Students' emotional response to multicultural curricula in higher education

Abstract

It is known in the educational system that the higher education student population in the United States has evolved into a culturally diverse audience. In response, some educators felt the need to adjust to this multicultural student body by infusing cultural issues into the curricula. Literature found traditionalists arguing against infusion and multiculturalists arguing for infusion. Some conflict consisted of common misconceptions about multicultural education which are reviewed in this research. Curricula change in higher education with multicultural infusion exists, despite conflict, and therefore, teaching implications, strategies, and methods used to infuse were similarly reviewed. This review showed a major change in the traditional teaching methodologies in higher education, yet no emotional responses from the students to these changes had been documented. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to recognize and identify the students' emotional response to multicultural infusion into higher educational curriculum. Qualitative data, using a phenomenological approach emergent design was used to compile (1) classroom observations and field notes from an infused undergraduate class during the fall semester at Colorado State University and (2) 10 voluntary individual interviews from students within the same infused undergraduate class. An open coding process was used to code the data from field notes and transcriptions. Once the codes began to show signs of saturation, the data were downloaded into a Word Document where themes were analyzed and categorized using constant comparative analysis. A second data analysis technique of poetic display was used to advocate the power of the participants' individual voice and illuminated the essence of this phenomenon. There are 16 emotional themes identified in the conclusion of this research. A final data analysis and poetic display was used to perform an internal validity check by triangulation of the 16 emotional messages from the individual voices, class observations, and field notes. This final analysis, using constant comparative analysis from all the poems, observations, and interviews, once again, allowed for the voices of the students to be heard together with their richness in inflection and depth of emotions through poetry.