Sauro Civitillo: Multicultural education || Cultural responsive teaching in Europe

ReSearching Diversity

In this episode, we spoke with Sauro Civitillo who is an Assistant Professor at the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

PAST (00:02:15): Sauro shares his experiences as a “first-generation student”, meaning that he was the first one in his family to attend university and to follow an academic career. He talks about how his parents supported him and about the positive impact one of his teachers had by having high expectations of him. He also talks about the sudden choice to become a researcher at age 31 and how he got three master degrees, showing his persistence in higher education.

PRESENT (00:08:25): Sauro discusses Gorski's (2009) article on the three types of multicultural approaches in education, namely the conservative approach, the liberal approach and the critical approach. The definitions are given, and we discuss which approach is most common in the U.S. and in European education. We also talk about the difference between multicultural education and culturally responsive teaching (CRT). Sauro gives some practical examples for how these approaches can be implemented in (higher) education.

FUTURE (00:25:30): Sauro emphasizes how important it is to have more research on culturally responsive teaching in Europe and especially research being done by people with a family migration history (in Germany typically referred to as “migration background”). He discusses the need for more researchers, teachers and teacher educators with family migration history and more equal funding opportunities because representation matters.

For more information on the episode, guest, and included references, please visit researchingdiversity.com.
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We want to thank Minor Revisions for the music, Lotte Gottschewski-Kooijman for the logo design, Max Kersten for post production, and zeythehuman for their artwork. Stay tuned and talk soon!

Full references of this episode:
Gorski, P. C., & Pothini, S. G. (2013). Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (0 ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203076200

*Gorski, P. C. (2009). What we’re teaching teachers: An analysis of multicultural teacher education coursework syllabi. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(2), 309–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2008.07.008

Vietze, J., Jongerling, J., Senathirajah, R., Sutrisno, R., & Meeuwisse, M. (2022). The Student-Curriculum Interplay: A Mixed-Methods Exploration of Diversity-Related Learning Goals, Content Integration in Instructional Materials and Higher Education Students’ Academic Performance. Psyarxiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zvjud