Chapter 4: Teaching Multicultural Perspectives in Social Studies: Dealing With Immigration and Migrants

One of the critical objectives of multicultural education is to ensure that other cultures understand individuals better. Living-learning environments could be contributed through reflecting the cultural interactions to the classroom environment in the multicultural educational environments that are created when immigrant students from other countries or cities become a part of the education system of their new residence.

While continuing their education in public schools, immigrant students in the mainstream education system go through a “divided socialization process” remaining in between the dominant culture at school, in their families, and other immigrant acquaintances. Students try to cope with a socialization process between the cultural expectations of their families and ethnic culture environments and the expectation of the institutions and community in the dominant culture (Özmen, 2012, p. 49). While living as “not a local but a foreigner, both as ‘in’ and ‘out’ where dates and memories meet” (Chambers, 1995/2014, p. 19) these students blend their discoveries and experiences, and “[t]he challenger foreigner who has been separated from his traditions and homeland is expected to make himself at home in the middle of an everlasting disagreement between a historical heritage scattered to the four winds and present time” (Chambers, 1995/2014, p. 19). What if this foreigner is a child? What does the place he live mean to him? How could he make himself at home? How could he identify and portray himself in his new home?