Teaching Anti-Bias Curriculum in Teacher Education Programs: What and How.

Abstract

One goal educators have is to empower at all levels in this diverse and changing society whether they work with teacher candidates or with P-12 students. Teachers are seeing increased differences in race, ethnicity, culture, and special needs in children in their classrooms (Corso, Santos, & Roof, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 2005; North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1998). The changing composition of early childhood classrooms challenges educators to be more responsive to diverse needs of all children. Therefore, implementing a curriculum that is culturally responsive and inclusive to assist children's needs is imperative (Gay, 2002; Hein, 2004). To prepare teacher candidates to integrate anti-bias or diversity curriculum with regular curriculum then becomes a crucial goal of every teacher preparation program (Van Hook, 2002; Wasson & Jackson, 2002). Unfortunately, many teachers currently in classroom report that they feel inadequate to teach multicultural or anti-bias curriculum (Au & Blake, 2003; Ukpokodu, 2004). Most teachers admit they have had little or no training at all to work with culturally diverse children and lack necessary pedagogical strategies to enable them to obtain good results with these students (Aguado, Ballesteros, & Malik, 2003, p. 58). The national survey data revealed that while more than 54 % of teachers taught who were either culturally diverse or had limited English proficiency and 71 % taught with disabilities, only 20 % of these teachers felt they were very well prepared to meet their needs. Eighty percent of teachers indicated that they were not well prepared for many of challenges of classroom (Parsad, Lewis & Farris, 2001). For this reason, university and college courses should be tailored to provide teacher candidates skills and content needed to meet needs of a diverse classroom. Implementing a diversity curriculum may not be easy because of fear, uncertainty, or discomfort of many teachers and teacher educators. Teachers' beliefs influence and affect their teaching practices and may become barriers that prevent integration of anti-bias curricula (Van Hook, 2002). However, previous research found that teacher candidates' level of intercultural sensitivity could be enhanced by their teacher preparation courses and activities (Mahoney & Schamber, 20004; Sobel & Taylor, 2005) and from teacher educators who encouraged teacher candidates to discuss and reflect upon issues (Conle et al., 2000; Milner, 2003). In this paper, authors discuss what an anti-bias curriculum is, provide theoretical framework and rationale for involving teacher candidates in certain activities that promote anti-bias curriculum, and offer additional anti-bias strategies for teacher candidates and teacher educators to implement in their classrooms. Anti-Bias Curriculum Anti-bias education is based on Paulo Freire's notion of practice of which is the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in transformation of their world (Freire, 2000, p. 34). Freire believes that freedom can only occur when oppressed reject images and fears they have adopted from their oppressors and replace them with autonomy and responsibility. Therefore, developing cultural consciousness and an understanding that we have power to transform reality must begin at earliest stages of education. It is clear that preparation of teacher candidates to implement anti-bias curriculum is crucial to any process of change. Anti-bias curriculum may be defined as: ... an active/activist approach to challenging prejudice, stereotyping, bias, and 'isms.' In a society in which institutional structures create and maintain sexism, racism, and handicappism, it is not sufficient to be non-biased (and also highly unlikely), nor is it sufficient to be an observer. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.