Parallels Between Cooperative Play and Multicultural Education

Using content analysis, this study examined the potential relationship between multicultural education and play or experiential education.

Focusing on a play curriculum (The Responsibility, Engagement, Safety, Principles, Empathy, Challenge, and Trust curriculum) implemented at four middle schools, this study used some fundamental principles of multicultural education to analyze and describe the potential conceptual relationship between play and multicultural education.

The results revealed that the targeted curriculum, while not designed specifically to infuse multicultural education into it, reflected some of its key principles.

These included, in order of frequency of occurrence, Critical thinking, Collaboration, Empowered Voices, Diverse Perspectives, Democratic Interactions, and Equality.

The analysis of this curriculum suggested that play experiences could be used by educators to introduce students to aspects of multicultural education, and that play education is amenable to the inclusion of multicultural knowledge, attitudes, skills and perspectives.

The study also revealed that both play activities and multicultural education create better opportunities for intellectual development and social transformation.

This study demonstrated that play may help prepare students for this transformation.

Other findings suggested that play experiences encourage students to rethink their actions in the classroom and in their school community; integrating play and multicultural education can empower students and enable educators to transform classroom interactions; and these experiences can create more equitable opportunities for ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse students to work effectively together so that everyone can accomplish higher levels of success---socially, personally, and academically.

This study also included recommendations for future research and practice for the integration of multicultural education and experiential education.

The research suggestions focus on instructional implementation to complement the curriculum analyzed in this study.

The practice recommendations emphasize deliberately incorporating more specific components and issues of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in to play or experiential learning activities.