Ethnocentrism and the Leadership of Multicultural Educator

ABSTRACT

The phenomena of multiculturalism in Korea have brought about significant change in the social demography of Korea. Here has stood out a need to educate multicultural families and their offsprings including North Korean defectors as well as alien workers and international marriage migrants, who are getting increased every year. Particularly, international marriage families have struggled with language gap or cultural difference between children and parents and cultural shock even within the boundary of a family. The foremost problem to overcome seems to be ethnocentrism in a multicultural society. Those multicultural educators influenced by ethnocentrism bear the limitation in leadership as an educator. Ethnocentrism they hold tends to come into conflict with culture either consciously or unconsciously while performing their education in multiculturalism: never easy to achieve the result of education. Educational concern in a multicultural society will be above all things a culturally focused education. At the core, then, are the ethnocentrism influential in education, the multicultural education required of overcoming ethnocentrism, and the leadership as the competence of multicultural educators which is necessary for the education. This paper stresses and reviews what is important is the leadership as the competence of multicultural educators to make the education that is practiced in Korea become a genuinely multicultural. It is also to review the leadership of existing educators in multiculturalism. And then, it discusses about the leadership of multicultural educators to overcome ethnocentrism. For a conclusion, it adds a recommendation for religious education in a multicultural society.