These days, multicultural education appears to be a common sight. This approach is applied in numerous educational institutes, from schools to universities. However, some problems regarding attitudes to different ethnicities and races may arise, especially in elementary school. Usually, children have a variety of prejudices against students, which may be different from them (What Can Schools Do to Reduce Pupils’ Prejudice?, n. d.). Therefore, the goal of this paper is to supply ways of prejudice reduction, which can be applied by an elementary school teacher.
In general, prejudice reduction in the context of the curriculum should involve lessons and activities intended to establish a positive attitude toward people of different cultures, races, and ethnicities. According to Multicultural Education: Goals and Dimensions (n. d.), “children come to school with many negative attitudes toward and misconceptions about different racial and ethnic groups” (para. 3). Furthermore, the article mentions that an effective option to overcoming prejudices includes teaching material information about different races, cultures, and ethnicities and tasks, which require students to unite and work in groups (Multicultural Education: Goals and Dimensions, n. d.; What Can Schools Do to Reduce Pupils’ Prejudice?, n. d.). This method is helpful for creating a positive image of ethnic groups among students.
A variety of approaches to including the material on diversity in the curriculum exists. One of the most widely used is Contributions Approach (Multicultural Education: Goals and Dimensions, n. d.). It is applied the following way: “teachers insert isolated facts about ethnic and cultural group heroes and heroines into the curriculum without changing the structure of their lesson plans and units” (Multicultural Education: Goals and Dimensions, n. d., para. 8). This way, the combination of the method described in the paper, it is possible to reduce prejudices against different cultures and races among student effectively
References
Multicultural education: Goals and dimensions. (n. d.). College of Education. Web.
What can schools do to reduce pupils’ prejudice?. (n. d.). The Centre of Education &Youth. Web.