Abstract
Studying Diversity in Teacher Education, edited by Arnetha Ball and Cynthia Tyson, is a tapestry of unique perspectives on a critical area of teacher education research from U.S.-based theorists and researchers. The 20 chapters of the text are organized into three sections focusing respectively on historical contexts and persisting challenges, current trends and innovation, and future trends and directions. Of the 20 chapters, one chapter explores the overarching theme of diversity in teacher education in an international context, the rest of the chapters address the theme in a variety of U.S. settings.
In the foreword, Linda Darling-Hammond describes the volume as a “treasure trove of perspectives, answers, and provocations” (p. x). We take a cue from Darling-Hammond in this review and discuss this volume in terms of the perspectives the authors bring to studying diversity in teacher education and how they provoke those who engage with the text. Overall, we conclude that rather than providing answers to the most vexing questions related to diversity and teacher education, this volume is an urgent call to action for the field.
Perspectives
The editors have created a rich mosaic of perspectives on this pressing and critical topic, successfully including an array of viewpoints without sacrificing depth. Deeply theoretical chapters such as Olsen’s contribution (Chap. 12) on identity theory are juxtaposed with empirical studies such Uys, Reyneke, and Kaiser’s work (Chap. 10) that explores a socially responsible approach to teacher professional development in a dominant language. Throughout the book, several authors underscore the critical nature of including diverse perspectives in dialogue about teaching education, particularly those that have been historically silenced. Several authors draw on similar statistics and familiar historical arguments, independently building a rationale for diversity in teacher education. The volume would have gained more coherence and less redundancy with a framing chapter of statistical trends and a rationale for investigating diversity in teacher education.
When we step back and examine the collection of chapters as a whole, the book cover image serves as an apt metaphor to describe the overall experience of reading this book. A collection of hands of varying shades of color are overlapping and touching, just as the ideas in the individual chapters create a multifaceted examination of diversity. The hands are layered, one upon another, just as the book provides occasional common narratives and common points of argument from different points of view. The hands, however, are not grasping each other; there is no bonding between the hands other than a layered touch. The book, similarly, leaves the reader wondering how the individual chapters grab onto each other to represent the interconnections among the ideas and not only the repetition of hand upon hand.
Historical Perspectives
In Chapter 1, Grant and Gibson assume the role of “historical detectives” and pose a troubling query—because certain questions “remain at the heart of research, public policy and debate. . . Why are we still asking these questions? Has anything at all changed?” (p. 20). The historical context provided throughout the volume reinforces the urgent need for attention to these perennial issues of oppression and marginalization of certain groups in teacher education, schools, and learning. For example, Quinn and Meiners (Chap. 5) highlight the continued absence of LGBT issues and perspectives; Sleeter and Milner (Chap. 3) discuss the demographic imperative of diversifying the teaching workforce; Kirkland (Chap. 8) describes the deficit views of Black males persistently held by many teachers; and Scott and Ford (Chap. 9) discuss the long-standing trends of disproportionate placement of students of color in special education and gifted and talented programs.
These issues are brought to life through heartbreaking vignettes that Chapman (Chap. 11) and Lee (Chap. 13) tell in the opening of their chapters. When we watch Randy, a dark-skinned Black boy, navigate a Kindergarten classroom in a predominantly White suburb, we are left troubled by the teacher’s inattention, misdirected attention, and judgmental attention she gives to him (Chapman, Chap. 11). When a White male teacher declares that boarding schools are his vision of the future of education for American Indian students, Lee (Chap. 13) highlights the tragic and historical irony of how this teacher “felt it was better to forsake the culture, family, and heritage of his students and to indoctrinate and assimilate them into Western culture, values, and the English language” (p. 275). In our reading, these vignettes create a greater sense of human urgency to the need for change than the much more typical statistical summaries and historical trends because they show us that diversity in teacher education needs attention in the here and now for the sake of each child in a classroom.
Policy Perspectives
The book takes up several policy discussions, with the most comprehensive analysis related to teacher quality provided by Cochran-Smith and Fries (Chap. 17). This chapter describes five major policy discourses in a policy web that have “braided and unbraided” with each other over the past 25 years. Although all center on teacher education and quality, the policy problems are constructed from ideologies such as educational inequality, market-driven discourses, a globalized society, teaching as a profession, and social justice. Policies of licensure requirements can lead to teacher education program designs that minimize attention to multicultural teacher education and that are frequently built on lifestyle assumptions more fitting to White, middle-class college students who do not have to support themselves. This volume includes arguments to press policy to grow, reshape, and allow the influence of alternative viewpoints. For example, Grant and Gibson (Chap. 1) and Chapman (Chap. 11) similarly argue that the interests of privileged groups are a prime driver of policy setting in education, with the emphasis on all children becoming an empty slogan in policy discourse.
Theoretical Perspectives
Not surprisingly, the majority of authors write from a theoretical perspective of social justice, social criticism, or sociocultural theory. The role of power and privilege is a common theme across the chapters. The treatment of teacher identity by Hollins (Chap. 4) and Olsen (Chap. 12) as a theoretical framework for understanding diversity in teacher education offered insight into the development of identity as an intersection of the self and the social world. These discussions offer teacher education programs some specific suggestions for engaging in teacher identity development. The volume also includes two chapters that cast the intersection of school and community from an indigenous (American Indian) perspective (Cerecer, Chap. 7; and Lee, Chap. 13).
Finally, Duncan-Andrade (Chap. 15) moves beyond traditional approaches to teacher education research by drawing on critical pedagogy, social justice, and multiculturalism, as well as research from public health, community psychology, social epidemiology, and medical sociology to argue for the need to change our approach in teacher education toward one that aims to develop educators better equipped to respond to the “socially toxic environments that emerge from racism, poverty, and other forms of oppression” (p. 310). This chapter opens windows to explain what occurs in classrooms by illuminating other aspects of students’ lives, aspects educators are generally not theoretically trained to consider as connecting to and affecting students’ learning. We found this interdisciplinary perspective compelling and hope to see more interdisciplinary approaches to issues of diversity in teacher education in the future.
Honoring Voices
The voices that are most often silenced bring forth some of the most compelling perspectives expressed in this volume. Quinn and Meiners (Chap. 5) explore the historically erased perspective of the LGBT community and the implications for teacher educators today. Cerecer (Chap. 7) highlights the perspective of indigenous youth. Kinloch (Chap. 6), Cerecer (Chap. 7), and Winn and Ubiles (Chap. 14) all address the need to honor and privilege the voices of students and/or teachers (both pre- and in-service) as they have been historically absent from educational research conducted by people positioned within higher education. The authors argue that these voices offer important insight into equality and equity in teaching and learning as well as diversity in teacher education.
The need for global perspectives in future research is taken up in the final chapter by the volume’s editors. This powerful call to action for the research community illuminates the absence of such global perspectives in the text. That is not to say the volume ought to have had more international authors. Rather, the immigrant status of an increasing percentage of the student population in American schools makes this issue particularly pressing as local globalization becomes the norm across the United States. Our institution, the University of Minnesota, prepares teachers to enter classrooms in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul where they will teach students from numerous immigrant populations. They will teach students who are refugees. They will teach Muslim students in a Christian-dominant society. They will teach students who speak a number of languages in their homes. Thus, we felt an absence of attention to the impact of global immigration patterns on local communities and education practices within the United States.
Provocations
We now turn to a discussion of how this book provokes our thinking as well as our actions in some predictable and some new ways.
More Research, But of What Kind?
Given the title Studying Diversity in Teacher Education, some readers may approach this text assuming that it contains a set of empirical studies. Rather, the editors have assembled a set of chapters dominated by essays, theoretical position statements, and summaries of empirical work conducted previously by some of the authors. Predictably, the authors frequently conclude that we need more research on the many questions that trouble diversity in teacher education. They call for research that comprises larger programs of research, is longitudinal in design, identifies connections to student learning outcomes, and provides stronger contextualization.
The more provocative lessons from this book are a call to rethink who participates in research and how. For example, Kinloch (Chap. 6) calls for an approach to research on diversity in teacher education that honors and even privileges multiple voices—particularly teachers and students who are typically the objects of research. Through her case study examples, the reader is not only left with a “call” for a multivoice approach but also experiences strong examples of how this approach has been successfully used. Similarly, the illustration of engaged research provided by Winn and Ubiles (Chap. 14), a university professor and a poet/educator teaching in a Bronx high school, call for the research community to exercise reciprocity and ritualization of respect between researcher and community in which the research occurs. Not only do the authors assert that these principles are necessary for scholarship to have an impact on diversity in teacher education, they illustrate their collaboration and respect through their narrative re- counting of their research process.
Defining the Field: Discipline in Its Own Right or Too Complex to Name?
Pang and Park (Chap. 2) boldly argue for the establishment of multicultural teacher education as a discipline “in its own right” that stands apart from teacher education as a whole in order to “fill the needs of a strongly immigrant and pluralistic nation as we move into the twenty-first century” (p. 76). Nieto and McDonough (Chap. 18) argue that equity ought to be “front and center” in teacher education in order to address the “complexities of identity and to confront racism and other inequalities” (p. 365). We found this provocation to represent the great potential of this volume to call teacher educators and researchers to embrace new ways of studying, thinking about, and dialoguing about diversity and multiculturalism in teacher education.
Yet in defining the field of diversity in teacher education, many authors point to the complexity inherent in the study of relationships in context. Cerecer (Chap. 7) explores the complexity of relationships between youth and adults, Kirkland (Chap. 8) discusses the complexity of students and their school experiences, Lee (Chap. 13) examines the complexity inherent in balancing unity and diversity for Native students, and Zeichner (Chap. 16) provokes the research community to embrace the multilayered complexity of relationships in which teacher education, teaching, and student learning are embedded. We left this text questioning whether these complexities can be untangled and named in such a way that researchers can navigate a field of study called diversity in teacher education.
Answering the Call to Action
In our final section, we harken back to our beginning frame to explore perspectives, answers, and provocations. We choose to frame the discussion about answers as not what the book offers the reader in terms of answers to our long-standing questions about diversity in teacher education. Rather, we think the authors are collectively telling the reader that the answers lie within the actions that the reader chooses to take—how they answer the call to action.
We sense this call to action from Grant and Gibson’s opening chapter that names diversity as a victim and the need to identify the perpetrators, to the editors’ closing thoughts (Ball and Tyson Chap. 20) about the need to build global networks of educational researchers and to create “action steps” for the field to move forward. Teacher educators are called on to be courageous (Pang and Park, Chap. 2) and to “rebuild the critical hope that has been worn down” (Duncan-Andrade, Chap. 15, p. 321). Authors call on the teacher education community to not only commit to our youth but to take action by taking care of our LGBT youth in schools (Quinn and Meiners, Chap. 5) and to write new narratives that respect Black males and other underrepresented groups for who they are (Kirkland, Chap. 8).
Finally, some authors challenge re- searchers to bring their commitment into the policy arena and to devise ways to be heard (Grant and Gibson, Chap. 1). Refreshingly, Quinn and Meiners (Chap. 5) provoke the research-minded reader to acknowledge that “good research on these topics exists and already offers a range of solutions and directions, so it seems that the problem is less what we don’t know than what we don’t do” (p. 145, italics in original). A volume such as Studying Diversity in Teacher Education serves as a valuable effort by the editors and the contributing authors to define some of our most pressing needs and set direction for coordinated actions that will change the way we engage in teacher education.