Developing multicultural and anti-bias awareness in pre-service teachers: A model proposal

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an educational model applied to pre-service teachers to raise multicultural and anti-bias awareness. In the study, pretest-posttest-follow-up test one-group mixed intervention design was used. The model, which was developed by the researcher taking into account the basic philosophy of multicultural and anti-discrimination education, using various teaching strategies such as watching movies, analyzing news, discussing articles, reviewing children's books, was implemented as an "intervention" program in two-hour sessions for 12 weeks. The study included 21 pre-service preschool teachers who voluntarily participated in the elective course. The quantitative data of the study were obtained with the "Multicultural Attitude Scale for Teachers", "Multicultural Personality Scale-Short Form" and "Multicultural Awareness, Knowledge and Skills Questionnaire-Teacher Form" adapted into Turkish by the researcher. In the post-test application, four open-ended questions about the model were asked in order to determine the opinions of the pre-service teachers about the applied education model. The data obtained from open-ended questions were used in the qualitative part of the study. In the quantitative part of the study, Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used and effect size was calculated. Content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. As a result of the research, it was seen that the education model applied made a significant difference only in the flexibility sub-dimension of multicultural attitudes, multicultural awareness, knowledge and skills and multicultural personality traits of pre-service teachers. In the qualitative part, the opinions of the participants were included under three themes: "implementation of the model", "contributions of the model" and "development of the model". As a result, it was revealed that the implemented training model was effective in raising multicultural and anti-bias awareness of pre-service teachers.