СOMPETENCE BASED APPROACH TO TEACHERS’ POLYCULTURAL EDUCATION

Abstract

The article deals with a description of some key competencies that are needed by a teacher for his/her successful professional activity in a multicultural society. The author addresses some program documents by the European committee of culture and education that depict the requirements of the society that a teacher should meet, such as: language competence; an ability to work in a multicultural environment; an ability to maintain fruitful co-operation with the community, parents and colleagues. The main idea that lies behind a teacher’s multicultural competence is that a teacher should change his/her attitude to the essence of multiculturality as view it as an advantage, not a challenge, that helps develop new qualities and get a broader world outlook. The author further states the necessity of building a system of polycultural education inUkraine. She also points out the key components of this system, such as: a goal setting component that describes the main goals of multicultural education; a contents component that reveals the main changes in curriculums, programs, contents of textbooks, etc. that assist multicultural awareness of students and teachers; an institutional component that show how different institutions (whose aim is multicultural awareness implementation) work in different European countries; an operational component that depicts how teachers interact with the community, their colleagues, students and their parents within the framework of multicultural education; and a result component that should elucidate all those who are interested in polycultural education implementation in the system of education in Ukraine. At the end, the author makes a conclusion that the system of teachers’ training inUkraineneeds modernization, and one of the features of this modernization should be the implementation of polycultural education.