Fostering Cultural Competency: Preservice Teachers and Culturally Relevant Mentor Texts

• In Event: Sylvia and Aki: The Power of a Mentor Text for Innovation in the Teaching of Language Arts and Social Studies With Diverse Students

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this study is to introduce pre-service teachers to high-quality multicultural literature (Bishop, 2007) that promotes a critical stance (Botelho & Rudman, 2009). Such literature highlights characters that participate within and across multiple cultures to differing degrees (Bishop, 1997). The specific research question was: What difference does the exposure to culturally specific multicultural children’s literature (Sylvia and Aki, El gusano de tequila, and others) make to the development of social, cultural, and academic competencies among pre-service teachers?

Theoretical framework
There continues to be concern that teachers are neither culturally competent nor responsive to Latino students (Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004). Exposing teachers to accurate and affirming works of Latino children’s literature has been found to foster teachers’ emerging cultural awareness (Medina & Enciso, 2001). The underlying premise of this study assumed that improvement of teacher’s competencies would make a difference in the ways they visualize instructional delivery for the increasing enrollment of Latino students in U.S. schools. Coupling cultural competency with the continua model of biliteracy (Hornberger, 2004) offers a framework in which to situate language planning for pre-service teachers’ future bilingual students.. The continua model of biliteracy posits the notion of intersecting and nested continua to demonstrate the multiple and complex interrelationships between bilingualism and literacy. This combined theoretical framework informed the study.

Methods/Data Sources
From a bounded case study approach (Merriam, 1998) of bilingual teacher preparation in a certification program in the Southwest, specific oral and written narrative responses to Latino centered texts were analyzed. Forty-two bilingual undergraduate students from two separate semesters were participants in the study. Discourse and thematic analysis was used to identify patterns on ways the status quo of the dominant culture was resisted, interrupted, and contradicted (Stanton-Salazar, 2001) or reproduced in oral and written responses. Selected data sources were coded and analyzed with attention to the contexts, media, and content through which biliteracy develops.

Results
The bilingual teachers drew from both languages in constructing meaning from mentor texts. As they engaged in hybrid language practices their understandings of literature as well as history shifted. Findings from this study suggest that teachers showed variance in competencies along the biliteracy continua (Hornberger, 2003) and thus, needed a variety of opportunities for deepening their awareness of their own and other’s linguistic, cultural, and literate knowledge. Analysis of themes in teachers’ writings also showed strengthening of their commitment to social justice instructional approaches (Brown, Parsons, & Worley, 2005).

Significance
There are few studies that portray Latina pre-service teachers as emerging competent professionals. This study examined the influence of mentor texts on teacher’s composing of their own culturally relevant texts. Beginning with the reading of culturally informed books, the identification of social issues that impact the lives of children were identified, discussed, and integrated in many teachers’ oral and written responses. Such responses have the power to affirm language, culture, and literacy in degrees that heed the call for the preparation of culturally competent and responsive teachers (Villegas & Lucas, 2002).

Author

• Brenda Ayala Lewis, University of Texas - Austin