The Collaborative Action Research On Promoting Multicultural Education In Kindergarten

Today’s pre-school children live in a multicultural society, and it’s an important basis for their social adaptation by developing their attitudes of respecting different cultural, enhancing their communication and the understanding abilities in multi-cultures. Therefore, it’s the inevitable choice required in the time to carry out multicultural education in kindergarten.This research selects one certain public kindergarten of Jianggan District in Hangzhou as the research field domain, cooperating with teachers of the bottom class and taking the kids of one bottom class as the research subjects, to carry out the collaborative action research on multicultural education. Based on the multicultural educational theory, this research makes the integrated application of various research methods, including measurement, observation and interview, to investigate the status quo of the kindergarten multicultural education, and explores the strategies to promote multicultural education based on the results.Firstly, the researcher investigates the actual situation of the kindergarten multicultural education and analyzes the current situation in three aspects of multicultural materials, teachers’multicultural literacy and the multicultural curriculums in the kindergarten. The survey has found that the kindergarten lackde the atmosphere for the implementation of multicultural education and teachers’ multicultural literacy was relatively weak. Based on this, by visiting and interviewing teachers and curriculum leaders, researcher analyzes that the reason for the ineffective launching of kindergarten multicultural education is the restriction of regions and environment, teachers’lacking in relevant training and the curriculum development leaders lacking the awareness of the multicultural course development.In the following, based on the status quo and the influencing factors,the researcher designs two-stage action research programs to improve teachers’ pluralistic literacy and children’s multicultural awareness. The first stage is to carry out featured multicultural education training for teachers, and the second stage is to carry out festival activities and teaching of multicultural picture books. The teacher has the following changes after the action:Firstly, the teacher has gained preliminary understanding on the connotation and value of multicultural education and her multicultural awareness literacy has got promoted; secondly, the teacher has reflected and realized her biased behaviors and perceptions, and her multicultural affection has been improved; thirdly, the teacher has got a clear framework of the implementation of festival education, put up more effective questions during the curriculum implementation, and set different activity targets by children’s ability levels, thus her multicultural skills have been improved significantly. Children’s changes are reflected as:Firstly, they’ve gained more understanding on the customs and festivals; secondly, they’ve got abundant festival feelings; thirdly, their stereotype for genders has been broken; and fourthly, they’ve realized the differences among ethnic groups.Finally, based on the conclusions, the researcher proposes some advice for teachers, normal universities, kindergartens, teacher training agencies and future researchers, and expects them to have more improvements in promoting the quality of the kindergarten multicultural education.