11 rejects racism and other discrimination in schools and society to accept and affirm the
pluralism ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, economic and gender among the students; their communities and teacher represent Lynch, 1986
Multicultural Education created to avoid the same mistakes with the past in dealing with multiculturalism issues. The goal of multicultural education is to help
students in understanding and appreciating cultural differences and to recognize the accomplishment of diverse ethnic, racial and socioeconomic groups James Banks,
1991. A pioneer of multicultural education was Banks 1991 who believed that all
aspects like teaching methods, instructional material, teacher attitudes and impersonal students assessed performance, needed to be transformed in order to create a good
multicultural school environment. This believes transforms into a class through the using of many teaching techniques that different with common teaching techniques in
the school.
C. Teaching Technique
1. Informing and Empowering
The goals of multicultural education are to foster acceptance, appreciation of cultural diversity, develop sensitivity to social inequalities and encourage
transformation of self and society. To achieve these goals; teachers can start informing to empower their students use multicultural education.
There are two functions of multicultural education, to inform and to empower. For informing, there is the example; teachers can ask their students to read the
multicultural literature books to gain knowledge or information about the experiences,
12 beliefs, and value of other cultures. Moreover, by reading multicultural literature
students are exposed to develop broad perspective of the world and challenged to look at themselves and the world differences Sims Bishop, 1994; after getting the
knowledge, students will empower themselves through developing an ability to identify and critically analyze – and may even take action to solve – problem related
to cultural or ethnic differences Rasinski and Padak, 1990 In short, Mc. Ginley et al 1997 said that “Stories can be a means of personal
and social exploration and reflection – an imaginative vehicle for questioning, shaping, responding and participating in the world”. That means both informing and
empowering are important and they are interrelated. As good teachers, we should not stop at informing but must always move toward empowering.
2. The differences between technique and methods
Teaching is not something easy. Teachers cannot come to the class and only read the material without explaining to the students. Teachers need to study more and
develop students’skills. Teachers need to be preparing the material; it could be all subject like English, Math or Science and etc before entering the class. According to
Harmer 2003:62, the definition of methods are about types of activity, role of teachers and learners and which kinds of materials appropriate for teaching. Teaching
methods emphasize the theory of teaching; while a teaching technique is the practice or concrete ways in teaching the methods.
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3. Teaching technique used in FREEDOM WRITERS film.
To explain teaching techniques we can not avoid discussing the methodology also, because teaching technique is the practice of the methodology Nunan, 2003. In
that case, we will talk about teaching techniques used in the multicultural class based on the Freedom Writers film. According to the film, the teacher, Erin Gruwell, mostly
focused on reading and writing skills to develop her students’ abilities by letting them read some books on multicultural issues.
• Reading and Speaking Teaching Techniques
