Multicultural population including children through multicultural population influx has increased. Together with this, new cultures come and interact with the original culture, thus causing multicultural education at school became important. Following...
Multicultural population including children through multicultural population influx has increased. Together with this, new cultures come and interact with the original culture, thus causing multicultural education at school became important. Following this, though multicultural education is being conducted at school, however there are limitations in the using of creativity experiment activity time, teaching learning method, teacher’s burden, etc. These cases bring the author of this research comes to an idea to perform multicultural education during the general academic class time so the process can be more effectively carried, and do the study about effect of multicultural education program utilizing language textbook on cultural awareness and critical thinking skills of elementary school students. The research problems are as follows.
First, in what form does multicultural education program utilizing language textbooks can be implemented? Second, is there any difference in multicultural awareness between the experimental group and the control group? Third, is there any difference in critical thinking skill between the experimental group and the control group?
To solve the problems, multicultural education program utilizing language textbooks were introduced in 14 sessions to the experimental group, while textbooks focusing in language teaching were performed in the control group. The changing of the multicultural awareness and critical thinking skill were observed. The results are as follows.
First, multicultural awareness results, showed to be higher in experimental group, and the average improvement of the multicultural awareness in pre and post-test’ results of the experimental group can be seen. From this result, multicultural education program utilizing language textbooks is proven to have positive effect on the multicultural awareness’ enhancement.
Second, critical thinking skill analysis tests showed significantly difference between experimental and control groups, with increased average scores in experimental group’s pre and post-test’s results. Moreover, after the program being introduced, the critical thinking skill result of the experimental group is found to be higher than the control group. Pre and post-test results of the experimental group, except the sub elements, all showed increasing trend in the average improvement. From these, multicultural education program utilizing the language textbook is seen to have positive impact on improving critical thinking skills of the students.
Third, qualitative analysis through students’ activity paper and class impression showed results that students have interest and concern toward various cultures and have commitment to respect them. It can be seen that the students want to learn others’ opinion and have initiative to tell their own opinions through active, subjective, and vigorous discussion.
The results of these studies showed that multicultural education programs utilizing language textbook has positive impact on students' cultural awareness and critical thinking skill. This result is suggested that multicultural education can being applied in regular academic class and can be utilize together with the academic goal.
In the future, more researches involving various grades and middle and high school students and using various subjects to apply multicultural education program are suggested.
* Keywords: multicultural education, multicultural awareness, critical thinking