International education graduate students’ conceptualizations of multiculturalism and multicultural education: Implications for the teaching of multicultural education at a western Canadian university

Abstract

Understanding how international education graduate students conceptualize multiculturalism and multicultural education will arguably inform the teaching that they experience during their programs and impact their learning along the way. This premise was motivated by my experiences with the concepts in question as an international graduate student and relying on the critical multiculturalism framework of McLaren (1994). A synthesis of seven international graduate students’ conceptualizations of multiculturalism and multicultural education showed that most of them had experiences with diversity and preconceptions of multiculturalism and multicultural education that differed from their experiences in Canada. Therefore, I argue that professors of international students need to seek, and then pay attention to their students’ voices in their silent struggles of meaning-making with these concepts, whether the lectures are on multiculturalism and multicultural education, or professors are engaged in multicultural practices and the observance of its policies during lectures. I believe that such fundamental concepts and practices in education and society should not be taught or observed without considering how international students themselves make sense of them. Otherwise, like some of the study participants explain, international students may wonder from time to time whether they are simply ‘factory goods’ in the hands of a so-called multicultural system that churns them out as finished Canadian ‘products.’