Responding to multicultural classrooms in Bangkokian schools based on school as learning community (SLC)

Multiculturalisation is taking place in schools in Bangkok, Thailand, due to the presence of immigrant students from various countries. This study investigates how teachers respond to students from diverse backgrounds at the school level, despite receiving insufficient resources from authorities, using cases from two primary schools. By drawing on the case study of two under-resourced public primary schools in Thailand that use the ‘School as Learning Community’ (SLC), a school reform approach, the study illuminates how teachers respond to immigrant students’ needs by developing their own pedagogical methods and artefacts based on their joint observations and reflections on these practices – key elements of the SLC approach. This study demonstrates how the SLC approaches can be utilised to support the learning needs of students from immigrant backgrounds and their potential for expansion into other learning environment with multicultural and multilingual contexts.