This dissertation explores how multiple lenses enable more nuanced understandings of gender that multicultural education, and by extension multicultural teacher education, will benefit from. In answering the question, “What was taught about gender and education within this multicultural teacher education course?” the teaching of gender within a particular multicultural teacher education course is analyzed using three theoretical frames - Liberal Feminism, Womanism, and Postmodern Feminism. To understand and articulate multiple stories related to gender and education within the context of multicultural teacher education, this study is methodologically framed through feminist poststructuralism. Specific research goals that stem from this approach include: a focus on issues of gender, an examination of the multiplicity of gendered identities/positionalities, an exploration of the complexities, contradictions, and contexts of identities and positionalities, and a consideration of my own subjectivities as a researcher.This research pushes the boundaries of qualitative research as it is written in large part as a play-like piece of performance art. The format and performativity afford this dissertation a creative space to demonstrate an innovative approach to qualitative research analysis, writing and utility. The play (1) answers the question, “What was taught about gender in this multicultural education course?” (2) demonstrates multiple ways of answering the question, and (3) allows readers to see/ascertain for themselves answers to the question. The script of the play is based largely on the transcript of two class sessions of an actual multicultural/urban teacher education course. These two days of a semester-long course were focused specifically on the topic of gender. Through the play layout, it is easy to see how the theoretical perspectives (Womanism, Postmodern Feminism, and Liberal Feminism) interact with the content and dynamics within the classroom experiences. This format and structure of the project and the writing also allows the interactivity of knowledge, power, and discourse of feminist poststructural methodologies to be enacted with and for the readers and observers of the research.A case study such as this opens up possibilities for teacher educators, researchers, and even teacher candidates to think more complexly about conceptions of gender, gender and teacher education, and gender and education more broadly. This, in turn, opens the fields of Multicultural Education and Multicultural Teacher Education to the possibilities of looking at gender issues more complexly. Further, this study extends and deepens understandings of Liberal Feminism, Womanism, and Postmodern Feminism within the realms of education, as well as adds to the limited number of studies that engage feminist poststructural methodologies of research within educational research. This study urges educators to address issues of gender and education from multiple perspectives, presenting and discussing multiple voices, and engaging and evoking gender as constructed within a multiplicity of harmonizing and contradicting discourses and power relations.
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