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9ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЕ ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ: ПРОБЛЕМЫ, НАУКА, ПРАКТИКА
И.М. Синагатуллин, О.Г. Калашникова ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ПОЛИКУЛЬТУРНОЙ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТИ БУДУЩИХ УЧИТЕЛЕЙ
Ключевые слова: поликультурная компетентность, будущий учитель, культурное и этническое разнообразие, знания, навыки.
Аннотация: Авторы статьи вкратце анализируют природу поликультурного образования и рассматривают некоторые вопросы формирования поликультурной компетентности будущего учителя. В работе также обсуждаются результаты анкетирования, которые свидетельствуют о том, что включение в программу подготовки будущих учителей поликультурного компонента оказывает заметное влияние на их личностный и профессиональный рост.
doi: 10.21510/1817-3292-2018-1-20-24
The ideas of multicultural education were largely triggered by the civil rights movement led by African Americans. Inspired by this movement, an ethnic revitalization upsurge began among the minority groups in other parts of the world. In many countries the integration of cultural and ethnic issues into school curricula traveled a painstaking road from assimilation to cultural pluralism. From a methodological perspective, multicultural education is determined by the principles of freedom, democracy, and human rights. All children and adolescents should have access to quality education, regardless of their ethnic, racial, language, social class, religious, and gender backgrounds. The ideas and fundamentals of multicultural education are very close to those of global education and intercultural education (4; 5; 6). Multicultural education is characterized by several dimensions. Content integration, the first dimension, necessitates the infusion of cultural and ethnic content into subject area instruction. The second dimension, the knowledge construction process, relates to the extent to which teachers help students understand and determine the impact of cultural assumptions and biases on knowledge construction within a subject area. The third dimension, prejudice reduction, encompasses an idea that educators must help learners develop tolerant and positive attitudes toward different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. The fourth dimension, equity pedagogy, is aimed at facilitating the academic progress of children. An empowering school culture and social structure, the fifth dimension, necessitates all members of the school staff to participate in creating a school culture that empowers learners from different backgrounds and promotes racial, ethnic, and social class equity (2). In educational institutions of different type, multicultural education is often perceived as an add-on subject area. Banks maintains in this respect: "When I asked one school administrator what efforts were being taken to implement multicultural education in his school district, he told me that the district had 'done" multicultural education last year and that it was now initiating other reforms such as the empowering of the students' reading scores. This administrator not only misunderstood the nature of multicultural education, but he also did not understand that it could help raise the students' reading scores" (1, 4).
We are of opinion that it is impossible to design a multicultural approach that could perfectly fit every classroom or university auditorium. In the world there are two widely known ways of thinking about, and dealing with, multicultural education: the universalistic or multicultural-for-all-approach and particularistic approach. The universalistic approach seeks to find better ways to address members of all ethnic and cultural groups in a given class, school, or a larger community. The multicultural-for-all-approach is concerned with meeting the needs of a particular cultural group in a specifically organized environment (in a bilingual school, in a rural school, in an institution for speech-impaired children, etc.). In societies with a stable ethnic and language minority makeup, it is easier to multiculturalize the educational process through bilingual
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education: Bilingual education incorporates a parallel study of the minority and majority cultures, therefore it provides a good framework for effective implementation of the ideas of multicultural education.
Multicultural competence includes three components: knowledge base, attitudes, and skills. Knowledge base is a salient component of any education. Enhancing a multicultural knowledge-base necessitates learning as much as possible about the ethnic and cultural groups among which prospective teachers study and live. For example, preservice students are required to gain insights into the essence of ethno-psychological peculiarities of these ethnic and cultural groups.
We associate the phenomenon of attitude with an educator's way of thinking and disposition toward working in a culturally diverse environment. A multicultural teacher needs to possess a positive attitude to diversity and understand that the lifestyles of some other cultures, even if they are strange and unacceptable in the teacher's native culture, may represent an important element of the indigenous ways of life in those "other" cultures.
Candidate teachers are required to possess a set of specific skills to address the challenges of the increasing diversity. They are required to possess classroom management skills. Working with a diversity of students, the quality of classroom management is largely dependent on how well the educator knows students' socialization patterns, their interactional and relational styles, learning styles and cognitive preferences, and their core values. Much depends on how effectively the educator addresses ethnic, gender, disability, language, and social class issues. In a multicultural classroom, stressful and frustrating situations emerge more often than in a standard class. Teachers get frustrated owing to a lack of knowledge about theirs students' historical and cultural background, their behavioral and cognitive characteristics and traits, and about their families and communities.
Future teachers have to know about, and differentiate between, each student's individual diversity. That may take the form of the differences in age, character, manners of interaction, styles of clothing, hairstyles, modes of socializing, preferences to some favorite activity or pastime (hobby), their devotion to a genre of arts or music, and their to liking of certain sites on the Internet. All this means that each member of an ethnic, cultural, religious or language group simultaneously belongs to other subcultures determined by an individual's personal inclinations, interests, drives, and other explicit and implicit characteristics. One young girl may be keenly interested in modern pop music; another female student's favorite pastime may be devoted to cooking and sharing her cooking skills with her peers. Still another student may be fond of traveling, an enterprise that may call her to learn subsequent foreign languages or at least some of the essentials of the spoken languages of the countries she plans to visit.
The issues of multicultural education are being conceptualized at the Department of Pedagogy and Methods of Pre-School and Elementary Education in Birsk Branch of Bashkir State University. We develop candidate teachers' multicultural competence through the lecture course "Multicultural upbringing of prospective teachers of elementary school." The course includes the topics such as:
• The essence of multicultural education,
• Multicultural vs. civic education,
• Psychological aspects of multicultural education,
• Multicultural education vs. ethno-pedagogy,
• Working in multiethnic and multicultural classes.
During the lecture course we ensure would-be teachers' understanding of the fact that the top and uppermost idea of multicultural education is to create all necessary conditions for all students (regardless of their ethnic, cultural, gender, and social class background) to improve academic achievement. It is necessary to create a classroom environment that permits to address
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the ethnic and cultural needs of all children, to maintain a positive and tolerant attitude to the diversity of students and to the notions of alien and foreign, and to provide extra guidance and support for the children with alternative behavior and alternative health. A good thing is to keep a journal of one's observations in the multicultural classroom. A teacher may write in the journal the information on children's behavior patterns, academic growth, their psychological and social changes, and on the manners of their peer relationships. In fact the teacher may keep several journals and conduct informal research of each child's development from different perspectives.
Among other themes, we convey to the candidate educators knowledge of the factors causing different ailments and psycho-emotional imbalances. Physiological and psychic ailments children and adults experience may be caused by some common factors. Some physiological ailments are caused by traditions pursued by a given group. The very fact that a definite custom or tradition may ultimately result in an ailment is often vaguely perceived. For example, the investigations undertaken by scientists proved that prolonged use of nas among Iranian and Pakistani teenagers and adults irritates the mouth cavity and causes different ailments, including cancer. Analogous negative effects were caused by chewing betel nut in India. A considerable number of U.S. children and teenagers look stout and obese, and the factors causing children's stoutness are many and can be, at large part, attributed to a specificity of contemporary American lifestyles. As a rule, a child's stoutness may be inherited and coupled with the intake of calorie-rich meals and beverages. The phenomenon of obesity and stoutness among the young is taking shape in beer-drinking countries, such as, for example, Germany. Conversely, certain percentage of Cambodians and Lao carry a genetic defect called thalassemia, a form of anemia accounting for their dainty look and inability to gain weight. Thalassemia may also be found among some Mediterranean ethnic groups. The symptoms are similar to that of anemia: fatigue, retarded growth, and paleness (3).
We alert students to the fact that urban residents complain on their health more often than their rural counterparts because of the ever-aggravating ecological condition of air and drinking water and an abundance of continuous stresses and frustrating situations they encounter and suffer from. Urban communities boast a higher percentage of heart diseases, arthritis, stroke, and obesity. As for the last misfortune, not only teenagers but even a great number of elementary students are affected by overweight in industrialized countries.
Despite a positive impact on education, technological progress has brought about numerous problems related to students' health. Overuse of computers and television entails an increased intellectual load and visual tension. Elementary and secondary school children overdose in watching horror, action, and thriller movies depicting scenes of murder, fierce fighting, monster vision, sexual abuse, alien sightings, pornography, and vampirism. Continuous stresses caused by such movies and scenes, coupled with other problems related to the school environment, community, and family, emotionally exhaust students.
We promote future teachers' competence by providing them with knowledge about the attitudes various cultures attach to food and dining practices. The notion of health is closely related to the food ways of different ethnic and cultural groups. According to modern medical research, eating healthy food is associated with consumption of low-calorie, low-fat, and vitamin-rich products. But, these modern, scientific requirements may not be congruent with some "healthy food concepts" peculiar to definite cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic groups. For example, consumption of fatty meat and fatty soup, least recommended by modern medicine, is a normal, ethnically praised practice among rural Bashkirs, Tatars, Kazaks, Uzbeks, and Kirghiz. In their communities, fatty meat and fatty bullion is believed to offer a special strengths to man. Fatty pork (or pure fat) is a national food in Ukrainian communities. A balanced use (increasing or reducing) of fat- and calorie-rich food depends on a person's occupation. People whose occupation is based on physical labor usually do not suffer from fat-rich-meal aftereffects and
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sediments, because they lose a considerable quantiity of calories regularly exercising their muscles; whereas for people involved in motion-deficit professions, consuming great quantities of calorie-rich food is unlikely desirable.
Fifth-year students who are required to write field projects on pedagogy willingly select topics devoted to multicultural education. Most of the students prepare experimental papers and carry out experiments in elementary schools in which they student teach. They select the themes such as "Developing elementary students' multicultural competence," "Teaching in ethnically diverse classes," "Using folk pedagogy during extra-curricular time," "Working with a diversity of students in a rural school" and other related topics.
In 2017 we conducted a survey among 15 fifth-year preservice teachers. Upon graduation these students are expected to work in urban and rural schools of Bashkortostan and other multicultural settings of Russia. The questionnaire consisted of series of items on multicultural education and related issues. The participants were asked to provide written accounts; in some cases they were interviewed on a question-answer basis. Below we present some of the students' sample statements.
• I understand multicultural education as an education that is needed in our republic. In Bashkortostan more than 10 ethnic groups live in harmony....
• When I was a schoolgirl I never heard of multicultural education. Now I am aware of the fact that such an education is necessary in all educational institutions. In our rural school
there were 11 students - Russians, Mari, and Tatars among them..... I guess that I will
work with a diverse student population when I start my career.
• I am a Mari student. If I work in a class with only Mari students, I will, nevertheless, tell kids about cultures and customs of other ethnic groups.
• Equipped with the Internet, we today can find any information on any nationality.
• Not only Russia, but also other countries are becoming increasingly multicultural.
• Multicultural education is closely connected with ethno-pedagogy. I think that the former is wider in scope that the latter.
• Human diversity brings forth the necessity of multiethnic education..... Interestingly,
there are a lot of ethnically mixed families in Russia. Their children seem to possess two native languages!
The participants began exhibiting a greater understanding of the nature of multicultural education and human diversity and demonstrated a deeper understanding of other domains of education and everyday life. The candidate teachers became more competent in their ability to interpret the fundamentals of their future profession.
Future teachers who are bound to work in multicultural settings (Baskortostan represents a multicultural and multiethnic republic), should continually enhance their multicultural competency, because they will have to work in culturally pluralistic classes. Today multicultural classes exist not only in metro areas but also in most of rural setting. An important task is that future teachers should not only enhance their own multicultural competence but also should know how to enhance the multicultural competence of pupils who will be in their charge. Prospective teachers should gain more knowledge and master their techniques and strategies of instruction and interaction with children. A good chance is provided when they student teach in schools. A very effective way of learning about human diversity is traveling about and seeing one's own country and the world. Among other ways of achieving multicultural growth is self-education.
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References
1. Banks, J.A. Multicultural education: Characteristics and goals. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: issues and perspectives (3rd ed., pp.3-31). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1997.
2. Banks, J.A. Multicultural education: characteristics and goals. In J. A. Banks and C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (pp. 3-30) (4th ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
3. Dresser, N. Multicultural manners: new rules of etiquette for a changing society. New York, NY: John Wiley &
Son, 1996.
4. Cushner, K. Human diversity in action: Developing intercultural competencies for the classroom (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
5. Sinagatullin, I. M. Fifteen biggest problems in education and how to solve them. New York: NovaScience Publishers, 2013. - 202 p..
6. Sinagatullin I. M. Developing pre-service elementary teachers' multicultural competency: Some reflections from Russia // Teacher Education & Practice. - 2015. -Vol.28. -No.1. -P.110-125.
