How Does Initial Teacher Education Research Frame the Challenge of Preparing Future Teachers for Student Diversity in Schools? A Systematic Review of Literature

The Need to Provide Preservice Teachers With Knowledge About Diversity

One hundred and ninety of the 209 included papers argued that in order to be able to work effectively with particular groups of learners, teachers need a detailed understanding of what are often presented (within this literature) as facts associated with these various forms of diversity; what we will now refer to as knowledge about diversity.

Papers in this subset had two key features: First, they make explicit mention of a particular form of diversity (often using percentages or population references to indicate the large numbers of students who belong to a particular group) and then go on to identify educational or social problems related to this form/rate of diversity that teachers need to know about. Second, papers focused on teaching about diversity argue that there are particular (knowable) facts about an identified, at-risk group of learners (including, it is important to note, facts about educational/pedagogical frameworks commonly link to the successful education of these groups) that teachers need to possess in order to work effectively with these learners: knowledge that needs to be included in teacher education programs.

The article by Alvarez Gutiérrez (2013) began with reference to a particular form of diversity (Latino children in the United States who are part of mixed-status families—i.e., families with at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant) and then identified a specific problem encountered by those children and their families: persistent and rising anti-Latino immigration policies. The author referenced the introduction of “over 1,600 antiimmigrant bills in 2011 originating from all 50 states in the union” (p. 170), demonstrated that these laws have relevance to the “one in 10 children living in the United States” who are part of “mixed-status families,” and argued tha: “a majority of Latino children (regardless of immigration status) in classrooms across the country are impacted by anti-Latino immigration policies” (p. 170). From this basis the author argued that teacher education programs need to ensure future teachers have sufficient knowledge of this situation: “Teacher education students and professional educators be purposefully trained and provided professional development to be zealously knowledgeable and recognize how anti-Latino immigration discourses spill into the education profession and how these are interconnected with local and school politics” (Alvarez Gutiérrez, 2013, p. 171).

This pattern is also illustrated in the article by Acquah and Commins (2013). Focusing on the issue of cultural diversity and located in Finland, the authors began with a recognition of rates of diversity, and argued that this creates a problem if the teacher workforce is homogenous:

As student populations across Europe become more diverse, it is critical to understand and build on lessons already learned regarding teacher preparation. Pre-service teaching candidates in teacher education programmes have been found to be increasingly homogeneous—primarily White, middle class and from the dominant culture. (p. 445)

The authors went on to argue that teacher education needs to increase future teachers’ knowledge about a “mismatch between teachers’ and students’ cultures” (p. 445) in order to ensure that they graduate with “the confidence and preparation to address issues regarding the education of students from diverse backgrounds” (p. 445).

The article from Kang and Martin (2018), based in Korea, provides a third example. The authors focused on disability to identify a problem: that “students with disabilities tend to underperform relative to peers without disabilities on assessments and that this gap in achievement tends to widen over time” (p. 320). From this basis the authors demonstrated that “inclusive education (IE) has the potential to improve special education needs (SEN) students’ learning outcomes, but IE requires teachers receive adequate training to be effective” (p. 319). The article goes on to discuss

the need for transforming pre-service teacher education using university-based experiential learning courses that simultaneously offer SEN students targeted, high quality content learning experiences that could also have a positive impact on SEN students’ attitudes about and achievement in science. (p. 319)

These three examples illustrate the broad features of papers concerned with teaching preservice teachers about diversity. They identify a group at risk and emphasize the need for teachers to develop new knowledge about that group. We will demonstrate below that these knowledge claims are often linked to specific suggestions about pedagogical approaches that will allow future teachers to cater to diversity in the future. Here our focus is on demonstrating the way the majority of the papers in this review name a group of learners with consistently evidenced educational problems that preservice teachers need to know about in order to be effective teachers into the future. Further evidence of the ways in which other papers follow this pattern is provided in Supplemental Table S2 (in the online version of the journal), which includes lengthy extracts from a further 10 papers illustrating research conducted in different locations, and in studies focused on various forms of diversity. We turn, in the next section, to illustrating an equally strong emphasis on ensuring that this knowledge can underpin action.

Principles, Pedagogies, and Practices Catering to Diverse Learners

One hundred and eighty-seven of the 190 papers that considered what teachers need to know about diversity also considered what teachers need to be able to do with this knowledge in order to cater to diversity in various educational contexts. These papers also make explicit mention of a particular form of diversity, often using percentages or population references to indicate the large numbers of students who belong to a particular group, and they identify a link between membership of a population subgroup and either educational or social risk.

From this basis, papers that we coded as focusing on teaching to diversity argue that there are particular (knowable) facts about how teachers can cater to diversity that teachers need to possess in order to work effectively with these learners. This claim is illustrated in various ways, including assertions regarding the need for new/specific teacher practices, references to pedagogical frameworks that will help future teachers to cater to diverse learners, and discussion of specific pedagogies/pedagogical skills/relationship or partnership skills that will help future teachers to cater to diverse learners (and their communities). Woven through these various claims are common arguments that teachers/preservice teachers currently lack the necessary pedagogical and partnership knowledge and skills: claims that are sometimes linked to evaluation of the effectiveness of various teacher education programs or courses.

For example, the article by Alvarez Gutiérrez (2013) cited above as an example of teaching about diversity also demonstrates a commitment to catering to diversity, with the author referencing specific pedagogical frameworks or philosophies of teaching or pedagogical practices that could help future teachers cater to diversity:

I urge teacher education programs, professional development, school leaders, and educators to incorporate the following calls to action in the philosophy and practice of the profession . . . critical self-reflection . . . family engagement . . . civic engagement . . . participatory action research. (p. 175)

A concern with ensuring teachers can cater to diversity is also illustrated by Qin and Villarreal (2018). Writing about rural education in China, the authors began with a problem:

In the last 30 years, these social and economic disparities have resulted in a large achievement gap between urban and rural schools. . . . This achievement gap continues to grow. (p. 2)

The authors then posited a solution that is linked to the specific pedagogical framework of culturally relevant pedagogy and emphasized the positive impact of specific pedagogical strategies on at-risk learners, including “multiple instructional strategies to address individual student needs” and “daily teaching plans” (Qin & Villarreal, 2018, p. 10).

A third example of this pattern is provided by Broomhead (2013). Focused on special education in the context of the United Kingdom, the author identified a concern with respect to the skills of teachers regarding working with children with special education needs and, as well, their families:

Focus on preparing pre-service teachers to support children with SEN has coincided with concerns regarding how they are ill-prepared for working with the parents of these pupils and are not equipped with the socio-emotional skills required to form effective home—school relationships. (p. 174)

She went on to identify specific skills that need to be addressed by teacher educators, arguing that current lack of skills

places pressure on teacher educators to address home–school collaboration during preservice teacher education. This is of increased importance within a SEN context, due to the additional support required by pupils with SEN involving parental input and collaboration, and consequent further communication between parents of children with SEN and teachers. (Broomhead, 2013, p. 174)

Once again, we provide these three in-text examples as introductory illustrations of the theme, teaching to diversity. Further examples are included in Supplemental Table S3 (in the online version of the journal): examples drawn from a range of contexts, exploring various diversity referents.

Papers that explored issues relating to a knowledge base about diversity, and pedagogies and practices catering to diverse learners, constitute the majority of the papers included in this review. There is, however, a noteworthy third cluster of papers that we turn to now.

Affordances of Teacher Education With Regard to Teaching For Diversity

As we explained above, some of the papers in this review are distinguishable from others because of more overt and sustained engagement with theoretical resources associated with what we describe as anti-essentialist perspectives on diversity. Although these papers generally also share some of the features associated with the two themes discussed above, the claims made within this third set of papers—a smaller subset of 40 out the 209 included—are based upon and justified through reference to what has been described as theoretically specific scholarship (Hytten & Bettez, 2011, p. 16): specialist theoretical literature associated with each category of diversity. This includes, for example, anti-essentialist commentaries on gender that draw upon feminist or profeminist theory, analyses of race that draw on resources associated with postcolonial theory or critical race theory, discussions of disability that acknowledge the differences between medical or social models of disability, and so on. These are papers that we describe as teaching for diversity.

Although the papers differ in structure and focus, they are recognizable due to the key features listed and illustrated below: clearly stated transformative aims, discussions of diversity that reflect anti-essentialist theoretical frameworks, explorations of the need for/value of ensuring future teachers engage with “specialist” knowledge relating to diversity, and demonstration of the links between specialist knowledge (or theory) and practices that can support educational transformation. We illustrate these features briefly here and expand upon them through reference to 10 papers included in Supplemental Table S4 (in the online version of the journal).

First, papers that consider teaching for diversity recognize and express an interest in providing quality educational opportunities for all members of the population, including those commonly understood as at risk of exclusion, alienation, or failure. What makes this subset of papers different from those referenced above is that they go beyond liberal or neoliberal acknowledgements of individuals’ needs or rights toward an assertion that these rights can really be met only through a fundamental transformation of educational and social systems. Lynskey (2015), for example, argued that it is the responsibility of teacher education to prepare graduates who can fight “inhumanity” (p. 73). Similarly, Zacko-Smith and Smith (2010) wrote, “Educators are understood to be either upholding the status quo or to be defining/redefining what is classified as ‘normal’ in their classrooms, and thus in the larger society as well” (p. 3).

Berta-Avila and William-White (2010) noted the fundamentally political work of teaching:

Our goal is to prepare highly qualified and politicized teachers who will be change agents . . . activist teachers who are working towards equity, access and social justice in low-income, culturally, and linguistically (LI/CLD) classrooms, schools, and communities. (p. 400)

Further examples of papers that see the purpose of education as social transformation, not social reproduction, are provided in Supplemental Table S4 (in the online version of the journal). This activist, transformative stance is fundamentally tied to an anti-essentialist perspective on difference and identity: the second feature of these papers that needs to be acknowledged. Authors working with anti-essentialist resources argue that well-documented links between difference and disadvantage are neither natural nor inevitable but rather socially constructed. In other words, differences are made to matter in various historical and social contexts in ways that draw attention to the operation and forms of power. These papers identify the particular (Eurocentric and phallocentric) knowledges and beliefs that have become privileged in educational systems that have been designed to ignore, silence, devalue, or “other” large sections of the population. To give three examples, Cobb (2018) used Bernstein’s notion of regulative discourse to examine the way in which open educational resources socialize “teachers and their students into Western culture, values, and beliefs” (p. 15); Liu and Milman (2010) showed that it is not students’ backgrounds but rather other people’s “assumptions and intolerance” that “build an inequitable atmosphere where students experience varying degrees of comfort and ability to focus on class goals” (p. 625); and Bates (2011) drew attention to the meanings that become attached to rural students (in music contexts).

Anti-essentialist perspectives not only reject the perceived “naturalness” or “normality” of associations between diversity and deficit—they also encourage educators to critically reflect on and question claims that groups (e.g., women, or people from Mexico, or children with a disability) are essentially similar in nature and needs. In the papers included within this literature review, this perspective sees authors use various theoretical resources to highlight the way in which categories themselves shift and evolve so that concepts such as “sex” or “disability” become categories to explain, rather than explanations in and of themselves. For example, Zacko-Smith and Smith (2010) used queer theory to critically reflect on common, simplistic understandings of gender and to assert that “sexual orientation and gender [are] concepts that are flexible and flowing, and not static and fixed” (p. 6); Liu and Milman (2010) drew on resources including critical race theory to “reflect upon and challenge the use of curriculum that maintains the status quo and silences the marginalized into assimilation” (p. 620); and Naraian and Schlessinger (2017) highlighted the way the concept of disability has been redefined over time, moving away from “political, organizational, and epistemological foundations of special education [that] have resulted in schooling practices that have marked disability as tragic, undesirable, and incompetent” (p. 82).

Anti-essentialism is also illustrated through explicit reference to the important idea of intersectionality. This is seen in 10 of the 40 papers included in the code, teaching for diversity, with three examples provided here: Gilham and Tompkins (2016), writing about inclusive education in Canada, noted that “inclusion as special education often neglects the intersectionality of important diversity topics such as race, class, and gender of individuals with disabilities” (p. 6); Robertson et al. (2017), in the United States, advocated for “providing preservice special educators with opportunities to explore the intersectionality between disability and other aspects of diversity” (p. 35); and Miller (2018), also in the United States, writing about gender identity, argued that a lack of intersectionality leads to “a flattening, unidimensional, and non-intersectional perspective of gender identity and delegitimizes those who do not ascribe to gender identity norms (p. 75). Again, further examples of anti-essentialist perspectives (and various ways in which this was evidenced in a range of papers) are provided in Supplemental Table S4 (in the online version of the journal).

A further feature of papers included in this subsection is the commonly articulated understanding that specialist, theoretically informed knowledge associated with anti-essentialist perspectives on difference, and an associated understanding of the ways in which differences can intersect or combine to create hierarchies of risk or advantage, needs to be taught in teacher education. The dispositions and practices that flow from an anti-essentialist mindset are not developed through simple exposure to knowledge about diversity. Nor will the requisite skills be developed simply because future teachers have a well-intentioned desire to cater to diversity. Rather, these papers argue that educational transformation—a foundational tenet of teaching for diversity—requires teachers to develop very particular combinations of theoretically informed knowledge and skills, all of which rest upon supported and structured opportunities to learn how to recognize, make visible, critique, and work against traditional operations of power. These perspectives are illustrated in the papers cited above, but we provide three further, illustrative in-text examples of each associated argument here, and lengthier illustrations in Supplemental Table S4 (in the online version of the journal).

First, there is a clear awareness that there is more than one way to approach teaching about/to/for diversity and there is an explicit rejection of approaches to diversity education that attempt to “add in” or “value” or “accommodate” difference in ways that leave the fundamental structures and ideologies of education unchanged or unexamined. Often described as assimilationist in nature, these perspectives underpin many approaches associated with teaching about, or catering to, diversity that specialist literature has consistently evaluated as inadequate. Examples of this are provided by Zacko-Smith and Smith (2010), who report on “the ‘melting pot’ paradigm popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when the stated desire was to create homogeneity, ‘sameness,’ and equality” (p. 5); by Smith (2009), who distinguished between the “multicultural festival” and “transformative” approach [which] weave a range of cultural perspectives throughout the curriculum. (p. 46); and by Pimentel (2010), who also critiqued the “‘contributions approach,’ wherein educators merely insert discrete ethnic heroes, holidays, and cultural artifacts into the already existing curriculum” arguing that “this approach alone fails to examine underlying asymmetrical relations of power that produce inequitable outcomes” (p. 51).

Building on this rejection of surface, simplistic, “recognition/celebration” approaches to diversity, the second point about teacher knowledges/skills made within these papers is that it is not possible to provide teachers with a portable, one-size-fits-all “tool kit” of strategies that will lead to social transformation. Instead, there is a consistent focus on the need to develop in future teachers the skills and knowledge to act in theoretically and politically informed ways in whatever complex, unpredictable context they may find themselves. For example, Seltzer-Kelly et al. (2011) highlighted the importance of teachers being able to recognize and challenge structures that construct students as “the philosophical Other” (p. 5); Acquah and Commins (2015) argued for structured opportunities within which future teachers critically reflect on “issues of culture, power and privileges” (p. 790), noting the link between these opportunities and “changing corresponding behavior to incorporate more positive views of culturally diverse students” (p. 792); and Naraian (2014) demonstrated that sustained, deliberate exploration of specialist theoretical resources will develop future teachers with the capacity to “go forth into troubled schooling systems and actively work against practices that perpetuate norms of dis/ability” (p. 2). Further examples of this perspective are contained in Supplemental Table S4 (in the online version of the journal).

In addressing Research Question 2, we have outlined three qualitatively different ways in which the papers included in the review engaged with issues relating to diversity, risk, and teacher education. Of the papers, 190 focused on outlining what teachers need to know about diversity, with this knowledge presented in an uncontested and generally unproblematized manner, and all but three of these papers also outlined an expectation that a body of knowledge about learners, when accessed, would shape decision making and the work of teaching, showing that knowledge about diversity is commonly paired with claims about how teachers should teach. A much smaller number of papers, 40, also drew upon perspectives associated with critical, social, and cultural theory in their exploration of what teachers (and thus teacher educators) need to know, understand, and thus be prepared to imagine and do.

Contextual Constraints

In common with papers discussed in other reviews of teacher education (e.g., Sleeter, 2012), many papers in this review made reference (often in their introductions, often quite briefly) to the impact that a particular political, policy, or institutional context had on the work of teacher education. Sixteen papers dwelt on these contextual constraints at length. These papers made reference to (and commented critically upon) the neoliberal or conservative political environments that increasingly dictate the content and design of teacher education programs (Aronson & Anderson, 2013; Chang, 2018; Gorski, 2012) and identified the small and/or declining amount of space allocated to the understanding of student diversity within teacher education programs (Assaf et al., 2010; Aronson & Anderson, 2013; Gorski, 2012). Brayboy and Maughan (2009) noted that, in this context, teacher education programs have the potential to be “rigid, narrow, and unforgiving to different ways of engaging the world” (p. 4). And with a different but related focus, Evans-Winters and Twyman Hoff (2011) demonstrated the ways in which the academic careers of teacher educators who are working in a social justice framework and also, themselves, seen as diverse, are impacted by university systems such as student evaluations. They argued that “cultural hegemony is institutionalized when white students are afforded the privilege to evaluate black female professors without academic departments and universities critically assessing the role that racism and sexism play in student feedback” (p. 461).

As an aside, we note here a documented theme in teacher education literature is the potential for schools and teachers to work against or undermine the objectives developed through critically informed teacher education courses. It would therefore be reasonable to expect that the attitudes of teachers or structures of schools would emerge as a topic when we considered constraints on the work of teacher education. This, however, was not the case. While we are reluctant to speculate too much about the reasons for this absence, it is appropriate to note that our systematic review involved search parameters that excluded those papers that did not have an explicit focus on teacher education. Thus, papers that might have been more specifically located in schools, or more substantially interested in school-based teacher education, were not picked up through our search strategy.

While most papers acknowledged some form of constraint in passing, in a significant number of papers (n = 59), challenges or constraints were explicitly linked to the knowledge, beliefs, and dispositions of two particular groups of people: preservice teachers and teacher educators themselves. We turn now to consideration of these data.

Challenges Linked to Preservice Teachers

Thirty-seven papers focused on identifying, describing, or measuring preservice teachers’ beliefs about diverse learners, and/or preservice teachers’ beliefs about their own preparedness, or capability, to work with this diverse cohort. While making preservice teachers’ beliefs visible is a common goal of teacher educators—particularly where those beliefs are inconsistent with a program’s ideological foundations, for instance, a commitment to social justice—it is still important to recognize that this work is neither straightforward nor without its demands. Problematic, discriminatory, naiïve, or contradictory beliefs take multiple forms, and manifest themselves in diverse ways, all of which can be experienced as constraints (especially when preservice teachers are resistant to changing their beliefs), in that they influence how a teacher educator can approach a particular objective. Making beliefs visible is therefore an important part of any transformative teacher education agenda. At the same time, however, the anti-essentialist perspective we outlined above reminds us that it is not appropriate to assume that all preservice teachers will hold conservative or reactive or negative points of view: Preservice teachers, like students in classrooms, are diverse. The papers linked to this theme, therefore, demonstrate that teacher education is always located in a specific context. For this reason, it is important to allocate time and space to making preservice teachers’ beliefs visible and using this knowledge to shape their pedagogical practices. The importance (and the challenge) of uncovering the beliefs of pre-service teachers is outlined in papers that explored different geographic/political contexts and focused on beliefs/skills/confidence of different diversity referents. We offer three in-text examples here (from 3 different contexts), and a further 10 examples in Supplemental Table S5 (in the online version of the journal).

Pecek et al. (2014) investigated “the initial beliefs of student teachers concerning the Roma population, Europe’s largest ethnic minority” (p. 359), as expressed by students studying at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and the Teacher Training Faculty at the University of Belgrade in Serbia; Bannister-Tyrrell et al. (2018) “surveyed 100 undergraduate teacher education students in a regional university in Australia” to explore their “self-reported perceptions of their knowledge about students with exceptional needs, and their competence to be effective educators of these students in an inclusive classroom” (p. 16); and Brandes and Crowson (2009), writing in the context provided by the United States of America, investigated “the association between socio-political ideologies of preservice teachers and their attitudes toward disability-related matters within schools” (p. 271). The 10 additional examples with a focus on preservice teacher beliefs, (contained in Supplemental Table S5 in the online version of the journal) demonstrate a sense that much of the work associated with teacher education involves identifying, changing, and improving the beliefs (and associated knowledge claims) of the future teacher workforce.

Challenges to Learning Linked to Teacher Educators

Twenty papers considered in depth the issues relating to teacher educators’ expertise, confidence, beliefs, and/or knowledges and the way these might constrain efforts to prepare preservice teachers for diverse learners and diverse contexts. In some cases, these constraints were illustrated through descriptions of how potential barriers had been overcome, in others through reference to ongoing challenges. The majority of these papers argued the need for teacher educators to possess the same kinds of robust knowledge that they seek to develop in their students, positioning any possible lack of knowledge as a key constraint to be overcome. For example, writing in the United Kingdom, De Carvalho (2016) investigated the constraining nature of “science teacher educators’ views on religio-scientific issues and their positions on the place of these issues within science teacher education and the science classroom” (p. 253); in the United States of America, Assaf et al. (2010) examined limitations associated with “teacher educators’ perspectives about multicultural education in an elementary and middle school teacher preparation program” (p. 116); and Wright (2016) argued that “early childhood teacher education faculty [in the United States] must be prepared to support sexual minority students in confronting decisions about disclosing their sexual orientation in the context of practicum” (p. 189), thereby identifying a potential way in which lack of knowledge could constrain teacher educators’ work.

Both strands of argument draw attention to the ways teacher educators’ knowledge and beliefs can shape what they do, how they do it, and how they evaluate the work of others. Both strands make reference to the importance of teacher educators learning “on the job” as seen, for example, in the article by Florian (2012), who argued that “teacher educators needed opportunities for professional development that would support them in preparing new teachers for the demands of inclusive education” (p. 280).

Interestingly, however, while many papers attempted to measure/assess/evaluate the beliefs or skills of preservice teachers, only two papers explicitly include an attempt to do the same thing in relation to teacher educators’ beliefs, skills, or knowledge base. D’Haem and Griswold (2017) argued, “Although teacher educators expressed strong concerns about teaching candidates to work with parents from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, they voiced doubts regarding their own ability to educate students regarding families from different cultures” (p. 81). Rigoni et al. (2013) used preservice teacher portfolios to reflect on “the degree to which students integrated concepts related to teaching in urban schools: asset/deficit perspectives, connections with families, social justice, high expectations for student learning, and contextualized teaching and learning” (p. 88) and used this analysis as a platform for reflecting on issues relating to the development of faculty staff skills.

Analysis associated with respect to Research Question 3, therefore, reveals a consistent acknowledgement, within literature, of the ways that teacher educators’ work can be constrained. The largest amount of attention is given to preservice teachers’ resistance to learning and shifting their deficit mindsets toward diverse learners. While we see nothing surprising in the identification of attitudinal shift in preservice teachers as a goal for teacher education (changing/challenging/broadening beliefs is a foundational objective for many working in the pursuit of educational justice and one that teaching for diversity explicitly recommends), it is interesting to note that the attitudes/beliefs of teacher educators are not subjected to the same amount of scrutiny. In the context outlined at the beginning of this article—the persistent failure of teacher education to prepare teachers confident in their own abilities to work with heterogeneous learners—this raises questions that warrant further consideration.