| Abstract: |
Goshen College (Indiana) provides a fourteen-week term overseas for its sophomores and juniors in Central America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and China. The Study-Service Trimester (SST) fosters the main objective of the college, to prepare persons for lives of service to God and fellowman, at home or abroad. The SST is an ideal setting for multicultural teacher education, since it develops the experiential factor which is a major tenent in multicultural education. The program aims at two important areas that can be applied to teacher education: (1) encouraging a responsive teacher attitude with respect for cultural identity; and (2) developing and applying such teaching skills as linguistic variations, diverse learning styles, values clarification, and conflict resolution. Features of the SST program include: on-campus orientation; living with families in the foreign location; assignments to volunteer fieldwork in schools, hospitals, agriculture, and forestry; and group sessions for feedback. In pursuing a truly bicultural experience, it is important that the students are able to keep their own cultural identity and yet be able to participate fully in the new environment. (FG) |