Cultural Understanding And Integration: Of Multicultural Curriculum Development

With the development of history, human society is striding towards democracy and equality. As a means to achieve this common goal, the education of multicultures is gaining an increasing global attention, improving the understanding between different cultures and educating people to be citizens empowered with democratic awareness. In addition, as an approach to curriculum design the education of multicultures is increasingly becoming the focus of attention in the academic circle. The dissertation points out the reality of the multicultural environment both in China and in other countries across the world. In the meantime, the dissertation seeks to explore the necessity of implementing multicultural education in China. With improving the understanding between different cultures as the fundamental objective and bringing about the integration of different cultures as a goal to strive for, the dissertation, by analyzing literature in this field and by the means of logical argumentation, attempts a preliminary discussion of the multicultural curriculums in China so as to push forward the research on multicultural curriculums. The dissertation consists of four parts. Part One points out the present reality of different cultures both in China and other countries throughout the world and expounds the necessity and significance of implementing multicultural education in China. Part Two explores the development of the intension and extension of multicultural education and analyses the nature and fundamental characteristics of multicultural education against the background of the rise and development of multicultural education in the United States and European countries. Part Three reviews three schools of multicultural curriculum theories outside China. 2 Taking as an evaluation basis the basic law in curriculum design that �'tudents?development should be the central task and the relationships between society, students, and knowledge should be kept in balance? this part analyses the merits and demerits of the three schools in an effort to work out the basic rules to abide by in designing multicultural curriculums. Part Four puts forward the objectives of multicultural curriculums and the conceptions of curriculum models in China.