Human Relations: Assessing the Affect of Cultural Awareness Curriculum on Preservice Teachers

Human relations training is intended to prepare teachers to be culturally sensitive to an increasingly diverse population. There is a growing trend in teacher education to train preservice teachers more effectively to meet the demands of multicultural society. However, limited research is available to guide the future design of human relations training courses. This research was conducted to address the gap in the literature by investigating the effectiveness of human relations training course on preservice teachers. Results indicate that the course made a significant difference on improving knowledge and skills categories for participants, but there was no significant improvement regarding a cultural awareness category among participants in the training. Results also indicated that specific multicultural concepts, such as White privilege and White Racial Identity, are unfamiliar concepts to participants in this course as evidenced by low pretest scoring. This article will address suggestions for future human relations courses. Human relations training is intended to prepare teachers to be culturally sensitive to an increasingly diverse population. With a growing demand for teachers to be more effective at meeting the needs of multicultural society, the issue of providing adequate multicultural training is paramount. However, limited research is available to guide the future design of huma