DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ CULTURAL DIVERSITY AWARENESS- THE EFFECTS OF STUDYING THE COURSE MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AT UNIVERSITY

In today’s educational context, universities have the role in enabling the students to develop the competences required for their future profession, but they are also seen as important in terms of preparing the young people to easily adapt and answer to the needs of the society. In these terms, today’s globalized society requires individuals who possess the competences for intercultural communication and who are able to live with and respect people who come from different cultures and have cultural beliefs different from their own. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to examine how studying the course Multicultural Education at university can contribute in developing students’ cultural diversity awareness. It is focused on exploring how much the contents covered in this course can contribute in developing and/or changing students’ attitudes and perspectives regarding cultural diversity and in raising their awareness about the importance of acceptance and tolerance of multiple cultural perspectives. The study was conducted on a sample of university students from different faculties at International Balkan University in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia, who were taking the course Multicultural Education in the academic 2021/2022 year. The pre- and post- measure method was applied, with the use of the Cultural Diversity Awareness Questionnaire. The questionnaire was applied once at the beginning of the semester, on a sample of 110 students, before they were introduced with the contents of the course, and again at the end of the semester, after studying the contents, on a sample of 88 students. The aim was to see if there are differences in the level of students’ cultural diversity awareness as a result of studying the contents covered in the course Multicultural education, and to examine their opinions about the usefulness of the course contents for their future life. Results have shown that the majority of the students have high or very high level of cultural diversity awareness and that there are improvements in the results of the post-measure, compared with the premeasure, although these results were not statistically significant.