Author(s): Barbara Dobrowolska / Language(s): Polish
Issue: 21/2012
Multicultural school faces its problems alone, which forces it to seek didactic and educational strategies with, not infrequently, a sense of solitude and community ostracism. Problems that need to be solved, a necessity to cope with everyday school life and the clash of cultures create its novel quality, image and institutional, unique identity. Multiculturalism in the school is becoming a source of new areas of teachers’ professional competence and of creating innovative school culture. It is a dynamic process within the broadly understood school development. New school culture is expressed in teachers’ work styles, forms of interpersonal communication, methods of work, and degree of cultural relativism, allowing for, or not, the adjustment of behaviours and attitudes, innovative cultural patterns and codes of students who are culturally ‘different’. The situation seems to introduce radical changes into school procedures, rules and standards existing to date and regulating the school’s inner order. As a result, new school culture allows: to create individual paths of teachers’ professional development in the field of multiculturalism, to provide innovative didactic solutions, which take into consideration cultural diversity of the students, to realize rules of democratization in school, and its cultural pluralism. Educational practice poses problems for teachers which result from the lack of solid substantive knowledge regarding interculturalism. Consolidated attitudes and views of teachers, which are the consequence of knowledge attained in monocentric culture that existed prior to the socio- political transformation, also significantly affect the adoption of a multicultural perspective.
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