Don’t Know Thyself: Monoculturally Relevant Pedagogy and the Changing Same in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Teacher Perspectives on Culturally Based Teaching

Abstract

For many White preservice teachers, their responses to culturally informed, equity-driven pedagogy function as enduring social scripts that reinforce non-critical attitudes, habits of mind, dispositions, and practices that restrict growth and induce harm across three overlapping contexts: personal, pedagogical, and psychocultural. In this conceptual article, the authors draw from their instructional experiences in an urban teacher education program at a PWI based in the Midwest. Encounters with White PSTs reveal a cognitive and emotional allegiance to what the authors define as Monoculturally Relevant Pedagogy (MRP). This duoethnographic article seeks to open new avenues (particularly for preservice teacher educators) for understanding and addressing the challenges attending the educational journey of White preservice teachers to becoming culturally informed thinkers and practitioners.

Authors

• Lasana D. Kazembe, Indiana University - Indianapolis

• Rylie Pittard, Indiana University - Indianapolis