Perceptions on Mother Tongue (Kurdish) Based Multicultural and Bilingual Education in Turkey

Abstract

In the past several decades, educational researchers have asserted that multicultural/multilingual education is a phenomenon which certainly has come into prominence in the world of education and most schools are becoming increasingly diverse; a significant role of teacher preparation programs is to prepare its teachers with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to help all students learn. However, multicultural education and bilingual education is still a controversial issue in Turkey. The education system has not adapted to meet the needs of our increasing multiracial and multicultural populations, and research continues to be limited. Thus, both multicultural education and bilingual education in Turkey should be supporting students to show tolerance towards those with backgrounds different from their own and also focusing on the protection of each student's cultural heritage and their mother tongue language. Thus, the purpose of the study is to investigate teachers', students', and academicians' perceptions on multicultural and bilingual education, specifically, based on mother tongue education in Turkey. This qualitative research, which aims to emphasize the need of multicultural education in Turkey and the need of Kurdish language instruction in Turkey's education systems, was conducted with 80 participants. In this study, researcher emailed 10 open-ended questions to participants to identify the need of multicultural and bilingual education based on mother tongue education in Turkey. Content analysis methods were utilized to analyze, interpret and assess the responses of participants to the open-ended questions. The findings of the study indicate that Turkey needs to immediately reform the education of native language and develop programs and special approaches that help improve the language deficiency of students who speak Kurdish as a mother tongue or have a limited understanding of Kurdish. This study also finds that the Turkish government should develop a multicultural curriculum that should help students, faculty, and staff to become advocates for multicultural awareness. This awareness informs the ways in which we prepare teachers, counselors, and administrators to serve all students.