Analysis of pre-service kindergarten teacher's metaphor for early childhood multicultural education

The purpose of this study was to analyze the pre - service teachers' perceptions and concepts about multiculturalism. From the result, we intend to obtain basic data on multicultural education in Korean early childhood... [ view full abstract ]

The purpose of this study was to analyze the pre - service teachers' perceptions and concepts about multiculturalism. From the result, we intend to obtain basic data on multicultural education in Korean early childhood education curriculum for pre-service teacher.  

The research problems set for the research are as follows.

1. What is the image of Korean pre-service kindergarten teacher about multiculturalism?

2. What are the experiences of Korean pre-service kindergarten teachers’ multicultural education and the frequency of multicultural contact?

3. What is the difference in the image system of pre-service kindergarten teachers according to experience of multicultural contact?

Method: This study was carried out on 221 students of 3 grade students at 1 Kindergarten teacher education university (ISCED 6) and 5 Kindergarten teacher education colleges (ISCED 5) in Seoul/Gyeonggi area. For the analysis of metaphor, we distributed a questionnaire that could be used to create metaphor for four items of multicultural, multicultural Family, multicultural child, and multicultural education. After writing the metaphor, the research participants are able to describe the reason for the metaphor. In addition, the questionnaires on whether to participate in multicultural education for children and the frequency of multicultural contact were added to enable the analysis of multicultural experiences of participants.

The questionnaire was conducted for 3 weeks (1^st to 3^rd week of December, 2016). The total number of questionnaires used in the analysis was 205, excluding 16 questions which did not respond to the question of metaphor.