International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
School reform should reflect an understanding and acceptance of all students as having talents and strengths
that can enhance their education. A perspective that affirms the talents and experiences of students and their
families can expand the people and roles included in the curriculum. School reform measures based on the
assumption that children of all families bring cultural and community strengths to their education would go a
long way toward providing more powerful learning environments for a higher number of youngsters. Besides,
school reform should be considered within the parameters of critical pedagogy. A critical education expects that
students will seek their own answers, be curious, and be questioning. Using critical pedagogy as a basis for
school reform renders very different policies for school than do traditional models of school reform. Even more
important than just increasing curricular options, critical pedagogy helps to expand teachers’ and schools’
perspectives about students’ knowledge and intellectual capabilities.
To enhance teachers preparation program to fit for multicultural education
In response to the diversified development of future society, it requires that the teacher not only has a solid
professional accomplishment in multicultural education background, but also has the idea of multiculturalism
and quality, with respecting different cultures and meeting the demand of the education of different ethnic and
social class. In order to better achieve this goal, the reform of teacher education curriculum is one of the
important ways. For example, ethnic history and culture, cultural anthropology can be added in the general
course to deepen the teacher’s understanding of the relationship between different culture and people, and
between different culture and education development. In addition, local ethnic arts, regional geography, history,
and local inspection courses can be set up to study the local history development, geographical environment,
way of living, community groups, and cultural forms to enhance teachers’ knowledge about multicultural and
the corresponding local culture knowledge, to form the identification of the local social multiculture, acceptance
and the sense of belonging, to develop the teacher’s multicultural attitude, and to promote the understanding of
the multicultural education. In the major of education courses, the multicultural education or the ethnic culture,
local culture, community culture and education, etc, should be also added to train teachers’ abilities of
observing, collecting, and recording local culture, ethnic culture and turning it into curriculum teaching. Add the
corresponding education research methods course; improve the future teachers’ ability of observing and
understanding the student class culture, the relationship between teachers and students, the class atmosphere, and
dealing with cultural differences.
To create and apply innovation curriculum to multicultural education
It is very important that the government attaches great importance to multicultural curriculum development
and implementation. So firstly, the governments should invest a lot of money; fully rely on the intelligence of
intellectuals in the areas of ethnic, cultural figures and front-line teachers to develop the multicultural curriculum
with region characteristics. Then, in the implementation stage after curriculum developed, the government will
take effective measures to ensure that the course can be implemented.
The curriculum reform should not only be based on the ethnic main-body culture; but also be paid attention to
the minority area’s culture and its ethnic culture. So we should develop curriculum that adapts to the minority
students and make them enjoy equal development opportunity. The selection of curriculum content ought to be
close to life and adaptive to the characteristics of students and schooling. The primary curriculum content in
China’s primary and middle schools should be built with the base of curriculum resources, promoting the
development of the school-based curriculum, and improving the art curriculum.
The future textbook should breaks the tradition that arranges the contents as subject-centered,
and regards social concern as the center to organize the contents. When new primary curriculum(such as
mathematics) established with the view to multicultural education, the four principles should be adopted:
model principle the principle of situational, the principle of acceptability, and 4 readable addition
principle, and three elastic and flexible design ways: elements-additive, system-integrated, and topicexpanding
type(Sun, 2012). In addition, the following four curricula may be constructed to promote
multicultural education:
(1) Discipline curriculum i.e. branched or subject course, is a kind of discipline centered to weave.
Discipline curriculum has the advantage of helping systemically imparting human culture knowledge, and
helping students form the systemic cultural knowledge. It will help students systemically understand and know
their native cultural knowledge, objectively regard the national culture and other differences in national culture,
through the discipline curriculum implementing multicultural education, and then to form the concept of
multicultural education. For example, as to the language discipline, the school can combine the school
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