A creative intervention into a multicultural education setting

A multicultural education setting should fundamentally be an awareness-raising educational setting that, for the sole aim of justifying and inspiring a progressive inter-cultural cross-fertilisation, spotlights the challenges of co-existence in a multicultural local and global environment.

Therefore, multicultural education has the primary goal of inculcating students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for them to adjust voluntarily, co-operatingly and unobtrusively to the conditions and of a culturally and ethnically diverse nation, meeting these intra-national challenges and employing them constructively.

A support of this assertion lies in James A. Banks’ statement, “[multicultural education] is designed to empower all students to become knowledgeable, caring, and active citizens in a deeply troubled and ethnically polarized nation and world.”

However, the full implementation of the concept of an ideal multicultural education is not yet in evidence. What are generally on the ground are executions of facets of the concept, often with unsavoury and questionable unilaterality. What is outlined above is, therefore, for all practical purposes, an ideal to which every (nominal) multicultural education setting should aspire.

To remedy this one-sidedness in the generality of multicultural educational settings, one will do well to adopt a creative approach to the trends currently in evidence.

(A).   A CREATIVE INTERVENTION INTO THE CONDITION OF THE DAVID

AMBROSE MULTICULTURAL COLLEGE, MOPTI

(a) CREATIVITY: A creative intervention into the multicultural education setting of David Ambrose College, Mopti, as set out in the folio, is by no means a be-all-end-all intervention; it is no ultimate answer to its dysfunction, but an attempt to uplift it, according to a conceived ideal, to more respectable heights.

Creativity embraces rational and clear thinking, individual exploration of ideas and concepts, and an experimenting with the possibly untried in an attempt to further and ennoble an existing condition..  It is “inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, …..” Mary Lou Cook.

Two popular theories of creativity will be applied towards this intervention: The divergent theory (DT) and the associative theory.

The divergent theory of creativity is a theory of systematic exploration of possibilities, a theory of serendipity. This theory  suggests that in questing for a  creative solution to some problem, a broad range of ideas, concepts, suggestions and recommendation are explored, the seemingly valid as well the seemingly invalid, a process generally associated with what is called “cognitive overinclusiveness” (CO).

Considered a fundamental part of the creative spirit, CO is the inclusion of the likely (apparently logical) as well as the unlikely (apparently illogical) in the range of considerations towards a solution to a problem or towards the creation of new ideas. “(a) many,  as opposed to only a few, ideas; (b) a wide range of ideas; and (c)  unusual (as well as more typical) ideas” (Boorstin) – all are put into consideration.

The associative theory, on the other hand, is a theory of similarities. It arose from the observation of the tendency of creative minds to associate an idea related to the issue being resolved to another which seems to expand or clarify it. This process sometimes results in an interfusion or union of various associated ideas into a novelty which contains the sought solution.