Drawing on public opinion data on multicultural people in Korea collected in 2013 by the
SSK Cultural Diversity and Coexistence Research Team, we investigated the structural
relationships between the variables affecting multicultural acceptance among teachers using
the structural equation modeling(SEM). We also examined how the relationships vary by the
level of school using multi-group analysis. Our SEM results showed that teachers’
experiences with multicultural education exerted a positive direct effect on their multicultural
acceptance. However, it also had a negative indirect effect on teachers’ multicultural
acceptance by enhancing their negative outlook on multicultural-family students’ adjustment
at school. Teachers’ experiences of mentoring multicultural-family students showed no direct
effect on and an inconsistent indirect effect on their multicultural acceptance. Specifically,
while teachers’ experiences of mentoring multicultural students were on the one hand
associated with their brighter outlook on the students’ adjustment at school, they were on
the other hand closely related to teachers’ negative evaluation of multicultural students in
comparison with their indigenous counterparts. We also found that multicultural school
climate had a very strong direct and indirect effect on teachers’ multicultural acceptance.
Meanwhile, the results from multi-group analysis by the level of school revealed that the
negative effect of teachers’ experiences with multicultural education on their evaluation of
multicultural-family students was witnessed only among elementary school teachers.