Graduate Students' Experiences of Multicultural Education

Abstract

The concept of multiculturalism, which emerged for the first time in the 1960s and is much discussed today, has played important roles in the transformation of social structures. Naturally, education is the main factor in this transformation. This has led to the emergence of another concept. This concept, which will appear as multicultural education, has been the cornerstone of peace and coexistence in some societies. Some societies have not been able to realise sufficient sensitivity and transformations in this regard. In this study, it was tried to examine the experience and the process of experiencing the course that classroom teachers took during their postgraduate education regarding both the concept of multiculturalism and the concept of multicultural education. In this context, the phenomenological approach, which is a qualitative research design, was adopted. Research data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Twelve classroom teachers who received postgraduate education participated in the study. The interviews were conducted after the end of the 15-week "Multicultural Education" course. Interpretative phenomenological analysis method was used to analyse the data. At the end of the research, the participants defined the concept of multiculturalism as cultural diversity, cultural sensitivity, richness, freedom from prejudice, respect and harmony, while the experiences and gains were expressed as discovery, individual experiences, personal and professional development.