Journal for Multicultural Education最新文献

Purpose

This study aims to explore the experiences of newly resettled refugee-background high school students participating in the Teen Response program, a community-based initiative to assist refugee-background adolescents (RBAs) in navigating educational and career opportunities in the midwestern USA.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examined twenty-two RBAs through survey and focus groups.

Findings

The findings reveal significant growth and transformation in the students' self-efficacy and advocacy skills. This growth underscores the critical role of social support and community engagement in helping RBAs, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others in pursuing educational and career goals.

Originality/value

This study contributes new insights into the community-based support programs for RBAs, focusing on enhancing self-efficacy and advocacy. It offers valuable implications for developing effective support frameworks and recommends future research on these approaches.

Purpose

Prior research reveals that teachers have lower job satisfaction when they have more Black students, but this work does not consider how different aspects of work conditions – and the increasing diversity of students beyond a Black/White binary – may matter. This study aims to examine the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of work conditions and the racial/ethnic compositions of the classes they teach.

Design/methodology/approach

This study leverages data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study. Analyses consist of both descriptive statistics and multilevel regression modeling.

Findings

Findings show that teachers’ satisfaction with working conditions varies in relation to the racial/ethnic composition of their students. Increase in the percent of Black, Latinx and Asian American students in a teacher’s classroom, was associated with a decrease in satisfaction with community involvement and student behavior. For increase in Latinx and Asian American students, this study finds significant decrease in satisfaction with measures of pedagogical and job support. For measures of school leadership and responsiveness to professional development needs, this study sees no significant relationship, which suggests that perceptions of some working conditions are more strongly tied to classroom demographics than others.

Originality/value

This work adds nuance to previous research on teacher job satisfaction by exploring satisfaction with various working conditions and how it varies in relation to classroom racial composition. This study concludes with a discussion of potential explanations for observed differences in teacher satisfaction, as well as potential ways to address these differences.

Purpose

Islamic culture believes the evil eye can cause distress, mental illness, physical illness and even death through envious glances. However, the gap was highlighted about the influence of college students’ religious beliefs, particularly those of the evil eyes, on their academic failures. Based on this notion, this study aims to explore how evil eye beliefs affect students’ academic experiences with failures in a culturally diverse educational environment.

Design/methodology/approach

This study included 18 female Sunni-Muslim students from Kuwait University by using Heidegger’s phenomenological framework. The study conducted 18 face-to-face interviews over four weeks and analyzed the data using NVivo 14 with thematic analysis and phenomenological assumptions.

Findings

This in-depth study shows how the pervasive belief in the evil eye in academic settings challenges students. The study found how this cultural belief affects students’ mental health, academic performance and social interactions. The study also explored cultural sensitivity’s wider implications, how educational institutions face the psychological stress this belief causes, cultural effects on academic failure and student coping mechanisms.

Research limitations/implications

Because the study was qualitative and exploratory, the findings provide depth rather than breadth of understanding about students’ evil eye perceptions. The study does not consider the possibility that “evil eye” beliefs might be psychological delusions, complicating cultural beliefs and mental health symptoms. This oversight makes it challenging to select participants who have genuinely experienced evil eye effects. Teachers interviewed students who might withhold private information or alter their responses due to power dynamics or a desire to appear positive. This setting might bias data, reducing its authenticity and depth.

Practical implications

The study suggests that academic institutions should address cultural beliefs to support students’ education and academic performance rather than promoting hate, evil eye and oppression.

Originality/value

This study highlights the need for academic environments to address and mitigate the evil eye belief’s unique challenges, creating a more inclusive and supportive learning environment for all students.

Purpose

Ethnomathematics can help understand math concepts but is challenging in countries like Indonesia and Thailand due to its complexity. This study explores how math educators in these countries view integrating ethnomathematics into teaching. The purpose of this study is to see its importance in helping students understand and apply math concepts in different cultural settings. By looking at educators’ opinions, the study seeks strategies to effectively use ethnomathematics in education.

Design/methodology/approach

The research used a mixed-methods approach with questionnaires and interviews to gather data from 138 Indonesian and 145 Thai educators, including lecturers, teachers and preservice teachers. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to classify responses. Qualitative data analysis involves reducing, presenting, concluding and validating data to ensure accuracy. This approach aimed to provide a complete understanding of educators’ views on ethnomathematics.

Findings

The quantitative results showed strong support among Indonesian educators (average score 4.77) for integrating cultural elements in math education. Thai educators were slightly less enthusiastic (average score 4.57), but still positive. Interviews revealed unique cross-cultural perspectives and emphasized the need for theoretical and practical applications of ethnomathematics in the classroom. This perspective highlights the importance of social context and interaction in learning and calls for innovative teaching methods that use students’ cultural backgrounds.

Originality/value

This study offers new insights into how Indonesian and Thai educators view ethnomathematics, considering their cultural contexts. It underscores the importance of adapting teaching approaches to fit each country’s cultural characteristics, showing the close link between ethnomathematics and cultural development.

Purpose

This study aims to investigate preschool teachers' perspectives on diversity in the unique educational context of Türkiye, a nation-state often underrepresented in the predominantly Western-centric diversity literature.

Design/methodology/approach

Recognizing teachers as critical content integrators, the study involved semi-structured interviews to explore their views on diversity within early childhood education.

Findings

Analysis of the interviews revealed two key themes: first, the challenge of maintaining nation-state ideology, where teachers balance fostering a national identity with acknowledging diverse cultural backgrounds; and second, a willingness among educators to embrace diversity, highlighting their efforts to create inclusive, multicultural classrooms.

Practical implications

The authors call for developing context-specific teacher education programs addressing diversity in depth, equipping teachers to effectively promote context-specific multicultural education that would be different from Western countries.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is original in researching preschool teachers’ understandings of multicultural education in a nation-state country.

Purpose

Curriculum supplementation by teachers is an agelong tradition, and the widespread use of the internet has increased the use of online resources in the classroom. This paper aims to explore preservice teachers’ views on multicultural science resources and make a case for the representation of the changing demographics of the American classroom in online resource development.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a qualitative interpretive approach, this study explored the perceptions of preservice teachers on their access to and use of online science resources through the conceptual lens of the pedagogical design capacity framework (Brown, 2009) and the first two principles of critical and cultural approaches to ambitious science teaching (C²AST) (Thompson et al., 2021).

Findings

Participants in this study have not accessed culturally relevant online science resources. They adapt the resources to meet the demographic needs of their class.

Practical implications

This study aims to support the need for content creators of online educational repositories to develop multicultural science resources.

Originality/value

This work not only gives a background to why preservice early childhood science teachers could not access multicultural online resources, but it also makes a case for integrating skills needed for teachers to create culturally relevant resources into teacher training programs.

Purpose

Most research about combating the whiteness of teacher education neglects to analyze the whiteness of the higher education institutional contexts housing teacher preparation programs. This gap also holds true within research exploring Minority Serving Institutions’ potential to graduate large numbers of teachers of color. Consequently, this paper aims to argue that without strong institutional commitments to dismantle the whiteness of higher education, Hispanic Serving Institutions (a type of Minority Serving Institution) compromise their potential to robustly prepare and graduate K-12 teachers of color.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on an inductive qualitative analysis of interviews with teacher educators of color and students and a deductive qualitative analysis of publicly available data at two Hispanic Serving Institutions, this paper uses Critical Race Theory tenets of lived experience and intersectionality.

Findings

Both institutions enacted diversity commitments. However, findings demonstrated that institutional support neglected the multiple oppressive systems impacting students of color. Additionally, prioritizing (White) research norms invisibilized faculty of color in higher ranked professorial roles and compromised faculty pedagogy.

Originality/value

Findings address lesser known analyses of how the intersections between institutional climate, teacher education programs and the unique Hispanic Serving Institutional context impact student/preservice teacher and faculty/teacher educator racial diversity, demonstrate the necessity of using an intersectional lens when analyzing preservice teacher and teacher educator of color experiences, and demonstrate how racially diverse, multicultural higher education contexts can still invisibilize diversity.

Purpose

Research shows that family is influential to African Americans in college choice (Chapman et al., 2018; Chapman et al., 2020; Freeman, 2005; Hines et al., 2019; Lowry, 2017; Williams, 2018). However, it often overlooks unique, African-rooted characteristics of African American families and culture. This study aimed to explore whether and how these characteristics shape college choice for these students.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with six, first-year African American students at an urban university. The data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis.

Findings

The major themes showed the influence of family, community and spirituality in shaping participants’ college choice decisions and perception of higher education.

Originality/value

In addition to identifying specific family members who were influential to African Americans in college choice, this work highlighted the role of communities as a whole in shaping these students’ decisions and creating supportive environments. It also showed the importance of these students’ relationship with God through the college choice process. The work can guide researchers and educators in considering African American families and culture as strengths in helping these students through college choice.

Purpose

This work aims to introduce basic principles of the Anthropological Theory of Didactics applied to enhance the multicultural sensitivity in engineering statistics classroom. The approach emphasizes understanding learners’ socio-cultural backgrounds to tailor educational practices that resonate more effectively with engineering students.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper examines the application of the Anthropological Theory of Didactics within the context of statistics education for engineering students. This study aims to explore how integrating socio-cultural dimensions of learning can make teaching statistics more effective and engaging.

Findings

The application of the Anthropological Theory of Didactics reveals significant potential for enhancing the educational experience in statistics. By acknowledging and incorporating the diverse cultural perspectives of students, educators can develop teaching methods that are not only more inclusive but also more engaging. This methodology encourages a deeper connection between statistical concepts and engineering practices, aiding in the conceptualization of statistics among future engineers.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the field by providing concrete activities and pedagogical strategies that use the Anthropological Theory of Didactics in a novel context. These activities are designed to foster a better integration of statistical education with engineering, highlighting the theory’s versatility and its relevance to modern educational challenges. This innovative approach promises to enhance how statistics is taught to engineering students, potentially leading to more profound educational outcomes and a stronger grasp of statistical applications in engineering.