Beyond Awareness: Preparing Culturally Responsive Preservice Teachers.

Abstract

Educating preservice teachers for culturally responsive teaching in increasingly diverse contexts remains a substantive challenge. Research findings have suggested that courses in multicultural education have not had much impact on instructional practices of preservice teachers as they enter schools and classrooms (Xu, 2001; Zeichner, Grant, Gay, Gillette, Valli, & Villegas, 1998). Other scholars have argued that student preservice teachers and teacher educators must reconsider their own assumptions and work towards a better understanding of values and practices of families and cultures different from their own (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Derman-Sparks, 1995). Only through this type of reflective analysis of their own beliefs and systematic inquiry into diverse cultures can preservice teachers and teacher educators begin to construct a pedagogy that makes diversity an explicit part of the curriculum (Cochran-Smith, 1995). However, how this analysis and inquiry can best be realized and translated into classroom practice remains unclear. The Beyond Awareness Research Project was designed to develop more effective ways to address culture and cultural differences in the preparation of preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and university faculty. Its purpose was to provide a more adequate preparation for working in high-need schools by assisting educators in the development of habits of mind that incorporate an understanding and valuing of students' cultures and recognition of the need to consider those cultures in teaching practices. This report focuses on findings from the analysis of students' field notes, interview data, and artifacts selected from the larger project. Theoretical Overview One of the goals of multicultural education is to bring to light oppression and social inequality that are based on race, social class, gender, and disability. Its aim is to prepare students to become future citizens who are able to reconstruct society so that it can better serve the interests of all groups of people, especially those who are of color, poor, female, and/or with disabilities (Sleeter & Grant, 1999). The orientation and focus of multicultural education, therefore, needs to be on the whole educational process. This approach encourages students to question the power relations that are embedded in the new global economy though four practices that can be incorporated in schools. * Democracy is actively practiced in all areas of the school. In the classroom students are given the opportunity to direct a good deal of their learning and to learn how to be responsible for that direction. Teachers guide and direct students so they learn how to develop skills for wise decision-making. * Students learn how to analyze institutional inequality within their own lives. Crucial to this practice is the development of a critical consciousness. Here an individual wants to know how the world actually works and is willing to analyze the world carefully. According to this practice, individuals either believe that they have no power to change the way the world works for them or they believe that their problems have no relationship to their position in the power hierarchy. In this practice, students are taught to question what they hear about how society works from other sources and to analyze the experiences of people like themselves in order to understand fully what the problems actually are so they can prepare themselves to change unfair social practices. * Students learn to use social action practices such as the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are necessary for active citizen participation. The school is viewed as a laboratory or training ground for preparing students to be more socially active. Advocates of this approach do not expect children to reconstruct the world, but they expect the schools to teach students how to do their part in helping the nation achieve excellence and equity in all areas of live. …

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