Teaching development grants final and financial report: Embracing diversities: Empowering teacher students with multicultural competence

There is a rising concern on the educational needs of school teachers to work effectively with students from multicultural groups, such as racial minorities, sexual minorities, and disability groups etc., and to respect cultural diversities. Professional educational organizations, such as the Association of American Educators, American School Counseling Association in United States require their professional educators to be equipped with multicultural competency to work with students from diverse backgrounds. A specialized training model, the multicultural (MCT) model is recognized as necessary training model for professional training programs (Arredondo, 1999; Sehgal et.al., 2011). Sue & Sue (2013)’s model remains the most widely used for the MCT training, which has been conceptualized as having three multicultural competency components: attitudes, knowledge, and skills. While the major focus of this project is on improving teaching and learning in teacher training courses within the department of SEC, it also integrates the research component to explore evidence-based outcome of the teaching and learning strategies. Students enrolled in the master level programs “Supporting families with diverse needs”, and “Counseling ethics” from the Department of SEC will participate in the project. First, at the teaching and learning aspect, we aim to achieve the multicultural competence (attitudes, knowledge and skills) of participating students through the following teaching and learning activities, namely, the panel presentation and the case studies learning, the experiential learning. These strategies support the outcome-based learning curriculum spelt out in the courses. Second, at the research aspect, qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies in helping students to achieve multicultural competence and overall learning objectives. If the teaching and learning strategies proved to be effective through the evidence-based research, they will be adopted in other courses of SEC.