School-site decision making in multicultural education: An Australian perspective

This paper examines a number of issues related to multicultural education and curriculum change. It focuses on school-level projects that were developed in Western Australian schools from 1979-1981. The results of the research raised the following points: teachers viewed multicultural education as a psycho-social rather than a socio-political phenomenon; the aims of multicultural education were seen to be best achieved by the collection of specific resource material; on-site implementation of the projects often led to changes being made to the original intentions of the project designers; qualitative research techniques proved more sensitive in portraying and consequently understanding the complexities associated with project implementation, and, finally, it seemed clear that more emphasis should be placed on understanding the role of the teacher as a policy mediator. It is at the school level that the final decisions are made about national policy intentions. Copyright © 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.