Student immigration, migration, and teacher preparation

ABSTRACT

Global migration in recent decades means more schools enrol students from diverse cultural backgrounds than before. Such trends highlight the international importance of multicultural education within schools. This study reviews the evolution of multicultural education as a framework for addressing the education of immigrant students and examines the current extent to which teachers feel prepared for and are attentive to culturally responsive practices. Analyses of data on lower secondary teachers (n = 151,122) in 46 countries from the Teaching and Learning International Survey of 2018 reveal few teachers overall feel prepared for teaching culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. However, teacher preparation and practices in multicultural education tend to be higher in classrooms with a greater percentage of students from immigrant backgrounds. The results present policy and research implications for teacher preparation in multicultural education, as well as creating more equitable education systems internationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• multicultural education
• migration
• immigration
• student diversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 TALIS 2018 sampled 47 total countries and partners. However, teachers sampled in the United States (n = 2,560) did not respond to the survey question about immigrant students in their classroom. As immigrant students are a focal point of the present study, we thus excluded the United States from our analyses.

2 See Supplementary Appendix Table 1A for survey items used in each scale.

3 Teachers were also asked about the percentage of students who are identified as refugees. As the distinction between immigrant and refugee students is unclear in TALIS 2018, we only focus on immigrant students in this study.

4 See Supplementary Appendix Figures A4, A5, and A6 for a descriptive comparison of multicultural education preparation and practices among teachers in classrooms with and without immigrant students by country.