In a multicultural society, a curriculum designer aims to enhance social…

Concept: Culturally responsive, cooperative-learning pedagogy holds that structured, direct contact and joint activity among students from different cultural backgrounds — not mere exposure to diverse content — is what builds mutual understanding, reduces bias, and produces a shared sense of community, while keeping each culture’s perspective visible and valued in the classroom.

Application: Applying this principle here, the approach that serves both the cohesion objective and the diversity-responsiveness objective is the one that structures cooperative, cross-cultural contact directly into lessons — including collaborative projects and intercultural interactions. Working on shared tasks with peers from different backgrounds gives students first-hand positive contact and interdependence (the mechanism that builds cohesion), while the intercultural content keeps varied cultural perspectives present and respected (the mechanism that serves responsiveness to diversity).

Cross-check: Contrasting the remaining options against the same two objectives confirms this — none of them creates the direct, cooperative cross-cultural contact the concept identifies as necessary:

• Emphasizing subject content without group activities keeps students working individually, so no structured intercultural contact occurs.

• Focusing only on national symbols and traditional stories foregrounds a single shared narrative and leaves the classroom's actual cultural range unaddressed.

• Teacher-centered lectures with standardized testing keep students in a passive, individual role, so neither peer interaction nor intercultural exchange is built into the lesson.

Result: The approach that includes collaborative projects and intercultural interactions in lessons is therefore the one that best supports both enhancing social cohesion and remaining responsive to diverse cultural backgrounds.