Mindfulness training might be the single easiest and cost-effective school effort to implement to support students. In a diverse environment like those found in schools on the island of Guam, combining multicultural education and mindfulness training could provide an effective and low-cost means to improve student outcomes. An agenda is proposed for a two-day professional development session incorporating mindfulness and multicultural offerings of community-centered literacy projects such as book clubs, virtual museums, library projects, and home-based literacy strategies using the sociolinguistic framework.
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Multicultural education has been recognized as a trend in education that affects everyone from elementary school pupils to university students (Bagceli & Sezer, 2016). The methods of multicultural curriculum and pedagogy vary from conventional to globalization-based approaches. Many educational settings have an international population because of the cultural variety of their classes. The diversity of classrooms encourages educators to integrate multiculturalism education into their teaching methods. It is anticipated that future curriculum development practices will need educators to go beyond basic respect and knowledge of various cultural norms. A global mentality is required in curricular pedagogy methods to engage students in critical reflection on the social and political arena in the global community (Bendell and Sylvestre, 2017; Cohen and Wickens, 2015; Danzak, 2015).
In multiculturalism, there are many different curriculum pedagogical designs to choose from, including conventional, liberal, and critical cosmopolitan. Bagceli et al. (2017) describe multicultural education as the provision of equitable educational opportunities to students from a variety of backgrounds. Respect for those who are different is fostered through the conventional concept of multicultural education. The liberal approach takes into account a sociopolitical route that leads to global change. The critical cosmopolitan is concerned with the political and economic institutions and how they affect social inequality (Gorgadze and Tabatadze, 2017).
In addition to focusing on multicultural education, mindfulness and social-emotional learning (SEL) are two strategies worth incorporating into a professional development seminar. SEL focuses on teaching specific skills like recognizing emotions or using specific statements, with a teacher demonstrating these abilities for the students and guiding them through practicing them for a specified period, and then they help students go to the next skill (Jones et al., 2017). While SEL is working to assure that students are prepared to use their newly learned skills in every practical context, it believes that this approach will be sufficient to allow students to do this task in real-life scenarios. Integrating mindfulness with SEL allows students to develop their understanding of the five SEL skills, as articulated by CASEL. For example, to develop self-awareness, students can apply mindfulness to their daily lives, thus, deepening their awareness. Mindfulness enables students to improve their emotional control abilities, allowing them to speak more assertively or creatively in resolving conflict (Erwin & Robinson, 2016). For a learner to understand another person's feelings, they must control their own emotions because their ability to see and react to their pain grows. Practicing mindfulness promotes compassion. Thus, when students use SEL skills such as negotiating a solution that benefits both parties, they do it with greater empathy for the other person. Through mindfulness, students may expand their cognitive flexibility and inventiveness, allowing them to provide a wider variety of answers to complex problems (Gawrysiak et al., 2018). Besides, a person who practices mindfulness does not necessarily have the interpersonal abilities to handle interpersonal conflict.