Teachers' multicultural awareness within the consultee-centered consultation model
Abstract
The continuing growth of multicultural student populations in the United States has resulted in the need to increase teacher cross-cultural awareness to the variety of multicultural issues in education. This study has evaluated the effectiveness of a multicultural workshop (conducted by a consultant-psychologist) in advancing teachers' multicultural awareness and perceived self-efficacy. Follow-up problem identification consultation sessions were offered to teachers in order to continue the assessment of their ongoing cultural awareness. Caplan and Caplan's (1993) consultee-centered consultation model was utilized. The subjects consisted of 60 urban high school teachers. One group was comprised of teachers (n = 30) who participated in the workshop and the other group of teachers was established as a comparison group ( n = 30). Teachers were administered the Teacher Multicultural Attitude Survey and the Teacher Efficacy Scale. T tests were computed to test the hypothesis that teachers who were exposed to the workshop would demonstrate higher scores on the two scales than those who did not attend. Findings indicated that teachers' participation in the workshop did not support the hypothesis that teachers receiving the workshop would demonstrate significant differences on measures of teacher cultural awareness. In contrast, consultee-teachers who did not participate in the multicultural workshop were found to differ from consultee-teachers who participated in the multicultural workshop on the Personal Teacher Efficacy subscale. During the consultation sessions, verbal interchanges pertaining to students, problems were audio-recorded and measured for cultural statements uttered by each consultee-teacher from both groups. These transcriptions were coded for frequency and intensity levels and categorical themes of teachers' multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills. Chi squares were performed on the number of awareness, knowledge, and skills statements and of teachers, categorical themes for both groups. A quantitative comparison of the cultural categorical themes and intensity levels derived from both groups demonstrated that workshop teachers did not evidence significantly higher multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills when discussing their student populations. However, when qualitatively evaluated, both groups contributed a substantial number of cultural statements. Additionally, a greater number of teachers from the workshop attended the consultation sessions. Moreover, a greater proportion of cultural themes were evidenced from this group. These results suggest the need to direct future research toward consultee-centered consultation, based on the incorporation of multicultural issues as major elements to be considered within the consultation model.
Subject Area
Developmental psychology|Teacher education
Recommended Citation
Martines, Danielle Louise, "Teachers' multicultural awareness within the consultee-centered consultation model" (1999). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI9923436.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI9923436
