Multicultural
education presents many challenges. In Finland, one of the largest
challenges is the fact that the distribution of the immigrant population
is highly imbalanced: almost 90 percent of immigrants live in
metropolitan areas while in other areas of Finland there are few or none
at all. For this reason, schools’ and teachers’ experiences with
immigrant students vary widely and even the teacher training schools may
have difficulties producing teaching graduates with experience working
with immigrant students. In teacher education, reading fiction can be
used as a tool for gaining understanding of different aspects of society
and offer a chance to understand those in different situations.
However, fiction has been an under-used method to support student
teachers’ professional growth. In this article we describe an experiment
in which student teachers read and discussed multicultural literature
in literature circles as part of their studies in multicultural
education. Reading multicultural literature gives young teachers a
chance to understand diversity of multicultural issues beyond the monocultural or touristic perspective.