From Multicultural Dispositions to Epistemic Agency: A Way Forward for Teacher Education

• In Event: Elevating the Dialogue About Equity and Teacher Education: An Intergenerational Structured Dialogue

Abstract

In the last 40 years, iterations of multicultural education hasvebeen the standard approach to closing academic opportunity gaps for historically underserved and ignored students. Multicultural education emphasizes schooling as an agent of social change (Hollins, 2008). Banks (1991) provided multicultural approaches to teaching and framing curriculum, advocating for responsive teaching practices for ethnically, culturally, linguistically and racially diverse students. This approach relies heavily on the teacher's will to create a flexible, culturally friendly classroom to acquire the necessary skills to live harmoniously in a culturally diverse society. This approach presents a systemic problem of practice for teacher education because it relies heavily on an 80% White teaching force shifting their ideologies about historically underserved communities and Children of Color within a brief period of time (Gorski, 2016; Weiss, 1995; Zeichner & Grant, 1981). Hollins reported that learning experiences within teacher preparation should be developmental, cumulative, and provide carefully constructed social activities that allow teachers to acquire the language, behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes based on a particular teaching perspective (Hollins, 2011).
A promising practice for shifting the emphasis on changing ideologies to facilitating teacher candidate’s epistemic agency is to address the learning experiences embedded in the curriculum of the teacher education program. For example, at Author 2, a science teacher educators’ university, a secondary science credential program’s interconnected learning experiences were designed to influence the skill development of preservice teachers and close opportunity gaps faced by the diverse students they teach. These learning experiences are associated with courses grounded in a particular theory of learning teaching focused on developing candidate epistemic agency. The concept of epistemic agency comes from Kawasaki and Sandoval (2020). They define it as the authority to make decisions about the nature of a problem and the ability to solve it. The idea is to support candidates’ ability to identify, address, and reflect on problems of practice faced when teaching in a pluricultural society (Kawasaki and Sandoval, 2020). Similarly, at other proposed symposia Authors’ institutions across the country, a holistic, practice-based approach has been used to redesign aspects of teacher preparation programs in administration, secondary English education, urban teaching and learning, early childhood, and language and literacy (Authors, 2017, 2022, under review).
Three principles from the literature on holistic, practice-based teacher preparation were used to ground the redesign of the programs: a) learning teaching is a process that can empower students to develop the habits of mind of the discipline they will teach, b) teacher practice is a holistic, practice-based endeavor, and, c) teacher candidates can become proficient novice teachers when they develop epistemic agency (Hollins, 2011a, 2015; Lee, 2017; Philip, et. al., 2019; Valenzuela, 2016). These principles facilitated the development and implementation of coherent and continuous learning experiences that cultivated epistemic agency for teacher candidates.
Thus, a promising practice for shifting the emphasis on changing ideologies through multicultural education to facilitating teacher candidate’s epistemic agency is to address the learning experiences embedded in the curriculum of the teacher education program.

Authors

• Antoinette S. Linton, California State University - Fullerton
  Presenting Author

• David B. Yaden, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

• Connor Warner, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Sonja Lopez Arnak
  Presenting Author

• Kindel Turner Nash, Appalachian State University
  Presenting Author

• Christina V. Luna, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Miguel Zavala, California State University - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author