Teachers' Efforts to Facilitate the Social Development of Multicultural Children

The purpose of this study was to understand the role of elementary teachers in multicultural children's social development. The data were collected from eight teachers (female 6, male 2) who had multicultural children in their class. For collecting data, teachers were asked to write reflection notes and daily reports based on their observation of a multicultural student in his/her class for one week. The documented data were analyzed using content analysis. Procedures for line-by-line analysis were followed in order to extract core categories. According to the results of this study, social development of multicultural children was influenced by teachers' positive perception and acceptance on multicultural children, their understanding through first-hand experience with multicultural children, and their experience of multicultural training for getting rid of teaching stress. Finally, it was proposed that future research should investigate into specific mechanisms of how each helpful factor affects multicultural children's adjustment.