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The Institutionalization of Multicultural Education as a Global Policy Agenda

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Abstract

This study examines the institutionalization of policies and curriculum standards for multicultural education across countries. We used two sources of cross-national data on education: the World Data on Education (WDE) compiled by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (World data on education, 2007) and the data from the Curriculum Questionnaire of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007. WDE was used to gather country profiles regarding policies for multicultural education, and the data from the TIMSS 2007 Curriculum Questionnaire allowed us to look cross-nationally at multicultural curriculum standards for mathematics and science. The main findings of this study show that countries with more linkages to global civil society were significantly more likely to have national policies and curriculum standards for multicultural education. The significant effect of the linkages to global civil society persisted even after a range of other national-level characteristics were held constant. Such a persistent effect suggests the possibility that individual countries’ adoption of multicultural education policies and related curriculum standards may not simply be a national functional response; it may also be an institutional embodiment of universalistic world models and principles that emphasize the ontological status of the individual as the primordial constituent of global civil society.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Ham and Cha (2009), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Wotipka and Ramirez (2008). See also Boli and Thomas (1999) and Ramirez and Meyer (2012) for related discussions.

  2. WDE is also available online; the complete list of 161 countries included in WDE is available at http://www.ibe.unesco.org/Countries/WDE/2006/index.html. Belgium was treated as a single nation, although WDE had separate entries for the Flemish Community and the French Community.

  3. For other cross-national policy analyses that used this dataset, see, e.g., Ham et al. (2011) and Suarez (2007).

  4. Although these keywords were chosen on the basis of the literature that intersects multicultural human rights education and global citizenship education (Ramirez and Meyer 2012; Rios and Markus 2011), it should be noted that multicultural education is a contested concept, and the keywords used in the study may capture only a particular aspect of multicultural education. Inclusion of additional keywords pertaining to multicultural identity markers, such as race and gender, however, did not meaningfully alter the main findings of the study. See, e.g., Ham et al. (2011) for a separate analysis of WDE that used a set of keywords pertaining to gender equity in education and found patterns similar to the main findings from this study.

  5. TIMSS is the abbreviation of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. TIMSS is primarily an international assessment of the mathematics and science knowledge of 4th- and 8th-grade students around the world, which allows participating countries to compare student achievement across borders. To understand the contexts in which students learn, TIMSS also administered background questionnaires, including the Curriculum Questionnaire to be answered by the National Research Coordinator of each participating country.

  6. Only the countries that participated in the TIMSS 2007 Curriculum study as an independent nation (i.e., member states of the United Nations) were included for analysis in this study. Coding for Canada was based on the mean score of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, as they responded the Questionnaire separately.

  7. An exploratory factor analysis of these four variables was conducted. The result showed that all the variables were loaded on a single factor (the eigenvalue for this factor was 2.65) and that all of them had factor loadings exceeding 0.70 (factor loadings for the four variables, in the order shown in the preceding paragraph, were 0.83, 0.70, 0.85, and 0.86), indicating a high degree of consistency among the variables. Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.83.

  8. In an effort to check the validity of our multicultural curriculum standards index, we conducted a correlation analysis between this index and the MIPEX’s education policy index, finding that Pearson’s r was very high (0.71, n = 23). The MIPEX, or the Migrant Integration Policy Index, is a project led by the British Council and the Migration Policy Group to create and update a range of cross-national comparative indices measuring migrant integration policies in all EU member states and Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States (more information at http://www.mipex.eu). The high correlation between the two indices gives credence to the possibility that our index may be interpreted as a reasonably valid variable systematically related to the extent to which individual countries have developed an educational policy for migrant integration. It should be noted that a country where weak multicultural curriculum standards for mathematics and science are present may have strong multicultural agendas in civics education, literature and language studies, and social sciences, for example, considering that mathematics and science are known to be highly challenging subject areas to employ multiculturalism (Gutiérrez 2000). This suggests that our index is likely to be a rather conservative measure of multicultural curriculum standards.

  9. In this respect, see, e.g., D'ambrosio (1995) and Mohammadpour (2012) for mathematics and Siegel (2002) and Calik and Eames (2012) for science. However, see also Gutiérrez (2000), who introduces the possibility that some approaches to “the multiculturalization of mathematics” may keep “our eyes on [the kind of] mathematics content [that is seemingly multicultural at a superficial level] and away from socio-cultural processes and power relations in classrooms and in society” (p. 200).

  10. Similar categorizations of variables pertaining to national characteristics are also found in other cross-national sociological studies of the rise and diffusion of policy models. See, e.g., Cha and Ham (2011), Ham et al. (2011), Schofer and Meyer (2005), and Suarez (2007).

  11. One possible interpretation of the insignificant effect of economic international relations may be that some countries that are highly developed and modern often delay adopting innovations; since they are already deeply integrated into world society, conforming to additional world standards may not be their immediate political priority. Some evidence supports this possibility with respect to, for example, the cross-national incorporation of global civics content into social studies curricula (Rauner 1999) and the global diffusion of English language education policies (Cha and Ham 2011).

  12. The case of South Korea provides an illustrative vignette. Despite the country’s extremely high degree of ethno-linguistic homogeneity compared to most other countries around the world, South Korea has recently been formulating a range of national policies to ensure that racial/ethnic minority children are not discriminated against in any aspect of their school life. For example, in 2007, both the national curriculum standards and textbooks were revised to reduce nationalistic and ethnocentric descriptions. In addition, multicultural education courses have recently been incorporated into the curricula of many teacher preparation programs in South Korea, and in-service teacher training programs for multicultural education are also emerging. See Cha et al. (2013) and Mo and Lim (2013) for related discussions.

  13. In this respect, Sutton (2005) notes that although each national debate on cultural diversity in education reflects the aspects of diversity that are unique to a given particular country, the universal purpose of schooling as incorporation of future citizens into civil society renders a common framework for the formulation of multicultural education policies across different countries.

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Acknowledgment

This study was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2011-330-B00159). The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers of TAPER for their very constructive comments and suggestions.

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  1. 508 College of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

    Yun-Kyung Cha

  2. 305 College of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

    Seung-Hwan Ham

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Correspondence to Seung-Hwan Ham.

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Cha, YK., Ham, SH. The Institutionalization of Multicultural Education as a Global Policy Agenda. Asia-Pacific Edu Res 23, 83–91 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-013-0088-7

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