The dramatic demographic shift in Korea is more apparent in the schools than anywhere else. But this change in the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the student population is not the problem. The problem lies in the way teachers have respo...
The dramatic demographic shift in Korea is more apparent in the schools than anywhere else. But this change in the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the student population is not the problem. The problem lies in the way teachers have responded to that change. Concurrently multicultural education scholars have become persistent in their arguments that teachers should become knowledgeable that about cultural diversity and develop pedagogical skills and attitudes to teach these students.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the teacher’s competence including experience, belief, attitude, knowledge, and self-efficacy on multicultural education. For this purpose, a total of 143 elementary school teachers in the both general and special classes participated in this survey. The survey was composed four sub-categories: experience, attitude, outcome expectancy belief, and efficacy. The major results of this study could be summarized as follows: First, the special teachers had fewer experience on multicultural education than the general teachers. Second, There were no differences in the levels of attitude and efficacy between the two groups. Third, the special teachers showed relatively higher level of outcome expectancy belief than the general teachers. Fourth, the both of special and general teachers showed higher scores in the outcome expectancy belief than self-efficacy. In the final part of this article, discussions and several implications on the multicultural education related with special education were provided.