Section archive - Multiculturalism & Diversity

This article describes a unique initiative in Israel for preparing former immigrants from Ethiopia to become teachers. The author, who initiated this program in her college, describes the challenges she faced. The author outlines that this program is based on merging of two streams of education for multiculturalism: particularistic education at first and pluralistic education later on.

Most of the young refugees crossing the border to Israel lack any documents. The first stage after being caught by law enforcement agencies is placement in immigrant detention centers. One of the challenges of societies and countries that are committed to the values of safeguarding human rights is to find alternatives to the detention of unaccompanied minors. The experience described herein is a rather successful model practiced in Israel whereby unaccompanied adolescents (age 14-17) are placed in residential schools called 'youth villages' as an alternative to detention.

This study seeks to determine how differences in the Slovenian and Serbian contexts are reflected in differences in the initial cultural responsiveness of student teachers with regard to Roma minority pupils and their parents in the two countries. The results indicate that most student teachers in both groups favoured educating Roma pupils in regular schools and were aware of discrimination against Roma pupils in the education system. In addition, the results indicate that most of the student teachers agreed with the forms of cooperation that are most common in elementary schools, for example, parent meetings and individual meetings with parents. Finally, the results also indicate that the majority of student teachers from both groups would enrol Roma pupils in their class if they were charged with making this decision.

The goal of this article is to report a preliminary work on student-centered teacher preparation to promote school success among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The authors believe that teacher education programs need to be very purposeful in their approach to multicultural literacy teacher education. Drawing upon Vygotskian perspective on learning, they chose two cases from the beginning of their teacher education program and during student teaching, which often marks the end of teacher education program.