Brazilian scholar Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” catalysed a wave of criticism on the then mainstream education which was labelled “banking education” by Freire. Students are not “folders” that passively receive and contain “files” inserted by their teachers. Student oriented teaching and learning locates in the core of the liberation perspective of education – the pedagogy aims at empowerment and liberation of students. Education means to empower students so that they are capable to liberate themselves from various constrains – internal as well as external, material as well as spiritual. In the past four decades, disparities that attract most attentions are those of psychological in nature, such as level of capability and knowledge. Student oriented teaching and learning is geared to ensure fulfilment of all students’ needs and potential of development based on individual existing levels of capability and knowledge. While psychological disparities remain major concerns of research, responsiveness to cultural diversity is another crucial issue to be addressed in multicultural education.
In multicultural classrooms, the process of teaching and learning is essentially a process of intercultural communications. Cultural diversity of multicultural classrooms presents both challenge and opportunity for all participants – teachers and students. Successful multicultural education demands strategies to cope with the challenge and to exploit the opportunity. The challenge of multicultural classrooms comes from individual cultural limitations that become additional constrains to all participants in multicultural classroom teaching and learning. These limitations include customs, beliefs and value systems of various cultures. Successful multicultural education should enable students to transcend these cultural limitations. Therefore, development of cultural competence is an important component of multicultural education. This includes awareness of cultural limitations of oneself and cultures of others; appreciation of cultural diversity and capacity to navigate successfully in multicultural settings.

The opportunity of cultural diversity of multicultural classrooms lies in the diverse experiences and perspectives of the multicultural student body. Each student comes with a set of experience and knowledge accumulated in their past studies, works and lives. The students also bring various approaches and viewpoints in concord with their beliefs and value systems. These cultural capitals borne by the students are invaluable teaching and learning resources. The abundance of information and spectrum of visions that the students possess are incomparable to the circumstance in which students come from similar background, and are beyond the teacher’s knowledge boundary. No success could be claimed without fully exploiting these cultural capitals in multicultural teaching and learning.

The paper will first articulate the concept of cultural competence in multicultural education. A multicultural classroom teaching and learning model, which the author has been studying and practicing in recent years, will then be laid out to demonstrate how the above discussed objectives could be fulfilled.