Three case studies: Experienced teachers' reflections on their beliefs about multicultural education and their classroom practice.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Multicultural Education has recently become the topic of research in education. In the past twenty years, researchers have developed new ways of thinking about multicultural education. They developed definition and models to describe what they thought should happen to make education more multicultural. Then the researchers conducted studies to evaluate and describe what was being done. However, most of these studies were performed on their own pre-service teacher education classes. The few studies that were conducted in k-12 classrooms compared what was occurring to current theory. There are apparently no studies that investigated how experienced teachers think about multicultural education, how their beliefs have influenced their classroom practice, and how they have learned about multicultural education.
This study adds to the literature on multicultural education by exploring the ways in which experienced teachers think about multicultural education and how they implement their beliefs in the classroom. In order to understand the participants' conceptions of multicultural education, each teacher was interviewed and observed in three classroom situations and followed up with another interview. Each participant also provided me with lesson plans and other artifacts from their classroom that represent their thinking and actions about multicultural education. The data was presented in case studies and analyzed to determine what themes were present. Cross case analysis was also conducted. Overall, the findings suggested that teachers had different perceptions of the goals of multicultural education, depending on what they believed about diversity issues, who the students were, and what kind of school they worked in. This kind of multiculturalism could be described as <italic>Situational Multicultural Education</italic>. The study concluded that training programs that emphasize understanding of personal experiences with prejudice and discrimination would be the most effective way of providing experienced educators with the skills needed to implement multicultural education in the classroom.