'Education needs to embrace diversity'
President of the World Coalition for Equity and Diversity in Education Francisco Rios poses during the congress held at Hoam Faculty House at Seoul National University, Seoul, Wednesday. / Korea Times photo by Kim Jae-heun
By Kim Jae-heun
Education has been largely developed and passed down in a way to consolidate the dominance of men and the rich, and in this changing era of globalization, education needs to embrace other parts of society and respect diversity, said Francisco Rios, a professor of Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University.
Rios came to Korea to participate in the World Coalition for Equity and Diversity in Education’s (WCEDE) first world congress being held at Hoam Faculty House at Seoul National University, Seoul, Wednesday.
The coalition, established in July 2017, brings together three groups -- the Korean Association for Multicultural Education (KAME), the National Association for Multicultural Education from the United States, and the Institute to Advance International Education from Europe.
The coalition aims to work toward advancing inclusive and cross-cultural education that is based on the principles of diversity, social justice, equity and human rights.
In the congress, local and foreign experts in the field of multicultural education had discussions under the title of “Multicultural Education and Diversity: Desirable Social Change in the Era of Globalization.”
“We are at an early stage of our organization and we have a very ambitious agenda set ahead of us,” Rios, president of the WCEDE, told The Korea Times. “We are talking about engaging in collaborative research and projects. We’ve been talking about how we can produce publications collaboratively and engage in international exchange. We also discuss ways to change public policies.”
According to Rios, the ultimate goal of his coalition is to perhaps disband the association because if the goal is reached, it means equity and justice will have been fully adopted by the education sector. However, he said it will take a long time.
“Most education historically has been very exclusive and usually mostly for wealthy males. And those very early roots have created situations where many schools and universities have not shifted the way they teach to being inclusive of everyone.
“Sometimes it’s because of race, sometimes it’s because of gender, sometimes it’s because of sexual orientation and sometimes it’s because of immigration status. We can go with many others. Ideally, if education was equitable, we would not need our organizations,” Rios said.
Concerning multicultural education in racially homogeneous nations like Korea, Rios advised addressing local contexts and building up from there. “Countries organize themselves. We always have to attend to the local context and start from there,” Rios said.