The effect of multiculture on school management: Mardin city sample

Multiculture is a very important concept which comes to agenda with an increasing interest and shows our century's appearance. The topic of multiculture which is a reality of our world that is getting smaller owing to globalizing and technologic developments should carefully be dealed and necessary studies should be done in order to make a good profit of it. Multiculture is perhaps commented wrongly as a result of owned prejudices and so it might be understood as a negative concept. However, in reality multiculture is a special concept which includes diversity and which has a potential for revealing different thouhgts enabling an event to be applied in a best way which we call as brain storming. As the topic of study, the concept of multiculture which is getting a bigger importance and revealing its effect on school administration has been chosen.Paralel to this, revealing how teachers and administrators working schools in which multiculture is experienced and also revealing how having a multicultural structure in their school affects school administration have been tried by examining some changes such as their age, sex, seniority, working place, graduated school, working duration and whether they are administrators or not. The population of research consists of 70 administrators and 1035 teachers working in Mardin city center, 73 administrators and 1008 teachers working in Midyat and Savur districts, totally 143 administrators and 2043 teachers. While forming the sampling of the research, stratified sampling method has been used. In this way, the sampling of reseach consists of 97 administrators and 341 teachers who are randonly chosen from 20 primary schools in Mardin city center and 16 primary schools in Midyat and Savur districts of Mardin. In order to achieve this aim a 36-item-survey has been prepared by the researcher and an open-ended question has been used to get the teachers' opinions related to multiculturalism. For quantitative analysis of data: frequency, percent, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, for testing the significance of differences between two avarages the Independent Groups T Test and One-Way Analysis of Variance F Test have been used. The significance level for T Test has been accepted as p<0.05. In the case of revealing the differences of more than two avarages. The Scheffe Test has been used to determine the source of the difference. According to the results of the research administrators who have more seniority got accustomed to school culture more, and they have more experience while managing multicultural learning and teaching environment, so they have more awareness, knowledge related to multicultural matters and they have been found to be more ready against cultural diversity. Based on research findings, male teachers compared to female teachers have been determined to adjust themselves to the multicultural structure of their school more easily and they have been found to see themselves more sufficient while performing their skills for being a teacher. It has been revealed that cultural diversity which is formed by students of different cultures coming together, especially affect both climate of school and cultural interaction. With their metaphors defining multiculture, teachers and administrators working at the multicultural schools have been determined to tell about class environment formed by different ethnic and cultural groups by paying attention to the students forming learning- teaching environment who reflect Mardin's multicultural structure to schools. Key Words: Administrator, Culture, Multiculture, School, Teacher