Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity

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Preparing Teachers for CulturalDiversityB. Robert Tabachnick & Kenneth M. ZeichnerPublished online: 03 Aug 2006.

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International Analyses of Teacher Education 113

Preparing Teachers for CulturalDiversityB. ROBERT TABACHNICK &KENNETH M. ZEICHNER

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; Andtherefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (JohnDonne, Devotions)

We have met the enemy and they are us. (Walt Kelly, Pogo)

TEACHER EDUCATION AS CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Education as cultural imperialism is most commonly described as a part of theefforts of powerful countries to maintain their control over the destinies of weakercountries, usually former colonies. The great industrial nations radiate ideas andexperts, published materials and radio, television and film messages about how toknow and live the good life (which is to say the good Japanese or European orAmerican life) and how to interpret the world 'correctly' (see, for example, Carnoy,1974; Altbach & Kelly, 1978).

Our concern in this paper is with preparing teachers to work successfully withthe diversity of child and family backgrounds that is characteristic of schools in mosturban places in Europe, America (North and South), and to an increasing extent inindustrial nations throughout the world. There is a form of cultural imperialism thatexists within countries and that is, arguably, destructive of personality and helpscreate school failure where success is possible. Moroccan children in Belgium,Turkish children in Germany, Pakistani and West Indian children in Britain,Algerian children in France, African-American, Hmong, and Latino children in theUnited States are alienated from their own cultures in their schools and learn to feelmarginal to the mainstreams of thought and behaviour in many of the communitiesin which they live.

This type of cultural imperialism exists throughout the world, not merely inhighly industrial countries. It affects how Basarwa children are taught in Botswana'sKalahari Desert, how minority children are taught in southwest China, how "hilltribe" children are taught in northern Thailand, how Quechua children are taughtin Lima, Peru.

In the United States, the term 'minority' is beginning to acquire a surrealquality. In the 20 largest school districts, so-called 'minority' students comprise over70% of the total school enrollment (CES, 1987). For the country as a whole,

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114 B. R. Tabachnick & K. M. Zeichner

one estimate is that minority children will make up 40% of school enrollments by theyear 2010 (Pallas, et al., 1989). At the same time, teacher education students areoverwhelmingly white, female, monolingual, middle-class and grew up in rural,small-town or suburban communities where they had few experiences with people ofother races or cultures than their own (AACTE, 1987, 1989; Zimpher, 1989). Forthe foreseeable future, schools in the United States will employ teachers to teachchildren who will come, increasingly, from backgrounds different from those of theirstudents. A similar situation will also exist in schools throughout the world.

Preparing teachers for diversity has not been high on the agenda of teachereducators. Twenty years ago, Teachers for the Real World (Smith, 1969) identified thefailure of teacher education programs in the US to prepare teachers who couldsucceed in teaching what were then called 'culturally disadvantaged' students.

Racial, class, and ethnic bias can be found in every aspect of current teacherpreparation programs. The selection processes militate against the poor andminorities. The program content reflects current prejudices; the methods ofinstruction coincide with learning styles of the dominant group. Subtleinequalities are reinforced in institutions of higher learning. Unless there isscrupulous self-appraisal, unless every aspect of teacher training is carefullyreviewed, the changes initiated in teacher preparation as a result of thecurrent crisis will be, like so many changes which have gone before, merelydifferences which make no difference (pp. 2-3).

At the same time, Paolo Freire was proclaiming that to realize one's humanpossibilities, one must be free of cultural imperialism, able to 'name the world, tochange it . . . while to say the true word . . . is to transform the world, saying thatword is not the privilege of some few men, but the right of every man . . . no one cansay a true word alone—nor can he say it for another, in a prescriptive way which robsothers of their words' (Freire, 1970, p. 77).

In the intervening time, few of the national reports or literature reviews onteacher education in particular countries have given significant attention to the needto prepare teachers for cultural diversity or to issues of educational equity. Excep-tions to this general situation in the US are the Holmes Group's (1990) secondreport, Tomorrow's Schools and Howey's (1992) analysis of major issues facing USteacher education. For example, Howey (1992) criticizes US teacher education forpreparing teachers largely for schools in settings that are apathetic or hostile toproblems of equity, and argues that 'diversity must become a central theme perme-ating programs of preservice preparation' (p. 9). For the most part though, thenational reports and literature reviews about teacher education in the US (e.g.Lazerson, 1990; Hawley, 1992) are silent about cultural diversity and educationalequity.

When we look beyond the US, the situation is similar. Most discussions aboutteacher education and research in teacher education in particular countries that havebeen published in English and disseminated internationally (e.g. Gumbert, 1990;Tisher & Wideen, 1990; Leavitt, 1992) have also ignored issues of cultural diversityand educational equity. For example, a twenty page chapter about teacher education

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Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity 115

in Great Britain has one sentence that refers to 'multicultural education' (Judge,1990). Another chapter on teacher education in Germany (Handle, 1992) whereethnic tensions have been particularly intense in recent years, does not even mentionteacher education's role in helping to address the serious social problems thatcurrently exist in that country. One notable exception to this neglect is a recentdiscussion of teacher education in Israel where Ben-Peretz & Dror (1992) spendmost of a chapter discussing the key role played by teacher education in preparingteachers who can teach pupils from various cultural backgrounds. The normhowever, is one of neglect.

TEACHER EDUCATION'S RESPONSE TO CULTURAL DIVERSITY:THREE ALTERNATIVES

Given the reality of cultural diversity in many countries, a number of options areavailable to teacher education institutions. One option that seems to have beenadopted by many teacher education institutions in the US (Hodge, 1990) is toignore this diversity and continue to prepare teachers for some mythical homoge-neous society where everyone shares the characteristics of the dominant culturalgroup [1]. This response could either be aimed at the assimilation of subordinategroups into the dominant culture (usually to play marginal social roles within thesociety), or at the continued isolation of subordinate groups from the dominantgroups in the society [2]. In either case, this approach to teacher education does notseek to prepare teachers to engage in a culturally responsive/relevant pedagogy(Ladson-Billings, 1990; Villegas, 1991) that is sensitive to cultural and linguisticvariations and that builds upon the cultural resources that students bring to school.

Another response available to teacher education is to give minimal attention tothe reality of cultural diversity in the teacher education program by supplementingan essentially monocultural curriculum with bits and pieces of information related tothe characteristics of various cultural groups in the society. This minimalist ap-proach to diversity is often characterized by the addition of a single course onmulticultural education to a teacher education program. This approach can either beconnected to a view of society as a 'melting pot', a synthesis of all of the differentgroups into one new hybrid culture influenced by all its subcultures, or to a view ofsociety as a 'tossed salad' or cultural mosaic composed of different cultural groupsthat maintain significant aspects of their identities and that live side by side [3]. Inboth the monocultural and multicultural versions of this minimalist response, theattention to cultural diversity is not an important part of the teacher educationcurriculum, since it is separated from and made marginal to the core experiences ofthe program.

In a third option available to teacher education institutions, a great deal ofemphasis is placed upon developing teachers' cultural sensitivities and on preparingthem to teach cross-culturally. In this pluralist response, an attempt is made toinfuse issues related to cultural diversity into the entire teacher education curriculumand teachers are taught how to incorporate the cultural resources that their students

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bring to school into their instructional programs [4]. This approach affirms a viewof society as a cultural mosaic in which the various cultural groups maintainsignificant aspects of their cultural identities while building a shared affiliation witha national identity.

We argue that the only appropriate response of the teacher education commu-nity to the reality of cultural diversity is the pluralist approach which emphasizes thepreparation of teachers to be successful cross-cultural teachers in a culturally diversesociety. We view both of the other two responses (neglect and a minimalist response)as forms of cultural imperialism and educational colonialism that operate withinnational boundaries. Because of the cultural context of learning, both of theseresponses contribute in important ways to the continued failure by the state schoolsystems of many countries to educate ethnic minorities, and consequently theycontribute to the continued subjugation of these subordinate groups in a society.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

What teacher education students learn is influenced by what they bring to theiruniversity courses. Recent research has clearly shown that many teacher educationstudents in the United States come to their preparation programs viewing studentdiversity as a problem rather than as a resource, that their conceptions of diversityare highly individualistic (e.g. focusing on personality factors like motivation andignoring contextual factors like ethnicity), and that their ability to talk about studentdifferences in thoughtful and comprehensive ways is very limited (Paine, 1989).These novice teachers generally have very little knowledge about different ethnicgroups in the US, their cultures, their histories, their participation in and contribu-tion to life in the US (Wayson, 1988). Also, as Goodlad's (1990) study of teachereducation in the US has shown, many teacher education students are not evenconvinced that all students are capable of learning and often have low expectationsfor students from low-income homes and students from ethnic minority groups.Although we use the United States as an example here, we are confident that thesituation is similar in other countries, particularly in other anglophone countries [5].

While it is possible for these and other similar problematic attitudes anddispositions to be dealt with by preservice teacher education programs, the likeli-hood is that they are not adequately addressed by programs as they are currentlyorganized [6]. This failure of teacher education programs to prepare teachers to bemore sensitive to cultural variations and capable of building on the cultural re-sources that students bring to school is partly responsible for the failure of the publicschool system in the US to educate, even at a minimally adequate level, largenumbers of poor ethnic minority students. We say 'partly responsible' becausegreater synchronization between the culture of the school and the culture of thehome by itself does not necessarily confront the social, economic, and politicalinequalities in the larger society that underlie problems within schools (Villegas,1988). As Weiner (1989) points out, even under the best of conditions, whileteacher education programs may be able to educate teachers to teach diversestudents with respect, creativity, and skill within their classrooms, they cannot

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prepare individual teachers to substitute for the political and social movements thatare needed to deal with the problems of the society. There is a growing body ofevidence however, that under certain conditions, schools can make a difference inthe lives of poor ethnic minority students in situations similar to ones where otherschools have failed (e.g. Kalantzis et al, 1990; Lucas et al., 1990).

A PLURALIST APPROACH TO TEACHER EDUCATION

There are two different approaches in the US to implementing a pluralist teachereducation program. One approach emphasizes the selection of students who alreadypossess some degree of social responsibility and display some degree of culturalsensitivity (Haberman, 1991). Other programs like the Teachers for Diversityprogram at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Gomez & Tabachnick, 1991) andthe Teachers for Alaska Program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (Noordhoff& Kleinfeld, 1991) emphasize various socialization strategies within the teachereducation curriculum such as cultural immersion experiences, that are specificallydesigned to enhance cross-cultural teaching [7].

TEACHERS FOR DIVERSITY

Faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [8] have developed a teachereducation program, in partnership with the Madison school district, that aims toprepare elementary teachers to teach from multicultural perspectives in multicul-tural elementary classrooms. Further objectives of the program are to have universitystudents become (1) skilled in teaching children from low-income families andchildren of color; (2) committed to doing so after graduation; (3) able to make tacittheories of teaching explicit in order to be able to explain and justify teachingchoices.

One principle supporting this experimental program is that school staffstrengthen teacher education through participation with university staff in decisionsabout program goals, procedure, and evaluation. A corollary principle is that teachereducation students can strengthen school programs in classrooms serving diverseschool populations by making lively, problem-oriented, responsive teaching strate-gies easier to implement.

That knowledge is socially constructed becomes vividly apparent when weexamine the idea and practice of multicultural education, which can mean quitedifferent kinds of teaching (Sleeter & Grant, 1987). A third principle that givescoherence to the experimental program is the need to search for, create meaningsfor, multicultural teaching in multicultural classrooms. These meanings are notgiven to students as authoritative descriptions of practices they must strive toemulate; rather, they form out of social encounters in school and university class-rooms. A fourth principle supporting the experimental program draws on narrativeas social discourse. Students tell their colleagues in the cohort 'teaching stories'(Gomez & Tabachnick, 1992) intended to illustrate instances of multicultural

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teaching. The search for multicultural teaching becomes a collective enterprise using'teaching stories' as a vehicle for collaborative construction of meanings.

The 'Teachers for Diversity' program has several key characteristics,

1. Students volunteer to participate in the program.2. It is centered on 3 semesters of a 4-year (8 semester) undergraduate elementary

teacher education program. Courses in methods of teaching and seminars accom-panying two 9-week practica and a semester-long student teaching experience areconcentrated in these three semesters.

3. A team of university and school district staff are responsible for planning practiceteaching and analytic-responsive experiences in seminars and post-teaching ob-servation meetings. Two members are Instructional Resource Teachers. They areveteran teachers who became jointly members of both school district and univer-sity staffs. Each is resident in a participating school with part responsibility fordeveloping curriculum with all teachers in the school and part responsibility forsupervising students and for planning and teaching the seminars together withparticipating university staff.

4. Students remain together as a cohort during the three semesters. They take alltheir methods courses and seminars together. They have practica and do theirstudent teaching in the same schools. With the guidance and encouragement ofthe program staff, students form the cohort into a powerful support networkwhere they can teach and learn from one another.

5. All students have their practicum and student teaching experiences in just one ortwo schools during the three semesters. Over the year and a half period they getto know teachers, administrators, the pupils and their families well and assumeprofessional responsibilities that are rarely available to students who spend asemester or less in a school.

6. Teaching from multicultural perspectives becomes a three semester search.Students explore, invent, and refine meanings. They try to discover tacit theoriesof teaching and of multicultural education in their teaching actions and then theytry to make these explicit so that the theories/practices can be examined and beaffirmed or modified. Peer supervision, sharing 'teaching stories', and studentjournals assist the students' search.

Twenty-four students in the first two cohorts have completed the program andsought and found teaching positions. Seventeen of these (70%) are teaching inschools that serve significant numbers of low income children and children ofcolour. Reports from administrators are very positive about their success in teachingchildren from diverse backgrounds.

Implications for preparing teachers for diversity include (1) exploring variousforms of partnerships between universities and schools; (2) lengthening the time(beyond a single semester) that students spend in a school; (3) keeping studentstogether in cohort groups; (4) having students construct meanings for their ownpractice through sharing stories of their teaching, group discussion, and interaction.

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TEACHERS FOR ALASKA

The Teachers for Alaska program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks is anotherpreservice teacher education program that has adopted a pluralist approach toeducating teachers for cultural diversity. This 1-year post-bachelors degree programfor secondary teachers emphasizes the preparation of teachers for remote Eskimoand Indian villages and urban multicultural schools that include Alaska Native,African-American, and Asian students. About 12% of the students in this program,which is in its seventh year, have been from ethnic minority groups. Like mostteacher education students across the US the students in Teachers for Alaska havemostly been Caucasian with very limited intercultural experience. As an alternativeto the generic and decontextualized learning about diverse students that is character-istic of most multicultural teacher education programs and courses, this programlinks the preparation of teachers to the specific contexts in which its students willwork. The program curriculum is based on a particular set of assumptions aboutlearning to teach multiculturally.

. . . that experience with culturally diverse youngsters and the tasks ofteaching is necessary before prospective teachers are able to make sense ofthe concepts, theories, and methods that university course work has to offer. . . that educational theory needs to be presented in terms of actualteaching problems and tasks . . . that teacher candidates need to learn howto pose educational problems as well as to deal with those problems . . . thatteacher preparation should focus on the teaching of subject matter tostudents of diverse backgrounds, not on instructional methods. (Noordhoff& Kleinfeld, 1991, p. 14) [9]

This program is organized around problems of teaching experienced in theAlaskan context and makes extensive use of cases as a means of introducing studentsto deliberation about these problems (Kleinfeld, 1992). These cases, often writtenby practising teachers, help embed teaching issues within a larger social and culturalcontext. For example, 'Malaise of the Spirit' (Finley, 1988), one of the cases usedin the program, helps prospective teachers consider the issue of racial tension in theclassroom, the appropriateness of setting alternative goals and assessment for cultur-ally diverse students, and the community's relationship with the school and itsfaculty.

The program also involves extensive experiences in schools in culturally diversecommunities including a one week visit to the Alaska Gateway School district whichis home to 20 or more different Indian groups, and three Eskimo groups with stronglanguage and cultural identification (McKenna, 1990). During this week whichcomes near the beginning of the program, TFA students assist teachers in smallrural high schools and participate in community life. This intense exposure to ethnicminority communities, together with the structured debriefing on campus upon theirreturn, helps introduce students to dilemmas and tensions involved in cross-culturalteaching.

Although prospective teachers are given information in the program about the

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Alaskan cultural context and about the history and culture of the different ethnicminorities in Alaskan schools, the emphasis in the program is on helping prospectiveteachers learn how to learn from the culturally diverse students and communitieswith which they work. One way in which this is done is to encourage TFA studentsto spend time in the communities in which their schools exist, learning about thecultural resources in those communities, and thinking about how they as teacherscan build upon the cultural resources that their students bring to school.

We encourage our teacher candidates to put themselves in roles outside theclassroom (e.g. community basketball, skin sewing or beading groups,church attendance) and to spend time in places such as the store or postoffice where people are likely to congregate or share news. We advise ourstudents to seek out the expertise of teacher's aides who live in thecommunity and to make home visits . . . (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1991,P- 19)

Teachers for Alaska, like the Wisconsin program, has been able to documentsome success in preparing teachers for culturally diverse settings including changesin student teachers' abilities to tailor their instruction to their students' culturalbackgrounds (Kleinfeld & Noordhoff, 1988). These two programs are among thevery few in the US which represent a pluralist approach to preparing teachers forcultural diversity [10].

CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHER EDUCATION

While we have emphasized the preparation of teachers from the dominant societalgroup to teach students who are members of various marginalized groups, there isa sense in which all teaching is intercultural regardless of the specific context inwhich it occurs. Because of the multiple microcultural identities of all individuals,regardless of their background, along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, social class,language, religion, exceptionalities, age, sexual preference, occupation, etc., allhuman experience is intercultural and all individuals are intercultural beings.

Cultural forms are invented and produced in the interactive processes oftransmission as well as being preserved and reproduced in more or less modifiedform. Variations of belief and practice within culture groups result from processes ofacculturation and inventive cultural productions that respond to particular socialcontexts. There is no one way to be a butcher or a teacher, a poor child or a wealthyone, a Pakistani-Briton or a Latino-American. Hmong-Americans create culturalforms that are different from Hmong cultural practices in Laos and Turkish-Ger-mans live and value differently from their uncles and sisters in Turkey.

Learning how to teach in a culturally sensitive and responsive way is animportant goal for all prospective teachers, regardless of the social context in whichthey teach. It is not just a matter to be considered by teacher educators who aredirectly concerned with preparing teachers to work with marginalized groups.Because of the complexity of cultural diversity, an appropriate pluralist response byteacher educators includes at least the following elements:

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1. Preparing teachers to have an awareness of self as cultural carrier, both a receiverof cultural attitudes, beliefs, and practices and an inventor of culture.

2. Preparing teachers to be able to learn from the experience of teaching, i.e.teachers with the disposition to reflect about their practice and about the contextin which their practice occurs.

3. Preparing teachers to expect that students will bring cultural resources to schooland that all students are capable of learning under the proper conditions.

4. Helping teachers learn how to acquire information about the cultural resourcesthat their own students bring to school and how to build bridges between theculture of the home and that of the school in their particular teaching situations.

We have argued that the issues discussed in this paper have been largely ignoredin the teacher education literature of many countries. Who it is teachers are beingprepared to teach is frequently not discussed, and terms such as 'schools' and'students' are used as uniform categories devoid of any cultural meaning. Oneconsequence of this failure to think of teacher education as occurring in a culturalcontext is the complicity of teacher educators in a form of internal cultural imperi-alism or educational colonialism in which subordinate groups in the society continueto be marginalized. Teacher educators need to become accountable for how theiractions contribute, either to marginalizing some groups in a society or to thebuilding of more humane and just societies for all. Whether acknowledged or not,every plan for teacher education takes a stand on the current institutional form andsocial context of schooling.

NOTES

[1] According to Gollnick (1992), of the first fifty-nine institutions that sought nationalaccreditation for their teacher education programs under the new national standards, onlyeight (13.6%) were in compliance with the minimum multicultural education requirementsfor teacher education programs.

[2] This discussion which focuses on identifying general responses to diversity available toteacher education institutions, does not address the actual complexity of each of thecategories that are presented. For example, there are different kinds and different levels ofboth assimilation and pluralism. See Newman (1973) and Gordon (1978) for excellentdiscussions of some of these complexities.

[3] See Amir (1992) for a discussion of the melting pot and cultural mosaic views of multicul-tural education.

[4] There is a danger here of encouraging teachers to make faulty generalizations about studentsby ignoring the tremendous variation within cultural groups. This approach leads toquestionable generalizations about such things as how all people within a particular group(e.g. African-American) behave and learn (Bloch & Tabachnick, 1993). There is widespreadagreement in the literature regarding the importance of helping teachers to become re-searchers of the cultural dimensions of their own situations. See Zeichner (1992) for adiscussion of this literature.

[5] See, for example, Tomlinson (1991) and Suarez-Oroszco (1991) for European countries.[6] There is growing interest in the US in alternate routes to teacher preparations. The alternate

route is very similar to the licensed teacher scheme in the UK in which most of the teacher'sformal pedagogical education takes place in a school. Many college and university teachereducators in the US have opposed these programs on the grounds that they give minimal

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attention to understanding the context of schooling or to systematic analysis of pedagogicaldecisions and practices. Although colleges and departments of education have little connec-tion to preparing teachers via alternative routes, the alternate route programs havedemonstrated that they can attract teachers to schools serving poor students from minorityethnic groups, particularly in urban areas. Teacher education institutions on the other hand,have thus far failed to demonstrate that they can prepare many teachers who are even willingto teach in these schools.

[7] See Zeichner (1992) for an extended review of these and other strategies.[8] The major faculty participants in the program are Mary Louise Gomez, and B. Robert

Tabachnick, full-time employees of the university, and Mary Kay Johnson and MaurineMiller, jointly employed by the local school district and the university.

[9] This focus on the teaching of particular subject matter to diverse students is a reactionagainst the emphasis on generic methods instruction, divorced from subject matter, which ischaracteristic of much of US teacher education (Shulman, 1987). The emphasis in TFA ison helping prospective teachers learn how to transform and adapt particular subject matter(e.g. through examples, metaphors, etc.) to help connect it to the lives of their students.

[10] Currently, the US National Center for Research on Teacher Learning at Michigan StateUniversity is sponsoring a series of case studies of preservice teacher education programs thathave been successful in preparing prospective teachers for cross-cultural teaching. Inaddition to the two programs discussed in this chapter, data have been collected about theUrban Education Program of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the CulturalImmersion Programs sponsored by Indiana University. For more information about theseand other programs contact Ken Zeichner.

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Documents

Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity