Multiculturalism is a continuous pedagogical process in which the society, the educational system, teachers, children and parents of the immigrants all have to actively participate.
This thesis reflects on the problem of multicultural education, the role of kindergartens, schools and teaching staff in the process itself, along with the related legislative acts.
The empirical part of the thesis was established with a quantitative research, more precisely, with a surveying method. Since the sampling was random, the chance of selecting a certain person in advance was severely reduced. With the research, I wanted to explore the knowledge the respondents of the survey obtain on the following topics: multicultural education, content and practices, legislative acts, discrimination, linguistic integration, forms of support and additional help to these children. Furthermore, I wanted to find the potential conflicts between the viewpoints of the respondents.
Comparing the expert literature, legislative acts, different researches on multiculturalism and the results of the empirical part point to the teaching stuff in the first grade of elementary school being in disfavour of multiculturalism. The analysis shows that the teaching staff promotes multicultural communication and is ready to adapt to the children’s needs. However, they are not willing to work in the native language of the immigrants. Discrimination of the immigrant children depends on their country of origin; the respondents are more tolerant to the citizens of Northern and Western European countries and far less to people who originate from the countries of the former republic of Yugoslavia.
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