Beyond Exposure to Collaboration: Preparing General-Education Teacher Candidates for Inclusive Practice

Preparation of new teachers to work effectively in inclusion settings has not kept pace with demands created by recent reforms. General-education candidates typically receive limited exposure to inclusion strategies at the preservice level, and often their only meaningful preparation comes in the practicum setting. The purpose of this article was to examine the manner in which characteristics of cooperating teachers and the practicum settings affected efficacy for teaching students with disabilities. General-education student teachers responded to questionnaires about their collaboration with cooperating teachers, the focus on inclusion instruction in their practicum setting, and their efficacy for providing inclusion instruction. Results from a structural equation model indicated that efficacy is predicted both by focus and by collaboration with the cooperating teacher. Discussion focuses on implications for teacher preparation and directions for future research.     

Towards an Ethical Approach to Perspective-taking and the Teaching of Multicultural Texts: Getting Beyond Persuasion,Politeness and Political Correctness

This paper aims to problematize perspective-taking – an instructional practice widely thought to be useful in helping students develop the ability to better understand their own worlds and the worlds of others in multicultural texts. We provide examples that illustrate difficulties discovered in implementing a perspective-taking approach to teaching multicultural texts across three diverse classrooms. Specifically, these examples suggest that perspective-taking was perceived by students to be a rhetorical strategy that their teachers wanted them to acquire in the interests of persuasion, politeness, political correctness and uncritical tolerance. Through discussion of these examples this paper argues that in order for perspective-taking to be a valuable instructional strategy for teaching multicultural texts it must be grounded in a larger effort towards an ethical approach to response to multicultural texts – an effort by which teachers encourage ownership of initial responses, genuine and continual consideration of conflicting views, and a positioning of one's response in relation to those of others.