Project Owner: Yozgat Nene Hatun Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School

Number of Participants: 9

Project No.: 016- 1- TR01 – KA102-027816

Multiculturalism not only consists different ethnic group, social class or religion, but also different gender, superior ability  or disability. Banks defines multicultural education as " a major goal of multicultural education is to change teaching and learning approaches so that students of both genders and from diverse cultural, ethnic, and language groups will have equal opportunities to learn in educational institutions".
Studies of early childhood experience shows that it is highly effective in building the children's cultural understanding. Children, in the first three years of life, develop understandings about racial identity and gender.
The ability to learn quickly in early ages, especially the fact that the experiences in early childhood that is highly effective in building cultural understanding, has made multicultural education necessary for developing a healthy cultural identity and democratic attitude and skills.
Pre-school children aged 3-6 refuses pre-school education as they can't have contact linguistically with their teachers/master trainers in Erzurum especially in the South districts Çat, Tekman, Karayazı and Karaçoban. These children have this problem when they began to 1st grade of primary school and they could hardly learn Turkish at 2nd or 3rd grades. Currently there are 1203 students who can't read and write at 4th grade because of this linguistic problem in our city.
The children, who finish primary and secondary school in their own districts, can enter into "conflict with different values" environment as we mentioned above, when they face with the students that come from different cultures at high school.
Here the key are the people who are child development teachers/master trainers working at pre-school institutions.
The students, who graduate from child development fields of Vocational  and Technical educational institutions, generally start working as master trainers in their districts, and some of them continue to university and become child development teachers. These students don't get enough vocational education about the main issues as "how to teach the language", "how to meet the children from different cultures at common values" neither at high school nor at university.
However in Europe, especially in Germany, people from different religions, languages and cultures live together more than in our country. The children of these families' never have a problem with the language and cultural adaptations as a result of the approaches of pre-school educators and pre-school educations.
Here our aim, for the child development students, that will work as teachers or master trainers at pre-school education institutions, in this project for 2 weeks and 80 hours totally is to make them gain theoretical and practical education and training about:
* language, vocabulary and narrative skills development in preschool educational institutions in Europe,
* emotional and social development, the ability to establish positive social relationship with peers and adults,
* the approach of the preschool teachers towards the children that belong to different religion, language or race,
* to give the patriotism, to unite in a common denominator, the spirit of unity and solidarity to children who belong to different language, religion or race by the end of art, drama, puppets, games, stories and music events,
* to give the unity spirit under common values and to respect to different opinions.