"Caring About Culture" and "What's the Assignment?" Cultural Sustenance and Tension in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Decentering Whiteness and Monolingual/Monoglossic Ideologies, Practices, and Identities in an Elementary Teacher Education Program

Abstract

Purposes
As teacher education programs aim to diversify their teacher candidates, they are facing challenges retaining and graduating teachers from marginalized backgrounds (Jenlink, 2014). This reality has been attributed to the fact that programs are centered around white, monoglossic cultural values (Milner, 2010). My study highlights how a mainstream teacher education program (TEP) attempted to offer cultural and linguistic sustainable practices that impacted the experiences and learning of three elementary, bilingual teacher candidates from different racial, linguistic, and economic identities.

Perspective(s)
This study draws on Paris’ (2017) literature on culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP), which advocates for the need of teaching pedagogies which sustain, rather than subtract students home cultures while critically looking at cultural structures themselves across contexts. With these pedagogies in mind, and Anzaldúa’s (2009) view on identity development I examined the narratives the teacher candidates shared (Sfard & Prusak, 2005) to gain an understanding of how their identities impacted their experiences of cultural sustenance or tension within the TEP.

Methods of inquiry
This project was a qualitative study in which I conducted interviews, document analysis, observations, and a focus group (Liamputtong, 2015) which included graphic elicitation (Bagnoli, 2009). After coding the data sources using a grounded theory approach (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), I moved into various cycles of deductive and inductive reasoning with the data to draw out themes and patterns.

Data sources
I used three types of data sources for this study:
audio and transcripts from interviews/focus group,
participant-created documents and reflective reflective timeline, and
field notes of observations in courses.
The data sources span various time points throughout the TEP ranging from application to after completion of the candidates required coursework and practicum for the mainstream portion of their elementary teacher certification program.

Results
Current findings suggest that the candidates experienced both, cultural sustenance and cultural tension in various programmatic structures. For example the inclusion of multilingual pedagogies in courses offered different types of interactions that aligned with candidates cultural and linguistic identities and ways of being. Race-based caucusing was also an important space that sustained TC’s identities. However, race-based caucusing was also a space of cultural tension for some candidates because of the different ways in which border-crossing identities affected interaction within and across ethnic groups. It is important to note that even when the programmatic examples above showed how similar structures were perceived differently, candidates still framed these structures and moments of cultural sustenance and tension as equally valuable for their professional identities.

Scholarly significance of the study
There is currently limited literature that uses qualitative data around teacher candidates’ experiences as a way to reflect on the design of teacher education programs. In choosing to center the experiences of bilingual pre-service teachers, this study contributes to the teacher education field by allowing programs to reflect on the affordances and constraints of programmatic aspects through the lens of nontraditional mainstream TEP students.

Author

• Cristina M. Betancourt, University of Washington