The Impact of Multicultural Education on High School Students: A Case Study in Rise International School in Erbil
Hakan Bilgin
English Language Teaching Department, Tishk International University, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
Email: [email protected]
Published: February 22, 2023
Abstract
With the increasing impact of globalization and some other problems, the world is expected to experience significant immigration waves. Such phenomena lead to more ambiguous political borders and accelerated cultural exchange among societies. Thus, there is a growing demand to include every citizen with different backgrounds into the new social and political context of the future world. In this sense, a growing interest in multicultural education takes place in the countries where minorities and aboriginal inhabitants with different ethnicity appear. Multicultural education aims to provide individuals with the sense of sustainability, environmental awareness and the sense of renaturalization along with multilingualism and multiculturalism. This study examines cultural aspects, archetypical notions and power dynamics in the implementation of education system in an international school in Erbil, especially in subjects of main language, foreign language(s) and history education within multicultural education context. The students’ multicultural awareness will be measured through a questionnaire. In this study, qualitative and quantitative data is used together. The students were given a questionnaire about multiculturalism, and the results were put into statistics to evaluate. The findings indicate that students are more motivated in lessons in a multicultural context. They are more aware of their physical environment, yet they refuse some social norms.
Keywords: Multicultural education, cultural education, minorities, foreign language education
DOI: 10.23918/vesal2023v53