In recent decades, Korea has undergone a marked demographic change due to the constant influx of international migrants. Yet, while Korea has rapidly been turning into a multicultural society, there exist direct or indirect discrimination against and ...
In recent decades, Korea has undergone a marked demographic change due to the constant influx of international migrants. Yet, while Korea has rapidly been turning into a multicultural society, there exist direct or indirect discrimination against and exclusion of migrants based on nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, or language. This social injustice can be attributed to the macro-level social structure, which has been built up so solidly over so long a time that it reproduces inequities in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. Due to such deep-rooted structural inequities, many migrants suffer from human rights violations, with no adequate protection by laws and institutions. In order to realize a multicultural society in the true sense of the word, it is essential to minimize disparities deeply ingrained in society, and education can play a leading role in eliciting efforts to effectuate this social change.
Multicultural education can contribute to achieving this goal by improving attitudes toward those from different cultural backgrounds. However, the current multicultural education practiced in schools has the following limitations. Firstly, multicultural education focuses narrowly on promoting understanding of cultural diversity among countries, which is generally referred to as the tourist approach. Students are unlikely to put aside their prejudice against migrants and learn to participate in addressing social issues merely by being aware of foreign countries’ cultures. Secondly, most approaches to multicultural education ascribe prejudice and discrimination against migrants to personal characteristics such as lack of cultural understanding on the part of some citizens in the receiving country, thereby overlooking structural factors. For this reason, students can hardly learn to articulate their critical perceptions on existing discriminatory structures that vitiate the principle of equity and discuss ways to ensure minoritized populations’ rights. Thirdly, in the current social studies curriculum, the issues of migrants’ human rights are seldom dealt with. Since multicultural education and human rights education are conducted as separate areas, students have little chance to learn in detail about migrant rights and structural inequities that infringe their rights.
Given these limitations, multicultural education associated with human rights education must be practiced in schools. The present study makes a case for ‘human rights–based multicultural education’ that favors a focus on discrimination against migrants as viewed through the lens of structural causes and migrants’ human rights. This approach aims to help students not only view people with different cultures as those who deserve equal rights but also reflect critically on structural inequities to seek positive social changes. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of human rights–based multicultural instruction on middle school students’ multicultural attitudes compared to cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction, which is the most prevalent framework currently used in Korean schools. Toward this end, this study established research hypotheses as follows:
● The main hypothesis : Human rights–based multicultural instruction is more effective in improving middle school students’ multicultural attitudes than cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction.
● Sub-hypotheses
1. Human rights–based multicultural instruction is more effective in improving middle school students’ multicultural attitudes in the cognitive domain than cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction.
2. Human rights–based multicultural instruction is more effective in improving middle school students’ multicultural attitudes in the affective domain than cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction.
3. Human rights–based multicultural instruction is more effective in improving middle school students’ multicultural attitudes in the behavioral domain than cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction.
In order to verify the research hypotheses, the present study conducted the experiment at 2 middle schools in Seoul. A total of 283 students in fourteen 7th grade classes—129 students in six classes at A middle school and 154 students in eight classes at B middle school—were finally selected as participants. These 7th-graders were randomly classified into two groups: the treatment group, who receives human rights-based multicultural instruction, and the control group, who takes part in cultural diversity-based multicultural instruction. After 3 lessons were offered to both groups, changes in three domains of multicultural attitudes—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—were measured through survey responses as a pretest and a posttest.
The present study used a modified version of Kang (2012)’s multicultural attitude scale, which was developed based on Munroe and Pearson’s MASQUE, to measure changes in middle school students’ multicultural attitudes. Multicultural attitudes—the dependent variable—were measured in cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains.
According to the results of multiple regression analysis, the treatment group showed a higher increase in multicultural attitude scores than the control group. That is, human rights-based multicultural instruction had statistically significant effects on the improvement of students’ multicultural attitudes in cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors. Thus, the main hypothesis and three sub-hypotheses were all verified, which demonstrates that this new approach to multicultural education is an effective way to enhance multicultural attitudes.
The results of the present study provide the following three pedagogical implications. Firstly, this study suggests a new approach to multicultural education—human rights-based multicultural education—that deals with human rights and structural inequities as the core content. This approach was developed based on the view that students can have desirable attitudes toward diverse cultures only if they view those from different cultural backgrounds as equal beings and critically understand discrimination that migrants experience in society. Human rights-based multicultural instruction, which was implemented in this experiment, can not only provide new perspectives on multicultural education but also suggest appropriate educational content that can maximize educational effects.
Secondly, the present study suggests detailed ways of multicultural education that can be easily practiced in schools. Previous studies are normally limited to the analysis of the national social studies curriculum and textbooks or theoretical discussion. In order to expand this research topic into practice in schools, this study devised practicable lesson plans of human rights-based multicultural education and verified the validity of those lessons by measuring the educational effects in schools.
Thirdly, the present study provides significant implications for how to improve Korean multicultural education that is narrowly focused on cultural diversity among nations. Given the results of this study, if multicultural education deals with inequity and human rights issues that have arisen in multicultural society as well, students’ attitudes toward different cultures can be promoted far more effectively. Therefore, this study suggests how to address the problems of the current multicultural education within the social studies curriculum by integrating the issues of human rights and structural inequities into multicultural education.