The Status of the Integration and Practices of Cultural Diversity in Secondary Teacher Education Program: Ethiopia and Kenya in Comparison

Ethiopia and Kenya are characterized by having rich cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and other types of diversities. The two countries have been making their best to adequately address issues of diversity into their secondary teacher education programs as a means to create teacher education programs that reveal the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of their respective contexts. However, although the two countries have ambitious teacher education policies that intend to significantly accommodate issues of cultural diversity, they have significant differences in the ways in which they practice issues of diversity in their respective teacher education system. While Ethiopia favors the use of a decentralized multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual secondary teacher education approach that is driven by federalist policies that aim to promote unity through ethnic identities, Kenya centers its secondary teacher education framework on a centralized model that gives utmost attention to fostering national unity and social cohesion at the expense of enhancing ethnic identities. Moreover, in Ethiopia, secondary teacher education candidates have the chance to pursue multicultural education as a fully-fledged course whereas in Kenya the curriculum strictly focuses on national cohesion rather than giving multicultural course for prospective teachers as an independent course of study. On the other hand, both countries have been experiencing a significant mismatch between the secondary teacher education policy ambitions and the actual teacher training practices.