In this series, I hope to guide you in acquiring the vocabulary that you need to know to be considered a competent education professional. In this article, we will discuss education vocabulary centered on multicultural education.

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Assimilation refers to a process of gradual, but imposed, adjustment to and absorption of the values, attitudes, and customs of a new culture until conformity is established. This new culture is often the dominant culture in the area or country.

Culturally Responsive is the term given to the practice of respectfully accepting, acknowledging, and incorporating the students’ diverse cultural knowledge, background experiences, and values into the curriculum and all aspects of learning.

Deculturalization is a term denoting the loss of “home culture” that occurs when immigrants achieve complete assimilation. This will generally happen across a generational gap, causing difficulties for both the deculturized children and their culturally intact extended family members.

Diversity A wide range of unique individual aspects, including race, language, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, socioeconomic level, and academic ability.

English Language Learners (ELL) refers to student who are non-English speaking, or students who may have a basic grasp of English, but who have a different home language that they use more regularly.

Equity denotes the concept or idea of fairness, equal treatment, and equal opportunity.

Multiculturalism The acceptance of multiple cultures coexisting in society with equitable status accorded to distinct ethnic groups.

Nativism is an academic term denoting the ethnocentric belief that the established inhabitants of a nation should have favored status over immigrants or other newcomers.

RaceUsually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics.

School Climate is a collective, descriptive label for the social interactions and relationships among and between students, teachers, and administrators. The ways students experience the school and culture: the ways teachers and administrators interact and collaborate.

School Culture The values, traditions, safety practices, and organizational structures within a school that cause it to function and react in particular ways.

Segregation refers to the unjust separation of different kinds of humans into racial groups in daily life that may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a washroom, attending school, and going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home.

Are there any terms that we missed?