ABSTRACT
The computer is a powerful and highly motivational learning tool. Used creatively it can liberate teacher time and enhance primary pupils’ repertoires of learning skills. It can increase access to the curriculum for children with a variety of individual needs and from diverse cultural heritages. In primary schools its effective use also poses issues of classroom management, which in their solution can force teachers to confront many of the challenges and issues of cultural pluralism. Such issues include the need for schools:
• to value cultural diversity explicitly; • to encourage children to value themselves as part of human kind, which
celebrates both similarities and differences; • to allow children the opportunity to stand back and view situations
objectively; • to allow children to express what they honestly feel about themselves, the
treatment of themselves and others and their everyday conflict situations; • to prepare all pupils for life in a pluralistic society characterized by
differentiation in language, ethnicity and/or cultural heritage; • to encourage children to look for strategies for resolving problems, especially
conflicts and to capitalize on cooperative communalities; • to help children to discover aspects of their own culture, particularly those
which help them to locate themselves; • to foster empathy by imagining the feelings of people both in similar and
different situations to their own; and • to use everyday situations to discuss uses and abuses of power and to consider
individual and collective rights and responsibilities.
