The Importance of Multicultural Education

by Adriana E. Soto-Aviles, PharmD

PGY-1 Pharmacy Resident, Suburban Hospital – Johns Hopkins Medicine

In today’s increasingly multicultural world, it has become more important than ever to be cognizant of the varying needs of people from different backgrounds. While deciding on what to focus on in this essay, I found an online article titled “Reflective Leadership for Multicultural Education”. The article discusses how understanding and relating to the students helps you close the achievement gap¹. This relates to the first readings we completed during the second week of the Teaching Certificate Program, where the chapters covered the importance of understanding your students.

In the article, the author highlights how a leader will succeed in multicultural education. Harvard Business Review defines multicultural leadership as leadership that leverages deep immersion within different cultures to understand their values and specific context². The value of this kind of insight is so powerful that many kinds of industries are making multicultural understanding central to their business to better suit the needs of their individual customers². Just like businesses need to ensure that each customer feels that their needs are taken care of, learners also need to feel that they are being heard and their educational needs are going to be met.

During the past weeks, we have been learning about instructional design and have been creating our own design project. We learned that to have a successful instructional design, we need to know our target audience. This means that before even creating an activity, we must have an idea about who it is for: their way of learning, what they already know, what is the best way to deliver a message to them, and what they expect from the educator. This becomes a complicated task when you have an audience with different backgrounds. The only way to be successful with your activity is to be a leader with multicultural awareness. A great way to gain this awareness is by reflecting on the kinds of issues that individuals from different backgrounds and cultures may face. It is vital to put yourself in their shoes and understand where they come from, how they were brought up, what their values and priorities are. This information can then be used to project your message in a way that will reach them. The article emphasizes that this reflection occurs continuously, and it must include yourself, the population and future outcomes. You must know how you are impacting your environment and how you are making a change to allow for everyone to obtain the same education and be able to close the achievement gap³.

It is important to note that the education that students receive while in the school of pharmacy forms the foundation for their careers as pharmacists. Throughout workshops and abilities labs, students learn how to interact and communicate with a diverse pool of patients, including how to approach them with difficult questions without making them uncomfortable. A pharmacy teaching culture based on multicultural education will create new pharmacists that are better able to offer their services to the diverse population around them.

Multicultural education can easily be applied to the ADDIE model, where each of the five phases (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) can benefit from a reflection about the diversity of your audience and how you can tailor your teachings to give each of them the same opportunity to learn. Before coming across this article, I was not aware of the importance of equity in teaching, especially regarding learners of different backgrounds. This new knowledge will have an impact on my self-directed design project, because the project involves reflecting on who my target audience is and why it’s important to teach the topic to that audience. Educators can utilize this article to self-evaluate their teaching styles, and ask themselves if they are doing their part to close the knowledge gap. It will help all educators to adjust their styles and prioritize the learning styles of the target audience. By adjusting to your audience, you are being a leader and you are being responsible in the knowledge you are about to impart to the students. Educational leaders need to “create a new language capable of asking new questions and generating more critical practices⁴”.