Current Educational Practices from Multicultural Perspectives in Oromia Secondary Schools: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the current educational practices from multicultural perspective in secondary schools of Eastern Wollega Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. To realize this, survey method was adopted to collect data from 5 experts, 10 principals, 51 teachers, and 102 students. The students were select randomly by using simple random sampling techniques while experts, principals, and teachers were selected by the availability sampling method. Questionnaires and interviews were used for data collections. The collected data were analyzed by frequencies, percentages, and narration of words. The findings revealed that respondents were highly aware of multicultural education. However, it was not implemented into educational practices. Furthermore, lack of skills, knowledge, negative attitude, and discrimination based on prejudices, ethnocentrism, politics, and religion were the main challenges. The study confirmed that establishing clubs could boost multicultural education awareness and positive attitude. It could also raise the students, teachers, and the society’s awareness about multicultural education. Teachers should encourage students in practicing tolerance and respecting differences. Furthermore, school principals and Oromia Education Bureau should create different mechanisms for nurturing multicultural education and creating a means to minimize discrimination. Finally, the study indicates the need for preparing teachers, students, and the school community to build unity within diversity and tolerance in the schools.

Academic Staff Commitment towards Implementing Curriculum from Multicultural Perspectives in Eastern Ethiopia Higher Education

“…Teachers should be trained in culturally sensitive pedagogy. Additionally, Ethnic conflicts and political interference are multifaceted difficulties encountered while implementing MCE in universities (Motuma, 2015;Debela, 2020;Dereje, 2016;Abeya and Ferew, 2019).…”

“…This implies that the commitment of teachers plays a vital role in multicultural curriculum implementation. Similarly, Debela (2020) reported that a multicultural curriculum programme is capable of transforming its pedagogy and evaluation approach to respond to the transformation of teachers to multicultural commitment and create possibilities and actions for social justice in multicultural setting reform.…”

The challenges of implementing cultural-based teaching in remedial education: analyses and recommendations

“…Consequently, the delivery process of teaching and learning could be employed appropriately and effectively. Tezera [31] examined various cultural-based teaching practices through teachers' cultural diversity, which discovered that teachers were familiar with the significance of cultural diversity education. Nonetheless, several improvement areas regarding teaching skills, cultural-based instructional knowledge, and attitudes towards classroom diversity were identified.…”