Navigating Multicultural Curriculum Reform: EFL Teachers' Use of Movie-based Cultural Content

Abstract

This paper chronicles the outcomes of a semester-long study involving 560 lesson plans by 39 teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in two separate language centers in Rabat Morocco. The objective of this study is to report on the practices of EFL teachers when using movie-based cultural content for Multicultural Education (ME) purposes, as instructed by James Banks (2002) Approaches to Multicultural Curriculum Reform. Two research questions guided the current study: (1) do EFL teachers incorporate movies into their lesson planning for multicultural purposes? (2) Are ELF teachers’ lesson plans compatible with the principles of ME of curriculum reform? To respond to these research questions, a qualitative research design was adopted, involving content analysis of the cultural contents in the corpora of lesson plans collected. The findings revealed that EFL teachers primarily used movie-based content as instructional tools for language acquisition rather than for cultural exploration. In addition to that, teachers’ lesson plans indicate a deficiency in the progressive integration of ME approaches to multicultural curriculum reform, as their content does not reflect either the principles of the Transformative Approach (AP) or the Decision-Making & Social Action Approach (DM&SAA). The study concludes by a series of recommendations to navigate Multicultural curriculum reform through the use of movie-based cultural content.