British History And Current Situation Of Multicultural Education Research

Multicultural education has been a hot topic in the world educational theory and educational practice. The United States, Canada, Australia, Britain and other countries have to develop and implement multicultural education policy in order to respect cultural differences and promote the communication, understanding and sharing between different cultures. With the increasingly frequent international exchanges, multicultural education goes gradually beyond a domestic racial and ethnic minority education, which shows the trend of globalization and has become a concept of global education and education reform movement. It emphasizes the respect for individual culture, encourages cross-cultural exchange and promotes international understanding and communication, reduces conflicts and promotes world peace. It can be said that the "understanding" and "harmony" are the pursuit of the goal of multicultural educators.Multicultural Education originated from the western civil rights movement, requiring education to face up to and respect for cultural diversity and reflecting the equality and justice, so that the ethnically and racially different students with different social classes enjoy equal educational opportunities. In the1970s, the British government began to focus on immigrant education and make the multiculturalism policy; its purpose was to pursue equality, and to effectively improve the minority education. In the1980s, the British government explicitly admitted that its society was a multicultural society, and actively advocated the multicultural education. In the1990s, the anti-racism education research rose.From now on, the research focuses on the equality and diversity of education and introduces the concept of specific classroom teaching. China is a typical multicultural country, and is gradually getting in line with the international standards, so it is very important to solve the multicultural education problem either from the perspective of social development or from education itself. However, in China's current situation of education, multicultural education is still in the stage of theoretical and practical exploration. Multicultural education is often understood conceptually vague, and many articles refer to multicultural education as the Minority Education. Theoretically, there is a lack of in-depth and systematical research on multicultural education in the foreign countries, while, in China, introduction to the practical situation overpasses the in-depth analysis of multicultural education for which theory system construction hasn't been made. In practice, multicultural education model with Chinese characteristics has not yet explored.This research chooses British multicultural education as its object out of two reasons. First, Britain is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country and it is one of the main countries carrying out multicultural education; each ethnic group has a long history and they are getting on well with one another. Second, Britain implements the multicultural education plan effectively. The analysis of British multicultural education will provide helpful guidance for our multicultural education.Six chapters are included in the thesis. In Introduction the background, significance, the core concepts and methods of the research are presented. Chapter One summarizes and reviews the studies on British multicultural education which is introduced. In Chapter Two, the development course of the British multicultural education is divided into three stages--he initial stage, development stage and mature stage. Chapter Three is about British multicultural education involved with the immigrant education and Civic education. Chapter Four is about multicultural educational practices in the United Kingdom--chool education which is analyzed from the viewpoint of teacher education and curriculum development. Chapter Five is about the characteristics and reflection of the UK multicultural education. This chapter summarizes the characteristics and shortcomings of the British multicultural education, and then some suggestions are made for the development of China's multicultural education based on its actual condition.