Multicultural Education: From the Lens of Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the attitudes of pre-service teachers towards multicultural education. Senior students studying in three different majors, namely English language teaching, classroom teaching, and Turkish teaching, were administered a questionnaire that comprised of Likert-type statements measuring their attitudes and open-ended questions interrogating the metaphorical conceptualization and description of the concept of multicultural education. The general scores of the participants are positive and high, with female participants have considerably better scores in certain statements. The cognitive conceptualizations of multicultural education by the participants indicate a diversity in language terms, as most were associated, whereas descriptions of the concept display a synonymous sense with ones in the related literature, though participants do not receive formal instructions about the concept.