Evaluation of research

7.6.1 Limitations

This study set out to be a comparative study of multicultural education in Sri Lanka and England. However, after reviewing the relevant literature it became clear that it is

difficult to compare the two countries because of their different physical, historical, social and economic backgrounds and their implementation of multicultural education policies. Despite these acknowledged difficulties, initially the researcher planned to select five multicultural schools with good multicultural practice in Sri Lanka and five multicultural schools with good multicultural practice in England. However, it was difficult to get permission from the schools in England to collect the necessary data. Therefore, the sample selection for the study in England was restricted as only two schools gave permission for data collection (one pilot school and one school which was used for the main study).

This study only targeted secondary level students, who were studying in the Sinhala medium in multicultural schools in Colombo district in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka schools are separated according to the medium of language, ethnicity and sometimes religion. In the ethnically mixed areas of Sri Lanka there are schools with students from different ethnic backgrounds who are studying through the Sinhala language medium. For this research five schools were selected from among these schools that had a large

multicultural student population and were Sinhala and Buddhist medium schools. Therefore, it is difficult to generalise the findings to the whole country and to all types of schools. In England two schools were selected from ethnically diverse areas in

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Bedfordshire. The English school in the main study was an academy that followed the Anglican tradition. As with the Sri Lankan schools, the findings from this English school cannot be generalised to all schools in Bedfordshire or England as a whole.

Four policy makers in Sri Lanka contributed to the main study but in England no policy makers participated. Therefore, it was not possible to gain an insight of the perspectives of policy makers in England.

In this study there were different types of data collection instruments. Sometimes the same question was asked of different people (for example, students, teachers and principals). However, sometimes their responses were at opposite ends of the scale. Therefore, it was difficult to arrive at a definitive answer. This may be because they did not fully understand the questions asked.

A key limitation of this study is that it focused solely on some of the perceptions of the key stakeholders in the teaching and learning process in the schools in Sri Lanka and England. One of the limitations of such a study is that it is limited to reported perceptions and the findings could not be triangulated through any other method beyond the

interviews and questionnaires. The study may have been strengthened considerably through the addition of observations and documentary analysis that would have enabled cross comparison between perceptions and other kinds of evidence.

7.6.2 Strengths

One of the strengths of the findings is the deliberate use of a single framework which has been tried and tested over a number of years, and adapted from work carried out

multiculturally. This framework enabled a conclusion to be drawn that the teachers in the five Sri Lankan schools are generally aware of the importance of understanding their students’ ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, but that they know that they do not have enough knowledge to respond appropriately to all their students in their multicultural classrooms. This is in contrast to the teachers in the English school who had a wealth of multicultural knowledge on which they were able to draw in their teaching.

Another salient strength of the study is that there are a number of areas where the activities and curriculum in the Sri Lankan and English schools reflected what Banks includes in his framework as being essential in effective multicultural schools. The mixed methods approach of this study, using both questionnaires and interviews, meant that issues could be studied in breadth across the relevant participants in the schools, and also probed in depth. Results from one set of research instruments could be

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compared with the other to add trustworthiness to the findings. All teachers and students who completed the questionnaires participated in the focus group interviews in England which supports this view of the richness of the data that was collected. All instruments were piloted and refined in light of the pilot and in advance of the main study to ensure that they were fit for purpose. Research participants in both countries used their own language for questionnaires and interviews to add to confidence in the trustworthiness of the study.

Finally, to add to the uniqueness of the study, policy makers in Sri Lanka contributed information about new programmes that have not yet been published.

7.7 Conclusion

This study was conducted to elicit the views of stakeholders about multicultural education in five Sinhala-medium schools in Sri Lanka, and a comparator school in England. In a small-scale project such as this it is not possible to generalise from the outcomes. However, there are some important findings that warrant further research.

Firstly, the fact that Sinhala students in the five Sri Lankan schools seem generally to be disadvantaged in relation to the other ethnic groups in acquisition of multilingualism is ironic when so much focus is placed on such multilingualism by central government. Moving towards Sinhala-medium only after Independence threw the clear linguistic disadvantage of other groups into sharp relief. However, moving again into a national context of the acceptance of two national languages seems to have disadvantaged Sinhala students in these schools because, overall, they have linguistic skills in one language only, whereas other groups in Sinhala-medium schools tend to be bi- or multilingual. Having said that, however, the reported multilingual competence of students appears to increase with age in these schools. The importance of really good multilingual skills and teaching cannot be overestimated.

Secondly, although generally students of all ethnic groups reported feeling comfortable and safe at school, there seems to be an issue with the (in)visibility of some cultures in special events and public displays in these schools. There may be a need to investigate the effect of this on students’ sense of belonging and social inclusion amd, ultimately,

attainment.

Further, there is an issue of the basic qualifications of teachers at secondary level, and their access to the training in multicultural pedagogies that they wanted and that are

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essential to engender multicultural understandings. The higher the qualifications the more teachers appeared to understand the issues.

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