Summary: Cultural Responsive Education

Introduction

One of the important factors to achieve sustainability of society in a nation is education. However, it faces lots of challenges due to the diversity in Malaysia. Government had come out with some idea to promote unity through education such as introduced “Vision School” to society. The "Vision School" concept involves putting a national school and 1-2 other vernacular schools together at the same site to share common facilities such as the school canteen and sports ground. It hoped through this will encourage interaction between student in various races and foster national unity.Cultural responsive education is very important. According to Lynch (n.d.), to help all students become respectful of the multitudes of cultures and people

Therefore, teachers and educators have the responsibilities to promote a democratic and unbiased society for all citizens. That is why people have thinking that promoting intercultural communication should be done in schools when the minds are young and can be molded. According to Petty (2014), promoting equality and diversity in the classroom need not be a challenge and it is something that all children should be familiar with from an early age. Therefore, teachers can collaborate among each other in school by organizing activities that could promote multicultural competence. By running activities and workshops in school, not only the teachers can improve their cultural sensitivity and teaching strategies, the students may develop sense of tolerance, acceptance, respect and equality as well. Students can recognize their peers’ cultural differences and build up intercultural understanding, as well as multicultural awareness. In addition, teachers also can hold events such as festival celebrations in school. Teachers can make planning on performances which can promote culture of ethnic group. For instance, teachers and students can perform Chinese cultural dance in school when the school is celebrating Chinese New Year festival. This activity will not only

Educators and teachers should practice and apply multicultural pedagogy in classroom in order to meet the unique needs of every culture that represents the students’ identity. Teachers and educators can work together with the society and community to achieve multicultural diversity in classroom, as well as diminish the multicultural inequalities. Teachers have to present themselves as a role model for their students by not being biased, stereotyping, discriminating or ethnocentric towards a particular culture. Teachers also have to be open-minded and flexible to accept the dissimilarities of culture in a classroom. The goal of multicultural education is to expose the identity of students from various background and create an equal learning platform for all learners. By presenting and achieving multicultural education in a nation, then only the citizens will united and integrated, the nation will turn out to be