Teaching Social Studies from multicultural perspective: a practical approach to re-fashion African Studies for transformation

Abstract

Currently, global education and global citizenship for social transformation addresses the issues of cordial and harmonious existence of our time. Africa is a multilingual and multicultural continent with about 3.000 ethnic groups and 2000 languages spoken; therefore, introduction of multicultural approach in teaching will ensure effective socialization and transformative education in Africa.  The roots to challenge bias, prejudice and creating classroom environment that reflects the learner’s culture for national unity lies in multicultural education. Multicultural education is a system of instruction which attempts to foster cultural pluralism and acknowledges the difference between race and culture in order to promote societal change and orderliness. This work examined a multicultural educational strategy which could be used in helping students from diverse racial, cultural, ethnic and language groups to experience academic success. Multicultural Concepts Knowledge Test (r=0.82), Multicultural Concept Attitude Scale (r= 0.86) were administered on 251 junior secondary school students from five secondary schools in the south-west region of Nigeria using the simple random technique. Two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, analysis of covariance. Treatment had significant main effect on students’ posttest knowledge scores in multicultural concepts (F (2,340) = 5.835; p<.05).  and attitude to multicultural concepts (F (2,340) = 34.055; P<.05). The MCA shows that the cooperative learning group had higher adjusted posttest knowledge score (x =10.14; Dev. =.83) In summary, findings of this study revealed that the cooperative multicultural learning strategy is effective for teaching multicultural classrooms. Therefore, this calls for improved approaches towards teaching by educators in order to bring us closer to the goal of multicultural education