Blank Canvas and Glass Ceiling: Using Visual Metaphors and Narratives to Examine Preservice Teacher Development

When preparing college-age teacher candidates to teach in diverse contexts, knowing how they reconcile knowledge, self-author, and negotiate social relationships can enhance pedagogy and inform program design. In this article, the authors use a developmental framework they created to examine how teacher candidates’ visual metaphors about White privilege provide insight into the developmental nature of their conceptual thinking.     

Empowering geographic questions with multicultural perspectives: Suggestions for teachers by teachers

Teachers frequently ask their students various types of geographic questions. The questions may be relevant to academic content and the learning process or they may be pertinent to students' personal lives. All geographic questions and conversations yield ideal opportunities for teachers to convey powerful multicultural perspectives integrated within the context of their curriculum and daily teaching practices. Many teachers are not aware of the meaningful learning experiences that they can create for their students by empowering their geographic questions with multicultural perspectives. Nor are they aware of the powerful role modeling they share with their young learners. These conclusions were some of the outcomes compiled by a group of 25 graduate students, all practicing kindergarten through 12th grade teachers, enrolled in a multicultural education course. They examined the links between various geographic questions that teachers ask their students and the multicultural perspectives that teachers model and reinforce with their students that communicate powerful messages for valuing cultural diversity. This article shares the results of their exploration and gives five suggestions for teachers to integrate into their effective instructional practices.     

Deconstructing Black History Month: Three African American Boys’ Exploration of Identity

Every February, schools celebrate Black History Month and teachers teach the grand narrative of famous African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. While the stories communicate bravery, they are also about racism and violence. Here, through narrative inquiry, a teacher deconstructs Black History Month, inviting student responses to stories she shares.     

Diversity Education at a Predominately White Catholic College

This article discussed the successes that have occurred in a graduate and an undergraduate course in diversity education and English language acquisition at a small, predominantly white college. The activities and assignments that are discussed in this article have been refined by the four professors who teach the courses to enable candidates to examine their own biases and the power they have as teachers in a classroom. In addition, the assignments and activities educate and begin to provide candidates with the tools to address cultural capital and how to work with families and students who have different beliefs than themselves.     

Reconciling before educating? Narratives of conflict and peace among teachers in Côte d’Ivoire

While teachers are generally perceived as positive agents of change in post-conflict countries, recently researchers have started questioning teachers’ ability and willingness to teach ‘peace’ after conflict. The vast majority of these studies have been qualitative in nature. The current paper makes an important contribution to this debate by analysing quantitatively how teachers’ narratives of the violent past affect their teaching practices in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that emerged from violent conflict in 2011. Drawing on a survey conducted among secondary school teachers (n = 984) in Abidjan, we show that teachers remain sharply divided along ethno-political lines concerning their perceptions of the past conflict and current peace and reconciliation process. There also exists a potentially problematic relation between these narratives and teachers’ teaching practices: Teachers in support of the narrative associated with the current government seem much more willing to discuss their country’s violent past in the classroom than others.     

Exploring the other side of cultural boundary-crossing teaching in the polarized Israeli society: Jewish teachers from the majority group who teach at the Arab minority's schools

One of the methods of multicultural societies for advancing a shared society is cross-cultural teaching. Commonly, teachers from the majority group apply to teaching at the majority's schools through the acculturation process. The current study, however, illuminates the understudied situation, in which teachers of the Jewish majority group in Israel teach at the Arab minority's schools. Our findings indicate that these Jewish teachers are mostly motivated by their ideology and moral values, mainly a yearning to bridge between two hostile societies. These teachers' integration into the minority's schools is challenging due to cultural differences, lack of familiarity with Arabic, and difficulties introducing informal pedagogy, that is not common in Arab schools, discipline problems among students, and a challenging national-political discourse.     

Reflections on Diversity—a Personal Journey

This is a reflection on my life experience as a woman of color. I teach Spanish courses as well as teacher preparation courses. I know what it was like to grow up in a nearly all Black community, then move to one which was almost exclusively White. As an adult looking back on my childhood, I believe that it is especially important that culturally and linguistically diverse teachers are present in schools. As a professor, I see few teachers of color in foreign language courses at the university level as well as the P–12 levels. P–16 institutions boast of being more receptive to culturally and linguistically diverse students. Role models are important for all children. However, there are few positive role models for culturally and linguistically diverse children. If the goal is to get culturally and linguistically diverse children to succeed academically, then positive and diverse role models are needed in U.S. classrooms.     

Utilizing Theatre of the Oppressed Within Teacher Education to Create Emancipatory Teachers

A key focus of teacher preparation should be critical self-reflection, especially given the current context of market-driven school reform, which often leads to school closings, increases school segregation, and devastates local communities. The question, then, becomes how best to guide critical self-reflection for preservice teachers so that they are aware of their biases, privileges, and positions of power, as well as being cognizant of how these school reforms detrimentally impact poor communities of color. More often than not, when such discussions are broached, preservice teachers want to change the topic to practical teaching strategies rather than addressing issues of social justice. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to explore how “Theatre of the Oppressed” can be utilized to help prepare preservice teachers to become highly effective and socially just educators. More importantly, how can “Theatre of the Oppressed” be employed to engage teacher candidates in critical reflection and consciousness, as well as increase their understanding of systemic inequality.     

Vive la Resistance! (De)Constructing Classmates in a White Working Class High School

English Language Arts class in a predominantly white suburban high school may seem like an unlikely site for transformational pedagogy. Teachers and students speak the same national language and most of the teachers grew up and were educated in working class communities. Despite these roots, it is far too easy for teachers to forget that our “portfolios of experiences” have created access to middle class cultural values. If teachers unconsciously internalize middle class values, we might unwittingly judge working class students as academically deficient rather than engage in empowering, critical pedagogies. Teachers might reconsider student resistance as a force for co-creating curriculum to empower otherwise marginalized students.

This piece explores the nuances of social class, power, and language through the experiences of a teacher and her 11th grade students as they negotiate two units of study that are heavily laden with social class: poetry and college entrance. Analysis and reflection indicate that students in a white working class high school can benefit from pedagogies that embrace, rather than dismiss, student resistance.     

Migrant Philippine teachers in Indonesia: the nexus between precarious skilled work,illegal mobility and the cosmopolitan

This article examines the nexus between the illegal migration of Filipino teachers as a form of precarious skilled employment in conjunction with the mobility of choice and hope found in the adoption of cosmopolitan outlooks. Catering to the aspirations of Indonesia’s rising middle class, privately managed “international” schools actively recruit trained teachers from the Philippines. Many of these teachers are migrants negotiating journeys of financial independence. These migrant teachers often find themselves arriving in Indonesia being required to work in the absence of work visas that were initially promised by their employers. Migrant Philippine teachers working in Indonesia compensate for these “shocks” encountered during their employment by cultivating a sense of cosmopolitan sociability as they aspire to utilize their professional and cultural experiences in Indonesia for better employment opportunities beyond Indonesia.     

Broadening the mind: Beneficial effects of sojourn experiences and contact with visiting international students on prospective teachers’ motivation to avoid prejudiced behavior

Opportunities for intergroup contact are particularly important for prospective teachers because they bear responsibility for an ethnically diverse student population. Using data from a sample of 330 students inscribed in Austrian university colleges of teacher education, we investigated the long-term effects of international student exchange on prospective teachers’ motivation to avoid prejudiced behavior (MAPB). Both sojourning and domestic students’ friendships with visiting international students (VIS) were evaluated as potential instances of naturally occurring intergroup contact that can affect students’ MAPB. Sojourning students had an increased MAPB even nine months after returning to their home country. No effect was found for domestic students’ friendships with VIS. Possibly, the quality of these friendships was insufficient to result in long-term prejudice reduction. Implications of these results are discussed, and the need to advance interventions that are appropriate to improve domestic students’ contact with VIS is ascertained.     

Under-Prepared Students: Essentials beyond Academics

Teacher education programs continue to struggle with preparing highly qualified teachers ready to meet the academic, cultural, exceptionality and linguistic challenges, which are increasingly the reality of American's classrooms. Despite increased academic rigor in such programs, many emerging teachers are still ill prepared to each effectively students from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own. The article asserts that this is due in part to a lack of an appropriate disposition on the part of future teachers. Further, the authors provide three strategies they use routinely with their undergraduate teacher education students that hold promise for effecting positive changes in disposition.     

Teachers' Discoveries of Their Cultural Realms: Untangling the Web of Cultural Identity

Educators need to explore and understand their own cultural identities before they can comprehend and appreciate their students' cultural backgrounds. In this article, the author presents the findings from a qualitative study that investigated in-service teachers' awareness of and characterization of their culture. She also discusses the importance of affording educators opportunities to reflect on and make the connection between culture and their worldview. The author concludes by recommending useful and practical next steps once teachers have a better understanding of their cultural identities.     

Bargaining with the system: A mixed-methods study of Arab teachers in Israel

Research on minority-majority relations usually focuses on the impact of the hegemony on everyday life. In this study we chose to focus on the way minority teachers bargain with the power relations within their work environment as a microcosm of their strategies in the social arena in general. 163 Arab-Israeli secondary-school teachers completed an online questionnaire and were matched with 163 Jewish teachers according to demographic variables. 25 of the 163 teachers completed the optional open-ended question that comprised the data for the qualitative analysis. In the quantitative analysis, we found that Arab teachers showed less knowledge of the Ministry of Education guidelines regarding teachers’ freedom of speech, conducted fewer discussions of Controversial Public Issues (CPI) and rated the importance of their role as promoting active citizenship lower than their Jewish counterparts. In the qualitative analysis, three main strategies Arab teachers use emerged: ‘evasion’, ‘toning down’ and ‘promoting a shared society’. Arab teachers negotiate between their needs for self-preservation, and their national and professional identities in an implicit cost-benefit assessment. This analysis coincides with Kandiyoti’s (1988) model of women’s bargaining with the patriarchy, corresponding to Arab teachers as a governed minority group that negotiates with the hegemony. In each strategy, there is a different balance between the personal benefits, the risks involved, and the community interests one has in mind. The research sheds light on the precarious position of Arab teachers in Israel, and the flexibility that they are pressed to employ in order to muddle through.     

Advancing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Secondary Methods Course

Given changes in the U.S. school-age population, it is crucial that colleges of education prepare teacher candidates to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds. Because diversity constitutes such a small portion of the curriculum in many teacher education programs, it is crucial that teacher educators find creative ways to incorporate diversity into the courses they teach. In this article a teacher educator at a predominantly White institution in the American Southeast describes how she introduces culturally relevant pedagogy and connects it to the content, activities, and assessments included in the remainder of a course.     

Egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and altrocentrism: factors in individual and intergroup violence

Egocentrism and ethnocentrism are considered as cognitive biases which foster violence at both individual and group levels. Each is characterized as a lack of empathy or an inability to see reality as it appears to others. Altrocentrism is conceptualized as a more mature, socialized form of perceiving in which the individual can understand another person because he sees the facts as they appear to the other. Adolescents tend to see policemen and teachers as hostile and threatening because they cannot empathize with the roles of these authority figures. Evidence indicates that violent behavior is associated with egocentric and ethnocentric thinking. Devices such as role-playing, stating the case of the other, fantasy, and the culture-assimilator foster altrocentric thinking, and some evidence indicates that they reduce the frequency of resort to violence. Cross-cultural education must begin use of such procedures if we are to minimize domestic and international violence.     

Enhancing Cultural Humility Through Critical Service-Learning in Teacher Preparation

To provide opportunities for preservice teachers to move beyond the limitations of their life experiences, the teacher preparation program at the University of Vermont has worked to advance service-learning experiences that push preservice teachers to examine their own identities and biases by providing them with opportunities to interact with others whose life experiences are different than their own. The goal of these experiences is to assist the preservice teachers in recognizing how their emerging practice, which is entrenched within their own positionality, impacts individuals that they work with as well as the broader community. This interpretive study examined outcomes of the experience through the lens of cultural humility. This study affirms the need to be explicit about practice, particularly as it relates to critical pedagogy to advance social justice. It also offers a glimpse into how teacher preparation programs may construct learning experiences to support the development of cultural humility.     

Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Readalouds

The teacher readaloud is an instructional tool established in its ability to foster children's language and literacy development. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and changing standards place pressure on teachers to provide literacy and language instruction relevant to children's everyday lives and learning. This article presents a framework for conducting culturally and linguistically relevant readalouds within two essential components, talk and text, in terms of developing cultural competence, maintaining high academic expectations, and fostering a critical stance. Particular attention is given to the interactive nature of these readalouds and how they can be used to promote children's active co-construction of textually-based meaning.     

Literature Review: The Growing Need to Understand Muslim Students

Is what preservice teachers say about issues surrounding culture and diversity actually what they believe? Using a short critical analysis of “The Three Little Pigs,” the author engages students in an anonymous writing activity that reveals dissonant opinions and leads to opportunities for discussion.     

A Review of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900–1960”

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 created a new kind of discomfort in the United States about “self-radicalized” terrorists, particularly related to Muslim immigrants. The two suspected bombers, brothers with Chechen backgrounds, had attended U.S. public schools. News media portrayed the brothers as “immigrants” and often showed them as having a struggle between their Chechen and U.S. identities. This article proposes that educators consider reframing the talk and discourses about immigrants and immigration toward a more complex understanding of transnationalism. The author demonstrates her work as a former English language learner teacher and her current research in the area of transnationalism to argue for educators to teach meaningfully about this concept. The goal, the author argues, is to help create a deeper understanding of newer arrivals to the United States so that the more newly arrived have greater choices about who they become and the identities they perform.