Learning or unlearning racism: transferring teacher education curriculum to classroom practices

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2003 by Beverly E. Cross

In the United States, urban public schools are attended primarily by students from various racial minority groups. Statistically, teachers in these schools are often White and becoming more so annually. Issues of race and culture are critical in today's educational contexts at every level--including pedagogy, curriculum, and teachers. Considering the severity of what these statistics mean for educational quality and teacher quality, research efforts to understand this situation are essential. This article presents the findings of a study about what a group of teacher education graduates learned about race as they prepared to teach in multiracial classrooms. The findings of this study are then used to discuss what the university curriculum may actually produce and what future considerations would be beneficial to enable teachers to teach in a context where their race and culture differ dramatically from their students.

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Background

AS THE NEW CENTURY BEGAN, the United States set the stage for one of the most pressing issues facing education when it hosted the National Conference on Teacher Quality in Washington, DC. Yet the educational practitioners, scholars, policy makers, and political figures in attendance participated in only limited conversations about teaching in multiracial environments such as those that exist in large urban school districts. As has been the case for years, it appears that neither the race of a teacher nor a teacher's ability to teach in multiracial environments is considered a component of a teacher quality. The absence of meaningful dialogue at the national level about the role of race in teacher quality is perplexing. Educators and teacher educatorsare struggling to improve the quality of teaching in urban schools as one means to improve educational achievement for large populations of low-income children of color.

Preparing teachers to teach in urban schools is shaped in large part by many contemporary demographic factors, including the following:

1. America's teaching force is becoming increasingly White. Currently approximately 85.6% of public school teachers are White, with increases projected annually (NCES, 1999).

2. Teacher educators (those who prepare teachers in universities and colleges) are overwhelmingly White (Talbert-Johnson & Tillman, 1999).

3. During the last 30 years, urban schools have become "intensely made up mostly of students of color" (Piana, 2000) and this is projected to reach 48% by 2020 (Pallas, Natriello, & McDill, 1989).

The confluence of these three factors creates an enormous gap between who prepares teachers, who the teachers themselves are, and who they will likely teach. Scholars describe this as a cultural/racial mismatch, (1) or gap, that results in a significant detachment of White teacher educators and White teacher education students from children of color. This detachment has serious consequences for what children of color will learn and what teachers will experience in the profession. It essentially raises the challenge of how to address "the huge problem of an institutionalized white, largely female, teaching staff" (Sleeter & McLaren, 1995, p. 24) teaching primarily students of color. Gay (1995) articulates how the mismatch is manifested in virtually every component of teaching:

   The fact that many [teacher education] students
   not share the same ethnic, social, racial and linguistic
   backgrounds as their students may lead to cultural
   incongruencies in the classroom which can mediate
   against educational effectiveness. These incompatibilities
   are evident in value orientation, behavioral
   norms and expectations and styles, social interactions,
   self presentation, communication and cognitive
   processing. (p. 159)

Presently some 90% of the more than 1,200 teacher preparation programs in the United States follow a traditional curriculum that includes liberal arts courses, methods courses, foundational work, and student teaching (Boyer & Baptiste, 1996). These programs provide beginning teachers with knowledge about teaching through coursework and field experiences. Much of what they learn, however, "does not reflect social reality and is therefore derelict in preparing them to function in culturally pluralistic and global society" (Sue, Bingham, Porche-Burke, & Vasquez, 1999, p. 1066)

This article examines the extent of this conscious neglect in learning how to better prepare teachers to teach in multiracial contexts. This will be achieved first through reporting on a scholarly research study of one teacher education program's attempt to teach about race. Important curriculum considerations follow this report and offer insight into moving beyond the traditional means currently used by well-intentioned university faculty to retrofit White, privileged students to teach in multiracial schools.

A Scholarly Research Study

In response to the racial/cultural mismatch described previously, universities around the United States have attempted to design programs to better equip largely White, female students to teach in multiracial contexts. The following short research summary describes (a) the efforts of one at teacher education program to incorporate issues of race into the teacher education curriculum and (b) the graduates' reflections of how that curriculum has prepared them to teach in multiracial class rooms now that they are full-time teachers.