Preparing Teachers for Diversity in Culturally and Linguistically Complex Classrooms in Transnational Contexts

• In Event: 68.040 - SALEACOM Network: Sharing Global Knowledge to Improve Learning for the Most Disadvantaged Youth

Abstract

This paper reports on the author’s recent research focusing on the preparation of teachers to teach diverse student populations in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms across national boundaries; and in particular, focusing on the preparation of teachers to work with students from historically marginalized, disenfranchised, or underserved groups. This research is part of a larger study that looks at teacher preparation in four transnational contexts, where each has sizeable school populations that are marginalized students of color who are disproportionately represented at the lowest quartile of economic and academic achievement—well below that of the dominant groups in each country. This paper reports on the efforts of a US and a South African teacher education program designed to prepare pre-service teachers to teach in complex classrooms and examines the teachers’ generative change after participating in a professional development institute focused on using writing as a pedagogical tool to affect teacher change. I will report on the technology related innovations that have emerged from this project.

We asked the following question: What do teachers learn through participation in a professional development institute on writing? Building on generative change theories, we explored how teachers used writing as a pedagogical tool to become metacognitively aware of their identities and created time and space for their students to do the same.

Theoretical Framework
This research is designed to advance work in the areas of sociocultural theory, generativity theory and linguistic theory through studies that integrate sociolinguistic, discourse analytic and ethnographic approaches to investigate ways in which semiotic systems in general, and oral and written language in particular, serve as a means for mediating teaching and learning in culturally and linguistically complex settings. This research emerges out of my current study of teacher professional development in transnational contexts—including the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia—and builds on my Model of Generative Change (Author, 2009).


Methods
This research is based in a qualitative case study examining South African and US teachers’ generative change after participating in a professional development institute focused on writing and describes how teachers enacted or made plans to enact writing in their classrooms following the institute.

Results
The research shows how the teachers’ discourses combined with their subsequent actions gave evidence of shifts in their beliefs and understandings. Through this paper is also concreted how writing as a pedagogical tool that can be used in teacher education programs to assist them in gaging their effectiveness in affecting conceptual growth, depth of understanding, and change in teachers’ attitudes and perceptions about the students in their classrooms in relations to issues of race, language and socioeconomic status.


Scholarly significance
This contribution has a powerful scholarly significance. The paper provides an expanded model of generative change and proposes new directions for preparing the next generation of teachers who possess the skills, dispositions and knowledge necessary to create a teaching force that can work successfully with poor, marginalized, and historically underserved students across national boundaries.

Author

• Arnetha F. Ball, Stanford University