Abstract
Demands on the teacher workforce are changing as one quarter of children in U.S. schools live in immigrant families and about half of students are racial/ethnic minorities. Simultaneously, diminishing teacher support and teacher shortages cause reliance on alternative certification programs (e.g., Teach for America). In response, we studied the links between color-blind racial attitudes and culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectations with immigrant students among 323 teachers completing an alternative program. Results from a moderated mediation model based on social cognitive career theory demonstrated that color-blind racial attitudes were significantly negatively associated with teaching outcome expectations with immigrants. In addition, the link between color-blind attitudes and self-efficacy was positive and significant only for Asian/Asian American teachers, and the link between self-efficacy and outcome expectations was significant for Latinx and Asian/Asian American teachers, and White teachers. We discuss implications for supporting teachers’ career development in schools serving immigrants of color.
Keywords
A diverse community of 44.5 million immigrants, including an estimated 11.3 million who are undocumented, reside in the United States (Zong et al., 2019). In 2017, approximately 18.2 million children (26% of 70 million children in the United States) lived with one immigrant parent (Zong et al., 2019), and approximately 7% of all children enrolled in K–12 public and private schools had at least one undocumented parent in 2014 (Passel & Cohn, 2016). Additionally, 88% of children of immigrants, approximately 16 million, were born in the United States (Zong et al., 2019). Undocumented and mixed-status families (i.e., family units with members having different immigration statuses) represent an important subset of the diversified composition of today’s U.S. schools. Moreover, trends show racial and ethnic minorities comprising nearly half of all children in the United States and a majority of all immigrants in the United States (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2018; Zong et al., 2019). Yet, despite the increasing presence of racially diverse children of immigrants in schools, teacher preparation and practice have not yet adapted to respond to the needs of changing classroom demographics (Irizarry & Donaldson, 2012). The purpose of this study was to use social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent et al., 1994; Lent & Brown, 2013) to explore whether color-blind racial attitudes are associated with culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy (CRTSE) and outcome expectations (CRTOE) with immigrants in a racially diverse sample of teachers.
As teacher practice is redefined by shifting demographics, teacher preparation must address the cultural, political, and ethical responsibility of preparing teachers to interface with students who live in racially diverse immigrant, undocumented, and mixed-status families. Yet, few studies have highlighted the particularities of teacher preparation for practice within immigrant classrooms (Dabach, 2015; Jefferies, 2014). Jefferies and Dabach (2014) challenge educators to break normative silences regarding immigration status, particularly within teacher education, in order to consciously acknowledge undocumented immigrant students and recognize the current political process that affects youth’s abilities to perform well in school. There is a need for teachers to receive professional development training regarding ways to work with immigrants (Jefferies, 2014). Adequate culturally sensitive training can lead to improvements in attitudes toward immigrants (i.e., increased empathy, lower prejudice, lower anxiety about immigrants) and increases in competency and self-efficacy for working with undocumented students (Cadenas, Cisneros, et al., 2018; Cisneros & Cadenas, 2017; Cisneros & Lopez, 2016). Without competent training, teachers are prone to putting immigrant students and families at risk or misguiding their future educational and career pursuits.
CRTSE and CRTOE
In line with SCCT (Lent et al., 1994, Lent & Brown, 2013), Siwatu (2007, 2011) described two dimensions of culturally responsive teaching agency, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs related to their ability to engage in culturally responsive teaching practices (e.g., adapting instruction to meet students’ needs) and their outcome expectations belief that this engagement will lead to positive outcomes (e.g., building trust with students). Studying these dimensions of agency may help researchers and practitioners better understand how to address teachers’ competencies for working with diverse learners. For example, teachers struggle with efficacy regarding being able to communicate students’ achievement to parents of English language learners and implement strategies that minimize the effect of the mismatch between the home culture and the school culture (Siwatu et al., 2009). This suggests that teachers may experience similar challenges in developing agency for working with racially diverse undocumented and mixed-status families.
Several researchers recommend reform in current teacher education approaches to prepare teacher candidates with skills and training to be more culturally responsive (Darling-Hammond, 2006). Siwatu (2007), for example, demonstrated how self-efficacy-building interventions for teachers increased student achievement. Such interventions include providing teacher candidates with opportunities to practice mastery experiences, have vicarious experiences, and teaching candidates how to teach students about cultural contributions to topics of learning. Frye et al. (2010) similarly demonstrated how teacher candidates’ CRTSE can increase with awareness and capacity to assess students’ needs prior to lesson planning and connecting cultures to lessons. These findings may be applicable to teachers working with immigrant communities. Providing teachers with culturally responsive knowledge and skills related to undocumented and mixed status immigrant families may help teachers boost their culturally responsive teaching agency. By having a higher sense of CRTSE and CRTOEs, teachers may play an important role in creating spaces in which undocumented students can thrive educationally and feel safe to share their experiences.
Color-Blind Racial Attitudes
Neville et al. (2001) explained that adopting color-blind racial attitudes denies the existence of ideological and structural racism and other forms of discrimination, perpetuating the belief that race does not play an important role in individuals’ lived experiences. Across a range of investigations, White individuals tend to score higher in racial color-blindness than people of color (Neville et al., 2000; Oh et al., 2010). Particularly relevant to this study, Spanierman and colleagues (2011) found among in-service and preservice teachers that racial color-blindness was associated negatively with multicultural teaching knowledge and multicultural teaching skill. These findings are consistent with research among university students generally, which indicates that higher levels of racial color-blindness are associated with higher modern racism attitudes (Poteat & Spanierman, 2012), irrational fear of racial minorities (Spanierman & Heppner, 2004), less empathy for racial and ethnic minorities (Soble et al., 2011; Spanierman & Heppner, 2004), and lower interest in social justice (Lewis et al., 2012). Additionally, we acknowledge that color-blind racial attitudes and racism are socially learned and sustained or dismantled through ongoing learning experiences, particularly among teachers (Brookfield, 2014). Hence, we posit that by not receiving training that explicitly addresses the intersection of immigration status and race, and by not explicitly addressing these experiences in the classroom, teachers may be engaging in teaching practices that implicitly reflect color-blind racial attitudes.
Research suggests that pedagogies that are consistent with racial color-blindness in teachers’ expectations can overlook the relevance of immigration status in the classroom (Hinojosa & Moras, 2009). Teachers’ low expectations of students based on race and social class, likewise, can be one of the worst forms of racism, and the expression of this racism in the classroom can be complicated by teachers’ unawareness of the stressful realities that immigrants of color face in school and outside of it (Landsman & Lewis, 2006). Arguing that race still matters in schools and in teacher training, Atwater (2008) suggested that observed differences in teacher opinions of students and approaches to teaching could be related to color-blind approaches of teachers promoted by teacher education and school policy. Wang et al. (2014) similarly described how racial color-blindness could help explain why some teachers have less cultural sensitivity when working with students from racial and ethnic minority groups. Hence, the topic of immigration status and its intersections with racial issues need to be prioritized for teacher candidates in order to increase their consciousness about these issues (Lewis et al., 2012; Poteat & Spanierman, 2012).
Framework for This Study
Programs such as Teach for America are a popular alternative route to teaching certification, with a strong presence in many urban schools serving large percentages of immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. Although there are compelling critiques of alternative certification in general and these types of programs’ mission and activities in particular (e.g., Lahann & Reagan, 2011; Veltri, 2008, 2010), reliance on such programs has significantly increased in the last couple of decades as schools grapple with low levels of financial support and teacher shortages (Sutcher et al., 2016). Thus, studying the cultural competence of teachers in these programs is particularly relevant. The purpose of this study is to explore the linkages among color-blind racial attitudes and CRTSE and CRTOE with immigrants among racially diverse teachers trained by alternative teacher education programs. To our knowledge, this is the first study of culturally responsive teaching with immigrants.
We aimed to explore two research questions in this study. First, what is the role of color-blind racial attitudes in teachers’ CRTSE and CRTOE with immigrants? Second, what is the role of teachers’ race and ethnicity in these linkages? To conceptualize these questions, we used SCCT (Lent et al., 1994; Lent & Brown, 2013) as a guiding framework. SCCT is responsive to the influence of background (e.g., race and ethnicity) and contextual factors (e.g., structural barriers) on the development of self-efficacy and outcome expectations through learning experiences (i.e., sources of efficacy), and it posits that higher self-efficacy and outcome expectations in a career-related domain (e.g., culturally responsive teaching with immigrants) may be predictive of higher career interests, goals, behaviors, and performance in that career development domain (Lent et al., 1994; Lent & Brown, 2013). SCCT is a widely used and empirically supported theory, and it has applications to studying teachers’ career development in diverse contexts (Lent et al., 2011).
SCCT has also been broadly applied to study preservice teachers’ career development and teaching self-efficacy (Zhang et al., 2014). Recent research using short-term longitudinal data point to the reciprocal effects of teacher self-efficacy and work engagement over time, as well as a teacher work engagement and job satisfaction (Granziera & Perera, 2019). Similarly, McLennan et al. (2017) found that preservice teachers’ self-efficacy predicts career optimism and mediates the link between career adaptability and career optimism, thus highlighting the importance of professional learning during preservice training. A meta-analysis by Chesnut and Burley (2015) concluded that preservice teacher self-efficacy predicts commitment to teaching profession. While there is a dearth of research specific to teachers’ self-efficacy in working with immigrants, there is work highlighting that social-contextual factors (i.e., race and ethnicity) are among the best predictors of beginning teachers’ job satisfaction (Mau et al., 2008). Relatedly, a longitudinal study of high school students’ persistence in pursuing teaching careers found that there are indeed racial differences in persistence toward entering teaching careers (Mau & Mau, 2006), where White and Latinx students were found to be more likely to persist in teaching careers than their Asian and Black counterparts.
Guided by SCCT, we constructed a model that depicts CRTOE for immigrants as an outcome variable predicted by CRTSE for immigrants, in a way that is consistent with the original theory (Lent et al., 1994, Lent & Brown, 2013). Additionally, we included color-blind racial attitudes into our model and conceptualized it as a source of efficacy or learning experience and thus being predictive of both CRTSE and CRTOE for immigrants. Within our model, CRTSE serves as a mediator between color-blind racial attitudes and CRTOE. Finally, theory and research point to the strength of the connection between self-efficacy and outcome expectations as varying due to the influence of personal experience and contextual factors such as race and ethnicity (Bandura, 1977; Cadenas, Bernstein, & Tracey, 2018; Siwatu, 2007). Thus, we positioned race and ethnicity as a moderator of the links involving CRTSE. This positioning of race and ethnicity as moderators is guided by SCCT’s depiction of race and ethnicity as contextual variables (Lent et al., 1994; Lent & Brown, 2013). However, given research suggesting that race and ethnicity are linked to teacher social-cognitive career outcomes (Mau et al., 2008; Mau & Mau, 2006), race and ethnicity were positioned in the current model as contextual variables that are proximal to career outcomes. Based on this theory-driven model, our hypotheses are as follows:
Method
Recruitment and Participants
We recruited preservice teachers who were part of a national nonprofit organization that trains promising individuals to teach in schools located in low-income communities. We secured the nonprofit organization’s permission to survey their preservice teachers upon completion of an intensive summer training program, before commencing their teaching practice. Out of approximately 450 teachers who attended the training, 431 agreed to participate in the study and 351 of these teachers completed survey measures. The final sample for analysis comprised 323 participants, as 28 cases were excluded from analyses due to missing more than 20% of item-level data on any of the measures for the study (Parent, 2013).
Participants ranged in age from 17 to 62, with a mean age of 24.42 (SD = 5.94, Mo = 22). Most of the participants identified as female (70.3%, n = 246), spoke English as their first language (68.2%, n = 238), and were U.S. citizens (95.4%, n = 333). They also self-reported their race and ethnicity as White (48%, n = 167), Latinx/Chicano/Hispanic (28.7%, n = 100), Black/African American (9.8%, n = 34), and Asian/Asian American (13.5%, n = 47). Importantly, having an educational background or professional experience in teaching was not a requirement of the program; thus, participants came from a variety of educational and vocational backgrounds, and most did not have degrees in education. Most held a bachelor’s degree (88.9%, n = 312), while some (9.4%, n = 33) held master’s degrees and doctoral degrees (1.7%, n = 6). Similarly, most had no prior teaching experience (78.2%, n = 273), while others had various years of experience, including 1–2 years (13.5%, n = 47), 3–5 years (6.6%, n = 23), and over 6 years (1.7%, n = 6). By the time teachers participated in the study, they did not yet know which grade they would be teaching, and they were aware that they would eventually be assigned to schools and distributed across various grade levels and subjects.
Instruments
CRTSE with immigrants
We used the CRTSE Scale to assess preservice teachers’ confidence conducting “practices and tasks associated with teachers who have adopted a culturally responsive pedagogy” (Siwatu, 2007, p. 1091). This scale contains 40 Likert-type items where participants indicate their level of confidence from 0 (no confidence at all) to 10 (completely confident). The original scale achieved high internal consistency in a sample of preservice teachers (Cronbach’s α = .96). We modified this scale by replacing the word “students” with “immigrants” throughout to add domain specificity, moving from broad cultural responsiveness to immigrant-specific cultural responsiveness. Sample items include “Adapt instruction to meet the needs of immigrants” and “Build a sense of trust in immigrants.” Internal consistency was high in this study, Cronbach’s α = .97. This measure was validated in a sample of 275 preservice teachers, using exploratory factor analysis to determine the factor structure, where the one factor accounted for 44% of the variance with loadings ranging from .39 to .79, and correlational analyses that established a positive correlation with culturally responsive teaching outcome expectations (Siwatu, 2007).
CRTOE with immigrants
We used the CRTOE Scale to assess “teachers’ beliefs that engaging in culturally responsive teaching practices will have positive classroom and student outcomes” (Siwatu, 2007, p. 1091). The scale consists of 26 Likert-type items where participants rate on a scale from 0 (entirely uncertain) to 10 (entirely certain) the probability that a teaching behavior will successfully lead to specific outcomes. We made similar modifications and replaced “student” with “immigrants” for greater domain specificity. Example items include “A positive teacher–student relationship can be established by building a sense of trust in immigrants” and “Using immigrants’ interests when designing instruction will increase their motivation to learn.” The scale achieved high internal consistency with the original sample (Cronbach’s α = .95). In the current sample, Cronbach’s α = .94. This measure was validated by Siwatu (2007) with a sample of preservice teachers. Exploratory factor analysis revealed that the factor solution accounted for 45% of the variance, with loadings between .55 and .75, and a positive correlation with CRTSE.
Color-blind racial attitudes
We used the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS)–Short Form to assess denial, distortion, and minimization of race and racism (Neville et al., 2007). This 14-item scale is a shorter version of the original 20-item CoBRAS (Neville et al., 2000) and involves unawareness of racial privilege, institutional discrimination, and racial issues. Participants indicate their level of agreement to statements on a 6-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Sample items include “Immigrants should try to fit into the culture and adopt the values of the United States” and “Racial problems in the United States are rare, isolated situations.” We calculated total scale mean scores as recommended by the authors where higher scores indicate greater color-blind racial attitudes. In prior research, Cronbach’s α = .83 (Neville et al., 2007), and Cronbach’s α = .78 in this study. This measure was validated across five studies (Neville et al., 2000), which made use of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to establish its factor structure, as well as correlations with related measures. The samples in these studies included racially and ethnically diverse college students and community members.
Analyses
Our first hypothesis was that CRTSE with immigrants would mediate the association between color-blind racial attitudes and CRTOSE with immigrants. To test this hypothesis, we used the PROCESS Macro in SPSS version 25 (Hayes, 2018) on the total sample of preservice teachers. We included the covariates of gender, education level, previous K–12 teaching experience, residency status, and English as a first language in the mediation model we tested. We used the method for testing mediation using PROCESS described by Hayes (2018), which involved examining direct effects, as well as indirect effects, generated through bootstrapped resampling process (10,000 repetitions) with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals. Here, indirect effect estimates were considered significant if confidence intervals did not contain zero.
To explore our second hypothesis regarding how the mediation may differ by race and ethnicity, we conducted initial analyses where we examined the mediation for each racial and ethnic group separately (i.e., Latinx, White, Black, and Asian/Asian American). In these models, the covariate residency status was removed from the mediation model tested on the White sample alone, and both residency status and English as a first language were removed from the model tested on Black teachers, due to these covariates being invariant in these two subsamples. Based on our hypotheses and what we learned from these initial models, we then used the PROCESS Macro to test moderated mediation. The continuous predictor and mediator variables were mean centered in these analyses. This tested our second hypothesis regarding the role of race and ethnicity as moderating the links in the mediational model. We followed the same method as previously described but now also examined the interaction of race and ethnicity and conditional effects. Lastly, we tested our third hypothesis by examining the direction of the relationship between color-blindness and CRTSE, which we expected to be negative across all groups.
Results
Descriptive statistics and correlations are presented in Table 1, including means by racial and ethnic group. Preliminary analyses using one-way analyses of variance suggested that there were significant mean differences between racial and ethnic groups in the main predictor variable, color-blind racial attitudes, F(3, 342) = 5.02, p < .05, in the mediator, culturally responsive self-efficacy with immigrants, F(3, 342) = 13.35, p < .05, but not in the outcome variable, CRTOEs, F(3, 332) = 2.02, p = .11. More specifically, Tukey post hoc tests indicated that Asian and Asian American teachers had higher color-blind racial attitudes compared to all other groups and that Latinx teachers displayed higher CRTSE than all other groups. This suggested that differences by race and ethnicity might play a role in moderating links in the model.
Correlations and Demographic Statistics.
Note: M = mean, SD = standard deviation.
*p < .05.
The correlation between color-blind racial attitudes and CRTSE was not statistically significant (p = .26), the correlation between color-blind attitudes and CRTOE was negative, moderately strong, and statistically significant (p < .05), and the correlation between teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectations was positive, moderately strong, and statistically significant (p < .05). Because of the weak and nonsignificant association between color-blind racial attitudes and teaching self-efficacy, it was unsurprising that we did not find evidence of mediation in the complete sample. The simple mediation model on the full sample yielded an association between color-blind racial attitudes on teaching self-efficacy that was not significant (b = −0.08, SE = 0.28, 95% CI [−0.32, 0.17], p = .54); however, the association between self-efficacy and outcome expectations was significant (b = 0.21, SE = 0.03, 95% CI [0.14, 0.27], p < .05), as well as the association between color-blind racial attitudes on outcome expectations (b = −0.36, SE = 0.07, 95% CI [−0.50, −0.22], p < .05). However, the indirect effect for racial color-blindness through self-efficacy was not significant (b = −0.02, SE = 0.03, 95% CI [−0.07, 0.03]).
We then tested this mediation model on each subsample of teachers in order to explore whether mediation patterns were missed due to lumping distinct racial and ethnic groups together into the full sample and to learn about which links in the mediation model may be moderated. This test of mediation by group again provided no evidence of mediation for Latinx, White, Black, or Asian/Asian American preservice teachers. However, we noticed that Asian/Asian American teachers evidenced a positive effect of color-blind racial attitudes on self-efficacy (b = 0.74, SE = 0.35, 95% CI [0.03, 1.45], p < .05), which was different from the nonsignificant association between color-blind attitudes and self-efficacy in the combined sample. Moreover, for Black teachers, the association between self-efficacy and outcome expectations was not significant (p > .05). Thus, even though our mediation hypothesis was not supported, results did indicate that both color-blind racial attitudes and self-efficacy were associated with outcome expectations and that the links between (a) color-blind racial attitudes and self-efficacy, and (b) self-efficacy and outcome expectations may be moderated by race and ethnicity.
To test moderated mediation, we examined race and ethnicity as a potential moderating variable for each link in the mediational chain. Preliminary analyses indicated that race and ethnicity did not moderate the association between color-blind racial attitudes and outcome expectations (there was not an interaction between race/ethnicity and color-blind attitudes in predicting outcome expectations, analyses available upon request). However, as noted previously, there was evidence for moderation for the other two links. As presented in Tables 2 and 3 and visually depicted in Figure 1, we tested a model showing race and ethnicity moderating the links between (a) color-blind attitudes and teaching self-efficacy, and (b) teaching self-efficacy and teaching outcome expectations. For the link between color-blind racial attitudes and teaching self-efficacy, there was a significant interaction term indicating Asian/Asian American teachers (b = 0.82, SE = 0.39, 95% CI [0.05, 1.59], p = .04) had a stronger association than Latinx teachers (as Latinx teachers served as the reference group), while interaction effects involving other racial and ethnic groups were not significant (see Table 2). Further examination of conditional effects by race and ethnicity (see Table 3) demonstrated the association between color-blind racial attitudes and teaching self-efficacy was significant and positive for Asian/Asian Americans (b = 0.77, SE = 0.34, 95% CI [0.10, 1.44], p = .02), whereas the association was negative and nonsignificant for Latinx (b = −0.05, SE = 0.20, 95% CI [−0.43, 0.34], p = .81), Whites (b = −0.08, SE = 0.18, 95% CI [−0.44, 0.29], p = .68), and Black Americans (b = −0.95, SE = 0.54, 95% CI [−2.01, 0.12], p = .08).
Color-Blind Racial Attitudes on Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy and Outcome Expectations With Immigrants.
Note: CoBRAS = color-blind racial attitudes; Latinx is the reference group for race.
*p < .05.
Conditional Effects by Race and Ethnicity.
Note. CoBRAS = color-blind racial attitudes.
*p < .05.

Conceptual moderated mediation model.
We also found the association between teaching self-efficacy and teaching outcome expectations was moderated by race and ethnicity as the interactions involving White teachers was statistically significant (b = −0.21, SE = 0.08, 95% CI [−0.37, −0.05], p = .01), while interaction effects involving other racial and ethnic groups were not significant (see Table 2). This indicates that the association between teaching self-efficacy and teaching outcomes was stronger for Latinx compared to White teachers. Conditional effects by race and ethnicity suggest that the association between teaching self-efficacy and teaching outcome expectations was statistically significant for Latinx (b = 0.36, SE = 0.07, 95% CI [0.23, 0.49], p < .05), Asian/Asian Americans (b = 0.22, SE = 0.08, 95% CI [0.07, 0.39], p < .05), and Whites (b = 0.15, SE = 0.05, 95% CI [0.05, 0.24], p < .05), but not significant and weak for Black teachers (b = 0.13, SE = 0.11, 95% CI [−0.10, 0.34], p = .27). Together these results show that the two links in the proposed mediational chain were moderated by race and ethnicity. However, the indirect effect for color-blind racial attitudes through teaching self-efficacy remained nonsignificant when examined separately by race and ethnicity (p > .05). Thus, we continued to not find evidence for mediation, while finding race and ethnicity to moderate key associations.
Discussion
We sought to investigate the role of color-blind racial attitudes on CRTSE and CRTOEs for working with immigrant students among preservice teachers engaged in an alternative nonprofit teacher certification program. We used SCCT framework (Lent et al., 1994) to specify links among these variables and test mediation and moderated mediation models among a diverse sample of teachers (i.e., White, Latinx, Black, and Asian/Asian American). Our study is the first to our knowledge to explore culturally responsive teaching specifically with immigrants and to study it in relation to color-blind racial attitudes and teachers’ race and ethnicity.
We found that color-blind racial attitudes negatively predicted CRTOE. These results provide evidence to support our conceptualization of color-blind racial attitudes within the SCCT model as an indicator of learning experiences that serve as sources of beliefs about expectations. Researchers have written extensively about implicit bias, racial attitudes, and racism being constructs that are socially learned in early childhood and sustained or challenged throughout the life span (Aboud, 2003; Feagin & Elias, 2013). Thus, our finding is consistent with extant literature. It is paramount that career theories aiming to explain teachers’ preparation to work in diverse communities (e.g., with immigrant students of color) integrate color-blind racial attitudes into their conceptualization of career development. Our results provide initial evidence for ways of doing this within SCCT.
Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find support for a link between color-blind racial attitudes and CRTSE, when this link was examined among the full sample. However, as described in the next section, this link was positive and significant only for Asian/Asian American teachers. We hypothesized that this link might be negative based on prior research, which found a negative association between racial color-blindness and both multicultural teaching knowledge and skills (Spanierman et al., 2011). Because teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs represent self-evaluations about their ability to work with immigrant students, such beliefs may be unchanged when teachers believe that all students have equal opportunities and are not affected by social inequities (i.e., color-blind racial ideology). In contrast, teachers’ outcome expectations may be more sensitive to color-blind racial attitudes because these expectation beliefs are specific to the outcomes of their teaching, which may be complicated by their awareness of systemic issues facing immigrant students. Lastly, we also found evidence for self-efficacy being a positive predictor of CRTOE.
Teacher Race and Ethnicity as Moderators
In contrast to our hypotheses, we found that the effect of color-blind racial attitudes on CRTSE with immigrants was significant and positive for Asian/Asian American teachers, but was nonsignificant for Latinx, White, and Black teachers. Our hypotheses were founded in literature demonstrating the link between racial color-blindness and various attitudes and behaviors that are antithetical to social justice; yet, there is limited research on color-blind racial attitudes for Asian/Asian Americans (Keum et al., 2018; Neville et al., 2013). Similar to color-blind racial ideology, there is a pervasive stereotype called the “model minority myth,” in which Asians and Asian Americans are perceived as a monolithically hardworking, high-achieving racial group that exemplifies the view that racial barriers to success no longer exist in the United States (Yoo et al., 2010). It is possible that Asian/Asian American teachers who internalize the model minority myth endorse color-blind racial attitudes and transmit this belief onto their self-efficacy for working with immigrant students. Perhaps due to their own connection to communities of recent immigrants, Asian/Asian American teachers may believe in their capacity to teach immigrant students by emphasizing meritocracy rather than using critical pedagogies.
Overall, our findings about race and ethnicity moderating the effect of self-efficacy on outcome expectations with immigrants confirm Bandura’s (1977) assertion that the links between these two dimensions of agency are indeed influenced by the personal experience and contextual factors. Specifically, when we examined the link between self-efficacy and outcome expectations by group, we found that this link was not statistically significant for Black teachers, but was significant for Latinx, Asian/Asian American, and White teachers. However, the significant interaction indicated that the effect was stronger for Latinx compared to White teachers. These results contradicted our initial hypothesis. Evidently, this may suggest that teachers whose racial/ethnic identification is more closely connected with recent waves of immigrants from Latin American countries exhibit stronger associations in their agency dimensions for teaching immigrant students, compared to groups who may be more removed overall from current immigrant realities (i.e., White and Black Americans). Research on the racialized experiences of immigrant teachers is limited but has begun to explore how these experiences shape racial minority immigrant teachers’ authenticity in schools (Subedi, 2008).
The extant literature may help explain why White teachers had a weaker association than Latinx teachers and also the nonsignificant association for Black teachers. We contemplate that the weak but significant link between self-efficacy and outcome expectations among White teachers may be a possible manifestation of the influence of racial affect (e.g., ethnocultural empathy, White guilt, irrational fear of people of color; Spanierman & Heppner, 2004; Spanierman et al., 2006) on their culturally responsive teaching agency. Perhaps the strength of this link might be mediated by racial affect, which we did not measure in this study. Additionally, the link between self-efficacy and outcome expectations was nonsignificant for Black teachers, which may be related to the well-documented experiences of discrimination and marginalization of Black individuals in educational systems (Hope et al., 2015). It is possible that Black teachers’ self-efficacy and outcome expectations might be informed by their own experiences and awareness of the structural obstacles that students of color, including immigrants, experience in schools.
Implications for Teacher Preparation and Career Development
It is worthwhile to consider that the current sample of preservice teachers exhibited relatively low levels of color-blind racial attitudes and very high level of CRTOE with immigrants. This may be attributed to the nonprofit organization’s already robust curriculum related to diversity, inclusion, and equity and perhaps also due to self-selection bias of teachers into a program with a clear mission of promoting educational equity. Nonetheless, the existence of a link between color-blind attitudes and outcome expectations, despite teachers receiving diversity training and having interest in working with marginalized students, speaks to the need to strengthen teacher preparation and career development to focus more on immigration and race/ethnicity. Career development research has established that higher self-efficacy and outcome expectations lead to higher career-related outcomes, including teachers’ job satisfaction (Klassen & Chiu, 2010; Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). Our finding that color-blind racial attitudes may suppress CRTOE for working with immigrants presents challenges and opportunities for teacher education and efforts to support them to stay and succeed in the workforce. Specifically, in the context of increasingly diverse schools and limited financial support for educators, we conjecture that inadequate preparation and low support for culturally responsive teaching might play an important role in the high numbers of teachers leaving the teaching profession within the first few years (Sutcher et al., 2016). Thus, creating culturally responsive educational systems (Klingner et al., 2005) that focus on developing teachers to address immigration, race, and ethnicity might represent part of the solution, if paired with adequate structural supports (i.e., policies and practices), to boosting teachers’ agency for working with diverse learners and retaining them in their profession (Siwatu, 2011).
Our findings have implications for supporting the career development of teachers working with immigrants of color by strengthening teacher preparation programs. Teacher preparation programs may find it fruitful to explicitly design curriculum that challenges teachers’ color-blind racial attitudes and their intersection with immigration issues. There are abundant examples for antibias and antiracist education (Lin et al., 2008) that can be combined with emerging educational interventions for improving attitudes and reducing prejudice for working with undocumented immigrants (Cadenas, Cisneros, et al., 2018; Cisneros & Cadenas, 2017; Cisneros & Lopez, 2016). Additionally, leaders of schools, educational systems, and organizations supporting teachers in the field might consider ways of providing ongoing opportunities for teachers to engage with issues of immigration and race/ethnicity. For example, Jefferies and Dabach (2014) explained how teachers can break the silence related to immigration by raising their understanding of key concepts (e.g., undocumented youth have educational rights) and building emotional safety, social networks, and spaces for empowerment.
These findings also have implications for career counseling practice. Providers who engage in individual, group, or program-based career counseling with teachers (or preservice teachers) may wish to assess their teachers’ culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectations, as well as their color-blind racial attitudes. These assessments may serve to explore teachers’ attitudes in a supportive environment and to devise action plans to increase their cultural responsive agency working with immigrants of color. Career counseling settings might provide opportunities for providers to counter color-blind racial attitudes and offer psychoeducation about immigrant populations using techniques rooted in multicultural career counseling competencies (Flores & Heppner, 2002). For instance, providers may use SCCT to conceptualize recommendations for teachers to engage in learning experiences to challenge color-blind perceptions of immigrants, such as learning about their students’ immigration stories, watching documentaries related to immigration, spending time in immigrant businesses and neighborhoods, and consulting with and observing the practices of teachers who are immigrants.
Limitations
While our study makes meaningful contributions to understanding culturally responsive teaching for immigrants, it is prudent to consider study limitations. Given the makeup of the sample, this study cannot be generalized to teachers with more traditional teacher education and training, as well as those with significant teaching experience. Our findings should be considered exploratory and limited to preservice teachers. The cross-sectional design of our study also poses a limit on inferences made about causality. Another limitation is that although the study was sufficiently powered, the subsamples of Black and Asian/Asian American teachers were relatively low, and a broader sampling of these communities might provide more nuanced results. Additionally, while the scales used in the study are well established and validated, they have not been normed with specific racial and ethnic groups. Moreover, the restricted range of responses on measures (low range on color-blind and high on outcome expectations) may represent another limitation, and future studies with more response variability will be beneficial.
Future Research
We hope that our conceptualization of color-blind racial attitudes as indicative of sources of efficacy will be useful to career theorists and future studies. Future studies may continue to build on our findings and test whether CRTSE and CRTOE predict other domain-specific career outcomes among teachers, based on SCCT’s interlocking models. Future studies might also attempt to replicate our methodology using longitudinal approaches and testing the framework in larger samples of racial and ethnic minority teachers. Similarly, the study should be replicated on different types of teachers (e.g., preservice, in-service, traditional teacher preparation, alternative teacher preparation) with varying levels of experience. Finally, future studies might measure teachers’ own immigrant generation and their experienced costs of racism, as these variables might explain some of the moderation effects.
Conclusion
In this study, we found evidence that color-blind racial attitudes play a negative role in teachers’ CRTSE and CRTOE with immigrants and how race and ethnicity moderate these effects. These findings show potential to advance theory, practice, and policy that is responsive to growing diversity across U.S. schools, high rates of teacher turnover, and growing reliance on alternative certification programs. Teachers often are underprepared to work with children who live in immigrant families and may fail to adequately support their success in school and society. Teacher preparation programs have the responsibility to prepare teachers who understand that the distance between crisis and opportunity resides in redefining the nature of teaching to be grounded in a critical awareness of the power and promise of immigration in a democratic society.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
