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This article explores and challenges a widely held and often unexamined conception of White teacher candidates as learners about issues of diversity and equity in teacher education. This conception suggests that most White teacher candidates are deficient learners who lack resources for learning about diversity. This review reframes this conception through an examination of three bigger pictures of White teacher candidates, of the lack of research regarding pedagogies for multicultural teacher education, and of insights from those who describe pedagogies that build on what students bring. Ultimately, if teacher educators hope that teacher candidates view their future K-12 students as having resources and capabilities for learning, then teacher educators must critically examine and dialogue about what they model through their own pedagogies.
KEYWORDS: teacher education/development, teacher characteristics, instructional design/development.
Challenging a Prevailing View of White Teacher Candidates
The purpose of this article is to frame a central problem in the work of multicultural teacher education. The problem centers on a widely held and often unexamined conceptualization of White teacher candidates as deficient learners about issues of diversity in multicultural teacher education. In this view, teacher candidates are learners who lack resources or who have deficient knowledge or experience from which to build when it comes to learning about these issues. The primary goal of this article is to explore, challenge, and revise this prevailing conception. In addition, the caricature of the White teacher candidate as deficient may be linked with teacher educators' pedagogical choices; the assumption that preservice teachers are deficient may lead to pedagogies that deaden their engagement in teacher education classrooms (Regenspan, 2002). Furthermore, if teacher educators want teacher candidates to embrace and enact a conception of K-12 students as active learners who bring resources to their learning, this article points to the need for a parallel conception of teacher candidates as active learners who bring resources to multicultural teacher education classrooms.
Multicultural education seems well defined by some policy makers and teacher educators and researchers; many delineate general principles or guidelines for what learning about diversity should include in K-12 classrooms and in higher education (Banks, 1995; Chisholm, 1994; Dilworth, 1992; Gollnick, 1995; LadsonBillings, 1999; Nieto, 1999; Sleeter & Grant, 1994). However, much less is known about the actual practice of...