The Future of Education

Our classrooms, workplaces and society in general is multicultural, even where there is no ethnic diversity. We all have different cultures. Our backgrounds differ in terms of parental education, religion, socio economic status, household, family form, etc. Additionally, they differ in values and attitudes, lifestyles, abilities/disabilities, and ethnicity or nationality.  This fact also means that our workplaces are multicultural – diverse in the broadest understanding of the concept “culture”. Again, no matter if there are co-workers or clients with different ethnic background or not and the demand for employees to use this diversity as an advantage instead of seeing it as a problem is obvious just by reading the job advertisements. The task for the educator then becomes that of preparation of students for the social diversity of their future workplaces, in addition to providing the environment that will produce active minds and critical citizens trained in key competencies and social skills alongside academic and vocational subjects.  Critical and creative thinking skills, problem solving, independent working and related skills must become the platform for all learning.

 There are two main questions that we need to consider in this context:

1. First we need to consider the why question.  Why should a teacher consider changing their teaching style? What in our society has changed to call for different educational approaches? Why is the teacher’s attitude towards diversity important?
2. The second question is the how question. This is the question that I have heard most often in my work, giving training on intercultural education. How do we reach the aims of intercultural education in our classrooms? How can we organize our teaching in order to reach those aims? Are some methods more likely to work than others?

In this paper I will discuss both questions from sociological and educational point of view.