Journal of Teacher Education

This study focused on determining whether there are particular factors that may be associated with the development of greater multicultural awareness and sensitivity in preservice teachers. The researcher conducted extensive interviews with one 22-year-old White female teacher candidate and identified six factors that appeared to play a critical role in her positive multicultural development. Three of the factors were dispositional and included openness to diversity, self-awareness/self-reflectiveness, and commitment to social justice. The other three factors were experiential and included intercultural experiences, support group experiences, and educational experiences. Several implications of the study are discussed.

In working with preparatory teachers, we have tried to “place diversity front and center” to help students “see culture” as a prerequisite for culturally responsive teaching. The language arts methods-course students who, like the authors, are White women from middle-or upper-income families, participated in learning opportunities that included writing cultural memoirs, field experiences in diverse settings, and written reflection on the relation between their cultural constructions and those of the students they were teaching. In this article, we turn around the culture question we’ve pushed the students to consider to ourselves: What are we learning about our students as cultural beings that is helping us prepare them more effectively to be culturally responsive teachers? We identified three areas of growth: We reconstructed our understanding of students as complex cultural beings, of ourselves as privileged teachers of the privileged, and of the nature and relationship of resistance and risk.

This article examines how the democratic practices of a teamed model of student teaching affect the student teachers’ susceptibility to be “summoned” by cultural myths of teaching as described by Britzman. Development and implementation of the teamed model was the basis for a case study of the mediation of power within the context of a student teaching experience. The teamed model was designed to develop dialogic practices that breach the dualism of theory and practice. The study was grounded in critical theory. Action research provided the framework for the participants’ systematic inquiry and reflection of pedagogy and served as a catalyst for implementing democratic practices within the teamed model. Findings reveal the possibilities for democratic practices to reposition mythical images of teaching from individual enterprise to a socially negotiated experience.

In this article, we consider the efficacy of criticality in cultural context for transformative teacher education. We present data about how a small purposive sample of educators who participated in a culturally based university course found the experience to be pivotal in their personal and professional development. For this article we ask: (a) What about the nature of the course made it an opportunity for transformative experience? and (b) What is the importance of criticality and culture in transformative educational experiences? Data were gathered through student-professor personal and dialogic experiential reconstruction, review of documents and evaluations, and extensive semistructured ethnographic interviews, all of which were coded and analyzed thematically. We conclude that, though the processes cannot be reified, criticality and praxis in cultural context are efficacious for transformative teacher education.

Although a significant body of research addresses teachers’ perceptions of student disruption, the views of African American teachers remain underrepresented. In particular, little is known about African American teachers’ disciplinary practices with students of the same race. The purpose of the current study was to examine if and how the concept of cultural synchronization relates to an African American middle-school teacher’s responses to student disruption. Qualitative data were gathered from an eighth-grade classroom in a public, urban middle school. The findings suggest that cultural synchronization between the teacher and her students contributed to an effective style of classroom management that differs from traditional models. The discussion highlights the importance of cultural issues as related to effective disciplinary tactics for urban African American students.

Preservice teachers are faced with many challenges when observing elementary classrooms and often jump to critical evaluation based on too little evidence. The authors wondered if preservice teachers could use observation methods from ethnography and sociolinguistics to delay their evaluations and interpretations of classroom practice and see from an insider’s perspective. The authors developed a study in which 42 preservice teachers learned how to observe through this approach and then observed 22 elementary teachers with fieldnotes and interviews. Classroom discourse was central to the research as observers recorded the “talk” during writing instruction. By analyzing the notes, interviews, and summaries, the authors found that preservice teachers were able to record talk and action in classrooms without critical evaluations. They used quotes from fieldnotes as evidence for their interpretations of what was happening. Their summaries included discussions of how discourse shapes instructional events and how teachers use talk to organize and manage classrooms.