The research team, led by Firew Bekele Ejigu with colleagues Tariku Sime Gutu and Wudu Melese Tarekegne, surveyed 342 primary school teachers selected through stratified random sampling across the city, complementing the questionnaire data with in-depth interviews and school observations involving six purposively chosen participants. The study employed an embedded mixed-methods design, giving greater weight to the quantitative strand while using qualitative data to contextualize and enrich the statistical findings. Addis Ababa, home to roughly 5.46 million people and often described as a microcosm of Ethiopia, provided an ideal setting: the city’s population includes ethnic Amhara (47 percent), Oromo (19.5 percent), Gurage (16.3 percent), Tigray (6.2 percent) and numerous other groups, alongside Orthodox Christian, Muslim and other religious communities.

The theoretical backbone of the study draws on James A. Banks’s influential framework of multicultural education, which identifies five interlocking dimensions: content integration, the knowledge construction process, equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction, and an empowering school culture. Crucially, Banks’s model insists that multicultural education is not merely a matter of revising textbooks or adding festival days to the calendar. It demands a transformation in teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and everyday instructional practices, because even the most carefully designed curriculum is only as effective as the educator who enacts it in the classroom.

Measuring attitudes required a purpose-built instrument. The researchers constructed a 20-item Likert-type questionnaire ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with negatively worded items reverse-coded during analysis. One sample item probed a common anxiety: whether addressing student diversity in class is dangerous for national unity. Before deployment, the scale was vetted by language instructors and diversity education researchers, then piloted with 15 teachers outside the main sample. The resulting Cronbach’s alpha of 0.754 indicated acceptable internal consistency, and skewness and kurtosis statistics confirmed the scores were approximately normally distributed, clearing the way for parametric testing.

The headline quantitative result was a grand mean score of 3.41 on the five-point scale, with a standard deviation of 1.33. That figure places teachers squarely in the moderate range: above the scale’s midpoint, signaling generally favorable orientations toward weaving diversity into curriculum experiences, but far from uniformly enthusiastic. The variability matters. Some teachers expressed genuine comfort with multicultural content, while others reported discomfort or uncertainty, and the interviews revealed why the average conceals a spectrum of understanding.

Those qualitative conversations were revealing. One teacher described a school where children speak Welayitegna, Afan Oromo, Amharic, Tigrigna and other languages, and where she regularly coordinates cultural shows and Nation and Nationalities Day events. Another participant, a school principal, painted a more cautious picture, noting that while some teachers hold positive attitudes, others avoid discussing diversity openly for fear of being perceived as politically motivated. Several teachers conflated multicultural education with inclusive education for students with disabilities, or equated it narrowly with religion-free schooling, suggesting that conceptual clarity remains a work in progress even among committed educators.

The inferential statistics told a story about what does and does not predict these attitudes. Gender made no significant difference, with male teachers averaging 3.39 and female teachers 3.47, a gap that failed to reach statistical significance. Academic qualification likewise showed no significant relationship, despite degree holders posting the highest raw mean of 3.73. More surprising was the weak, non-significant correlation between the number of languages teachers spoke and their multicultural attitudes, a finding the authors interpret through the lens of how languages are acquired: community-based, everyday multilingualism may matter more than a simple count of languages known.

What did matter was training and career stage. Teachers who had completed multicultural coursework or professional development scored significantly higher, at 3.54 versus 3.34 for those without such exposure, a difference the researchers report as statistically significant. One-way ANOVA results further showed that younger teachers, aged 22 to 35, and those with one to ten years of experience held significantly stronger multicultural attitudes than their older, more seasoned colleagues. The authors caution against attributing this generational pattern to training alone, since the data did not capture when or where teachers studied; generational socialization around diversity values, or younger teachers’ closer cultural proximity to their students, could also play roles. Still, the pattern echoes findings from Norway’s TALIS data, where professional development emerged as a significant predictor of multicultural teaching self-efficacy.

The study’s most sobering statistic may be that 50.6 percent of participating teachers had never received any training in multicultural education. That gap mirrors a continental pattern. Comparable studies in Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania have documented a recurring attitude-practice divide, in which teachers express rhetorical commitment to cultural diversity but lack the preparation, resources and institutional support to translate that commitment into classroom practice. The Ethiopian findings thus reinforce a growing scholarly consensus that the weakest links across African education systems are content integration, equity pedagogy and empowering school culture, precisely the dimensions that require deliberate, structured intervention.

The implications reach well beyond Addis Ababa. The researchers recommend embedding multicultural education as a core component of teacher preparation, both through dedicated standalone courses and through infusion across subject-specific methods training, alongside continuous in-service workshops and experience-sharing programs. They also call for systematic textbook analysis against Ethiopia’s new Education Sector Development Roadmap and curriculum framework. Because children begin forming evaluative categories about social difference at remarkably early ages, and because teachers serve as the role models from whom young learners internalize attitudes toward out-groups, the stakes of this professional development extend far beyond individual classrooms. In a nation whose founding educational aspiration is unity within diversity, the study suggests that the surest investment is not in policy documents but in the minds of the teachers who open them every morning.

Subject of Research: Primary school teachers' attitudes toward multicultural curriculum integration in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Article Title: Primary school teachers’ attitudes towards integrating multiculturalism into curriculum implementation in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia

Article References: Ejigu, F. B., Gutu, T. S., & Tarekegne, W. M. (2026). Primary school teachers’ attitudes towards integrating multiculturalism into curriculum implementation in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1073. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02166-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02166-6

Keywords: multicultural education, teacher attitudes, Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, primary education, curriculum implementation, professional development, teacher training, cultural diversity, inclusive education, James A. Banks, mixed methods

The article, authored by Yulin Tang of University College London and Wenzhou-Kean University and Chee-Seng Tan of Wenzhou-Kean University’s Department of Psychology and its Well-Being and Strengths Research Center, takes as its starting point what the authors describe as the uplifting effect on personal life happiness that viewing tragedies can produce, an effect highlighted in earlier research by Knobloch-Westerwick and colleagues. Rather than treating tragedy as merely an aesthetic puzzle, the authors frame it as a window into existential well-being, examining how characters in tragic narratives experience and confront suffering, and what those confrontations reveal about resilience and growth under conditions of hardship.

To ground the analysis in concrete cultural material, the study focuses on two widely known modern tragic novels representing Eastern and Western literary traditions: the Chinese novel To Live and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Both works are canonical in their respective cultures, and both center on protagonists who endure profound loss and hardship without being destroyed by it. By placing these narratives side by side, the authors set out to identify the differences and similarities in how positivity is expressed across cultural contexts, and to trace how religious and philosophical backgrounds shape each story’s vision of a life worth living.

The methodological approach is a cross-cultural contextual analysis, combining close reading of the two novels with concepts drawn from positive psychology, humanistic psychology, and comparative literature. Positive psychology, the scientific field that studies the conditions and processes contributing to human flourishing, has often been criticized for emphasizing positive emotions and individual achievement at the expense of darker existential realities. The authors argue that tragic narratives offer a corrective lens, demonstrating that well-being is not the absence of suffering but can emerge through and alongside it, a perspective that resonates with existential approaches to meaning and with humanistic psychology’s emphasis on the whole person.

In The Old Man and the Sea, the aging fisherman Santiago endures an epic struggle with a giant marlin, only to lose his catch to sharks on the journey home. The narrative’s power, the analysis suggests, lies in the protagonist’s perseverance, dignity, and refusal to concede defeat even when material success is stripped away. Within the framework of positive psychology, such a character embodies constructs like perseverance, hope, and meaning-making, while the story’s philosophical backdrop, shaped by Western individualism and a struggle-oriented view of human worth, frames well-being as something forged through effort and defiance in the face of an indifferent universe.

To Live presents a strikingly different, yet complementary, portrait of endurance. Its protagonist survives war, famine, and the deaths of nearly everyone he loves, yet continues to live with a quiet, almost stoic acceptance. The authors situate this orientation within the religious and philosophical traditions of the Chinese context, where notions of endurance, filial and familial bonds, and a more cyclical or acceptance-oriented view of fate inform what well-being means. Where the Western narrative dramatizes heroic struggle, the Eastern narrative dramatizes persistence and continuity, suggesting that positivity itself is culturally inflected: the same underlying human capacity for flourishing is expressed through different narrative and philosophical vocabularies.

Through this comparative analysis, the article develops a joint, cross-cultural understanding of well-being. The similarities between the two novels point to what may be universal: human beings can sustain hope, meaning, and even happiness amid irreversible loss. The differences point to what is contextual: the sources of that resilience, whether individual striving or communal and philosophical acceptance, are shaped by cultural narratives and inherited worldviews. This dual conclusion carries implications for cross-cultural psychology, which has long documented that constructs such as happiness, self-esteem, and meaning do not translate neatly across societies, and it suggests that literature can serve as a rich data source for studying those variations in vivo.

The authors argue that integrating positive psychology into the interpretation and appreciation of tragic stories yields benefits in both directions. For literary studies, psychological constructs provide a precise vocabulary for describing how characters transform suffering into significance, moving criticism beyond impressionistic claims about catharsis. For psychology, literary narratives supply complex, culturally embedded case material that laboratory measures of well-being often flatten. Literature, in this framing, becomes a lens through which readers can understand and pursue well-being in their own lives, witnessing models of resilience that are emotionally vivid in ways that abstract advice about gratitude or optimism rarely achieves.

The article also points toward practical applications in education. The authors suggest the possibility of utilizing literary works in positive and multicultural education, where students might read tragic narratives from multiple cultural traditions while reflecting on the psychological strengths those stories portray. Such an approach could simultaneously cultivate emotional literacy, empathy, and intercultural understanding, helping learners recognize that there is more than one culturally legitimate path to a meaningful life. In an era when well-being curricula are increasingly common in schools and universities, the proposal positions comparative literature as an underused resource for teaching flourishing, particularly around themes of loss that conventional positive education often sidesteps.

Published open access on 15 September 2026, the perspective article contributes to a growing intersection between psychology and comparative literature, reviving a debate that began with Aristotle and giving it contemporary empirical relevance. Its central claim is quietly radical: tragedy, far from being the enemy of happiness, may be one of humanity’s most durable technologies for cultivating it. By reading Santiago’s struggle and the quiet endurance of To Live’s protagonist as two cultural grammars of resilience, Tang and Tan invite psychologists, literary scholars, and educators alike to reconsider what tragic stories are for, and why, across centuries and continents, people keep returning to them not despite their sorrow, but because of what that sorrow teaches about living well.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural analysis of positive psychology and existential well-being in tragic literature

Article Title: A cross-cultural contextual analysis of positive psychology and existential well-being in tragic narratives

Article References: Tang, Y., & Tan, C.-S. (2026). A cross-cultural contextual analysis of positive psychology and existential well-being in tragic narratives. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00782-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00782-9

Keywords: positive psychology, tragedy, well-being, comparative literature, cross-cultural psychology, humanistic psychology, existential well-being, resilience, To Live, The Old Man and the Sea, multicultural education, meaning