Bridging social justice literacies: Elementary teachers’ beliefs about the goals of multicultural education

Although there is a consensus on core ideas of multicultural education, goals that scholars discuss vary. This qualitative study examined nine South Korean elementary teachers’ beliefs about different goals of multicultural education in relation to their prior experiences of multicultural teacher education in formal and/or informal settings. A synthesis of findings from in-depth interviews indicated that these teachers generally endorsed teaching of functional and relational literacies while they had discontinued views on teaching of critical literacy. The findings also suggested that teachers’ experiences of becoming numerically and/or culturally marginalized within ethnic minority communities in conjunction with their reflective efforts to integrate knowledge from multicultural education into the national curriculum served as a powerful means to enhance their commitment to the teaching of critical literacy. Based on these findings, implications for teacher education and school system were provided.