An experiential introduction to multicultural awareness

Teachers tend to come from the majority population, while students are becoming increasingly culturally, ethnically and racially diverse. Multicultural teacher education is seeking to train future teachers to be multiculturally aware and sensitive to the needs of a diverse student population.;The present study consisted of an evaluation of a multicultural awareness training workshop grounded in theories of transformative learning and of racial identity development. The Barnga-based experiential workshop was presented to 224 pre-service teachers enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course in a large Southeastern state university. The participants were assigned to either an intervention group who received a one-time one-hour treatment aiming to increase their awareness of multicultural issues, or to a control group who received the regular diversity infused curriculum. The effectiveness of the intervention was evaluated with implicit and explicit measures of attitudes, a measure of multicultural teaching self-efficacy, a measure of ethnocultural empathy, and questions of applied knowledge on the participants' final exam.;Results were mixed. Intervention group participants scored significantly higher than the control group on one of three applied multicultural knowledge questions on the final exam. However, no treatment effect was found with the pre and post measures. Adventitious findings include interactions between condition, gender and time on two subscales of the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy suggesting that males in the intervention group responded with significantly more acceptance of cultural differences and more empathic perspective taking after the intervention than males in the control group. The study's implication for the field of multicultural teacher education is described, and plans for future research are outlined.;Keywords. Multicultural Teacher Education, Scale of Multicultural Efficacy, Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy, IAT, Gender Differences...