From Multicultural Dispositions to Epistemic Agency as Justice in Teacher Education

• In Event: Borderlands: Constructing Educational Possibilities Across P–20 Systems: A Structured Conversation Between Educational Leadership and Teacher Education

Abstract

In the last half-century, multicultural education has been the primary approach to ameliorating injustice(s) and closing academic opportunity gaps for historically underserved and ignored students. Emphasizing schooling as an agent of social change (Hollins, 2008), multicultural approaches to teaching and learning include reframing curriculum, and advocating for culturally responsive teaching practices for ethnically, culturally, linguistically and racially diverse students. However, the success of multicultural approaches depends upon the teacher's will and ability to create a flexible, culturally responsive context. Thus, this approach creates a systemic problem of practice for teacher education because of its heavy reliance on a largely White teaching force to shift their ideologies about historically underserved communities and historically ignored communities within a brief period of time (Gorski, 2016; Weiss, 1995; Zeichner & Grant, 1981).
A promising practice for shifting the emphasis on changing ideologies to facilitating teacher candidate’s epistemic agency. Kawasaki and Sandoval (2020) define epistemic agency as the authority to make decisions about the nature of a problem and the ability to solve it. Addressing the learning experiences embedded in the curriculum of the teacher education program is an example of an approach to teacher education that we have found enables candidates’ ability to identify, address, and reflect on problems of practice faced when teaching in a pluricultural society. We draw on two examples here. The first is a secondary science credential program wherein 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 theory of learning teaching that focuses on developing candidate epistemic agency.
Our second example focuses on other universities we have been associated with where a holistic, practice-based approach has been used to foster teacher candidates’ epistemic agency within multiple programs including secondary English education, urban teaching and learning, early childhood, and language and literacy (Authors, 2017, 2022). Several principles from the literature on holistic, practice-based teacher preparation were used to ground the redesign of these 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

• Connor Warner, University of Utah

• Kindel Turner Nash, Appalachian State University

• Christina V. Luna, California State University - Fresno

• Sonja Lopez Arnak