarria, Vogt, and Short (2004) define sheltered instruction by using the following eight broad elements:
a. The preparation element is where the teachers first identify lesson objectives which are aligned with the state and local standards.
b. The building background element requires that teachers link new content to students'
background experiences and helps students focus on unfamiliar vocabulary.
c. The comprehensible input element, requires that teachers use controlled vocabulary, sentence structure, and visuals and gestures to facilitate students' comprehension.
d. The strategies element refers to teaching students different approaches for organizing and retaining information associated with effective learning.
e. The interaction element provide guidance to teachers on how they should structure opportunities for students to enable them to interact with their peers in the learning process.
f. The practice and application element requires that teachers provide frequent opportunities for students to practice new language skills in context.
g. The lesson delivery element shows how teachers could pace their lessons more appropriately in order to enable students have the opportunity to engage more in their learning.
h. The review and assessment element places more emphasis on establishing standards and including language-based and content-based evaluations.
All of the above mentioned elements are essential in developing and implementing effective teaching strategies which embraces the needs of a student who has a limitation to understand and communicate the language.
Multicultural education is another approach that is important in today's diverse classrooms. As the name implies, multicultural education addresses the needs of culturally diverse populations of students. Banks (2001) defined this approach with the following five major dimensions:
a. The content integration which implies that curricula should include content about diverse populations and present information from diverse points of view.
b. The knowledge construction process pays greater attention on the extent to which teachers explore the influences of culture with students. For example, exploring how knowledge is constructed and how attitudes are formed in regards to what constitutes valuable or important knowledge.
c. Bias reduction refers to activities that are designed to examine and reduce bias in students’ attitudes.
d. Building an empowering school culture eradicates systemic factors such as the negative effects of tracking practices on diverse groups of students.
e. Equity pedagogy helps teachers use instructional strategies that embrace the
learning characteristics and cognitive styles of diverse populations.
Multicultural education supports educators in enhancing the educational experiences of all learners, including students from culturally diverse backgrounds. Together, differentiated instruction, sheltered instruction, universal design, and multicultural education address the broad array of students in today's classrooms. By using these approaches, teachers have the pedagogical tools they need to teach standards in diverse, inclusive classrooms.
The aforementioned approaches share some similarity in the strategies used for each. For example, encouraging teachers to vary how they present content to students is a common theme for all of the instructional approaches. This overlap suggests that teachers need not have a separate repertoire of strategies for each aspect of student diversity. Rather, it may be more helpful to consider implications of student diversity on the critical elements of instruction. Combining instruction with an awareness of student diversity is, therefore, the key for success.
4. Policy-Makers and Teacher Trainers Must Recognize the Crucial of Multicultural and Inclusive Education
Lewis (2013) points out that those developing and implementing policies around education and teacher training need to have a keen a sound understanding of multicultural and inclusive education if they are to succeed in promoting inclusion across all aspects of educational endeavor. Therefore, policy-makers and teacher trainers need to understand that inclusive education is not just a separate or one-off project and understand the importance of inter-sectorial approaches: including children in education often requires effective links with health, social welfare, water and sanitation, public transport and justice sectors.
To achieve the level of understanding needed among policy-makers and teacher trainers, advocacy and awareness-raising efforts need to present clear and consistent messages on the above points. There should be follow-up training and support (including regular visits to schools and inclusive education projects) so that policy- makers and trainers keep learning and keep improving the pre-service and in-service support they design for teachers.
5. Final Thoughts
In closing, effective teachers of today and beyond must be prepared for diverse student population in their classrooms and must, therefore, be equipped with appropriate attitudes, knowledge, and teaching skills and strategies that are designed
to meet the educational needs of all students. These well-trained teachers are like the component parts of a kaleidoscope whose mirrors and loose pieces of colored glass or plastic inside are arranged in such a way that enables us to many different and beautiful patterns. The kaleidoscope is dynamic and changes its beautiful images by using the diversity of color, shape, and size. So, too is a well-prepared teacher who is capable of creating a conductive learning environment for all of our diverse student population.
6. Acknowledgement
The author wishes to extend her special appreciation to Pius M. Kimondollo for his precious advice and feedback on this article and to Alex, my son, who has brought great joy into my life for just being uniquely himself.
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