ECIS ESLMT Conference 2017

Using a multicultural curriculum reform framework, we look at ways in which academic content learning can link with the communities that an international school serves. Critical connections can be made with students’ home lives that would benefit not only multicultural learning but would also reinforce and extend content area concepts learned at school. Creating multicultural classrooms can be achieved by making cross-cultural and home-school connections in four steps that are increasingly complex: 1) studying the contributions that famous people from a group have made; 2) inserting topics/themes that are part of students’ backgrounds into the curriculum; 3) changing the basic structure of the curriculum to allow students to consider different perspectives; 4) expanding learning in significant ways by having students take social action in their own communities.