Teachers’ stress in responding to the challenge of teaching in multicultural school settings: Professional development implications for Cyprus and elsewhere.

Teachers’ stress in responding to the challenge of teaching in multicultural school settings:

Professional development implications for Cyprus and elsewhere

Loizos Symeou [email protected]

Department of Education Sciences European University Cyprus

Cyprus

Reflecting on two European Commission funded projects (2007-2014)

Ultimate aim of both projects: school inclusion of Roma families

Involved teachers and schools in 15 different European locations

Teachers’ stress in responding to the challenge of teaching in multicultural school settings

Exert of huge responsibility on teachers to differentiate their teaching and adjust the official curriculum to satisfy all children’s needs

Teachers’ stress: Feeling responsible

Feeling not confident to teach in multicultural settings

Lacking confidence in addressing stereotypes and prejudices towards minority pupils (including Roma)

Believing that they will always to face difficulties in teaching in multicultural classes

Teachers’ stress: Feeling incompetent

Rooted in teachers’ perception of helplessness and isolation

Feeling unable to do anything that could make a difference for marginalised children

Feeling unsupported

Feeling overwhelmed by expectations, curriculum restrictions, responsibilities and lack of time

Expect change in structural provisions and demands on them

Teachers’ stress: Feeling helplessness

Misrecognition of their efforts by stakeholders outside the school and the specific expectations from the educational authorities (inspectors, policy-makers, local authorities, ministry)

Teachers feel that their efforts go unnoticed, that their good practices are invisible, that they do not reach stakeholders outside the classroom, and eventually affect policy

Feeling that parents and the local community do not recognise their efforts

Teachers’ stress: Feeling mis-recognised

A challenge to school officials, policy-makers and practitioners, who face the daily charge to include all children (Roma children as well) in school and the local educational systems

Teachers are not often professionally prepared/developed to meet this challenge

No miracles can happen without facing teachers’ fears, emotions and stress on teaching in multicultural settings

Teaching as a cultural praxis

Aiming at facing, deconstructing and bringing to the fore teachers’ prejudices and discrimination against the Other/s by:

becoming familiar with the Other/s

BUT NOT BY ESSENTIALISING and FOLKORISING Others and their cultures

Teachers’ training to improve their understanding of Others, their history and culture and enable them to respond to the challenge of teaching in multicultural classrooms

To do so, training needs to value teachers, firstly, as reflective individuals and, secondly, as professionals with their own cultural backgrounds and identities, on which any training should start from and build on.

Considering teachers as resources of reflection and reflecting on their expressed stress and helplessness in working in multicultural school settings could be also addressed.

Relevant teacher professional development calls for the establishment of inclusion policies in European educational systems that will be structurally and functionally comprehensive, so that teachers feel supported by the educational authorities to overcome its overwhelming expectations on ensuring high academic standards and keeping up with the mandated curriculum, the curriculum restrictions, their daily responsibilities towards all children in their schools, and families expectations.