ABSTRACT
Multicultural education emerged as a political movement to redress systematic social injustice by educating service professionals in multicultural competencies so that they could approach diverse students with appropriately inclusive teaching strategies. While the study of multicultural education has been dominated by the United States because of its historical origins in the Civil Rights Movement, it has begun to be studied internationally, and the variety of contexts and needs adds a richness to the study of multicultural education that even the most thorough body of literature in the United States could not achieve alone. Preservice teachers and other health services professionals are of particular importance as targets of multicultural education, because their treatment of systematically oppressed populations has the potential to help redress inequities. Because of the scarcity of experimental research on interventions, best practices are difficult to characterise, with conflicting claims about the success of multicultural education of service professionals and the success of their implementation of multicultural practices varying from context to context quite significantly.
