Teacher–student relationships in multicultural classes: Reviewing the past, preparing the future

Abstract

This contribution reviews research that links students' and teachers' ethnic background to students' perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior, teacher treatment of individual students, and student achievement and subject-related attitudes. The review mainly includes studies from the United States, Australia and the Netherlands and a few Asian countries (Singapore, Brunei and Taiwan). The literature revealed that ethnicity is consistently associated with students' perceptions of their teachers, that the way teachers communicate varies according to the ethnicity of their students and that teacher interpersonal behavior may be more important for immigrant minority students' outcomes than for their indigenous peers. The article finishes off by offering suggestions for future research. r

Social Learning and Rational-Emotive Education: An Exploratory Investigation of Students’ Perspective

“…It might be the case that cultural norms make it hard for some of these students to talk about emotions and to see some relevance about their knowledge of emotions at all. Knowledge from research on dealing with multicultural classrooms should be suitable incorporated into the teaching process (den Brok & Levy, 2005;Lo & Howard, 2009;van Tartwijk, den Brok, Veldman, & Wubbles, 2008;Weinstein, Tomlinson-Clarke, & Curran, 2004) and probably some of the teaching methods have to be revised.…”

Changing School Demographies - Asking Teachers about Their Training Needs in Intercultural Education: A case Study in Greece

“…Not to mention that there is a great deal of diversity within an ethnic group itself, whilst students may also have different skills in adapting to the host country and the effect of ethnicity may vary from student to student (den Brok & Levy, 2005).…”

“…In effect, education has been indicated to have a persistent history of representing the dominant group, thus further subordinating already marginalised groups (Baldwin et al, 2007). According to den Brok and Levy (2005), teacher interpersonal behaviour has an absolutely determining role to play in intercultural education, being more significant for immigrant minority students' outcomes than for their indigenous peers.…”

“…(Dooly & Villanueva, 2006;Sales et al, 2011;Schoorman & Bogotch, 2010). This cannot though be accomplished by ignoring realities at the societal level too, especially considering that there is a great deal of diversity within ethnic groups themselves (den Brok & Levy, 2005;Horenczyk & Tatar, 2002).…”

Collaborative learning in multicultural classrooms: a case study of Dutch senior secondary vocational education

“…For the purposes of this research, we consider a classroom to be multicultural when it is composed of at least five individuals from a minority group (i.e. those individuals who were born in a country different from the country of residence or whose parents are from other countries) or at least two different cultural groups are represented (den Brok and Levy 2005). Coelho (1994) argues that collaborative learning is especially appropriate for multicultural classrooms.…”