Exploring the multicultural efficacy of korean pre-service secondary school teachers and their experience toward multiculturalism and multicultural education

This study aims to investigate Korean pre-service secondary school teachers (hereafter ‘KPSSTs’), who constitute the future leaders of multicultural education, and their level of awareness and experience toward multiculturalism and multicultural education, and to find ways to facilitate multicultural education in secondary schools as well as designing and running a pre-service secondary school teacher training program on multicultural education in colleges of education in Korea. 166 KPSSTs from 3 different universities in Seoul participated in the survey which examines their experience with multiculturalism and multicultural education and their level of awareness on these issues. The results were as follows: First of all, most KPSSTs had not experienced multiculturalism directly, but only indirectly through media. A slight majority of them had never had classes on multiculturalism, most of them had never taught students from multicultural families. Second, multicultural efficacy, which is the confidence in a teacher’s competence to teach students from culturally diverse backgrounds in a multicultural classroom environment, was average. Generally, KPSSTs were highly confident in guiding students to reduce prejudice and encourage them to foster mutual respect. However, they had low confidence in expert knowledge on multicultural education such as its contents, methods, and providing detailed descriptions related to multicultural education. Third, KPSSTs tended to approach multiculturalism by focusing primarily on race and ethnic group, which showed a lack of understanding on the broad scope of cultural diversity. © 2015 SERSC.