The Challenges Faced by Multicultural Teacher Educators

• In Event: Studying Diversity in Teacher Education: A Focus on Teacher Educators

Abstract

Objectives

The literature on multicultural education and multicultural teacher education (MTE) in the U.S. is rich with explorations of, and arguments for, the development of multiculturally-minded teachers (Ross, 2008). In turn, a growing number of scholars have focused on exploring what exactly constitutes the effective preparation of teachers in this regard. Considerably less attention has been paid to examining practices of multicultural teacher educators or the conditions affecting those practices. For example, although the body of scholarship on MTE includes several articles documenting the challenges individual teacher educators face as they deliver MTE courses, virtually no scholarship has attempted to document the common challenges experienced by people who prepare teachers to teach in equitable, multicultural ways.
The purpose of this study was to fill that void, identifying what patterns, if any, exist in the challenges they face, with a longer-term goal of considering the preparation people need who are teaching MTE courses to do so effectively. The primary research question: How do multicultural teacher educators characterize the challenges they face teaching MTE classes? A secondary question: What do multicultural teacher educators’ characterizations of these challenges suggest about how they might be more sustainably prepared to teach MTE classes?

Theoretical Framework

The relatively slim literature that does exist on these issues contains insightful observations about MTE practice and the sociopolitical context of MTE based upon the experiences of individual multicultural teacher educators (see, for example, Ukpokodu [2007]). Among the dominant themes of this inquiry are challenges ranging from student resistance (Thomas & Vanderhaar, 2008) to neoliberal influences on teacher education in general (Sleeter, 2008). In order to dig further into these phenomena I engaged a theoretical framework that overlaid critical theory onto existing multicultural education theory, or what often is called “critical multicultural education.” This allowed me to consider the significance of power relationships and how they shape the experiences of faculty teaching MTE courses.

Methods and Data Sources

My original data set came from an open-ended item on a survey of 70 people around the U.S. teaching MTE courses. Based on findings from an examination of those data (see Gorski, 2012), I conducted an interview study of 22 people who teach these courses. My methods in the interview study could best be described as heuristic phenomenology. Interviews were conducted in person at sites across the U.S.

Results

Three themes related to the ways in which multicultural teacher educators characterize the challenges they face teaching MTE classes emerged from the analysis: (1) instructional challenges (such as student resistance), (2) institutional challenges (such as institutional resistance), and (3) sociopolitical challenges (such as white privilege).

Significance

The findings allowed me to recommend several ways to more effectively and sustainably prepare people who teach MTE courses, which often are the only opportunities teacher candidates have in their pre-service careers to broach issues relate to equity and multiculturalism.

Author

• Paul Cameron Gorski, George Mason University