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THE DISCOURSE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION:
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THE DISCOURSE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY OF
A TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM

By

Gerald Scott Hopper

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Anthropology

l 996

ABSTRACT

THE DISCOURSE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY
OF A TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM

By

Gerald Scott Hopper

ln recent years, teacher educators have come to acknowledge the importance of
multicultural education in the preparation of preservice teachers. While there has been
much discussion regarding theoretical issues in the literature, there has been little emphasis
on documenting practice at the local level. In this thesis, I conducted a case study
examining how teacher educators practice multicultural education and use the concept of
culture. The teacher education program at Michigan State University was selected as the
study site, and I interviewed a total of twelve teacher educators who practice multicultural
education; the goal of this thesis was to document the wide range of issues that teacher
educators must address in their practice, to demonstrate the multiple ways multicultural
education is practiced and how the culture concept is deﬁned, and to call forth the building

of interdisciplinary ties between anthropology and teacher education.

Copyright by
GERALD SCOTT HOPPER
1996

To Kathy: my wife, best friend, and soul mate.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Dr. Jacob Climo for serving as my advisor, mentor, and ﬁiend. Dr.
Climo is a rarity among the faculty in the Department of Anthropology--a scholar and
professor who is truly devoted to his students. He helped in the selection and sharpening
of this topic, and provided insight into the ethnographic method that was used to approach
this research question. Dr. Douglas R. Campbell provided to me an understanding of the
research site, and many valuable comments that have been incorporated into the resulting
thesis. The late Dr. Jerome A. Voss also provided many USCfUl comments that ultimately
resulted in the sharpening of my research focus. I am grateful to Dr. E.L. Cerroni-Long of
Eastern Michigan University for serving on my graduate guidance committee, providing
me with many valuable comments, and for tuming me on to the challenging and rewarding
world of cultural anthropology--she is a one of a kind professor, and a once in a life-time
mentor. I would like to express my gratitude to all the teacher educators who allowed me
to interview them for my study. Without their participation, this thesis would not be
possible. Finally, special thanks go to Kathleen D. Hopper for her emotional support,
editorial assistance, and just for being the wonderful person that she is, which helped me to

endure and ultimately succeed in researching and writing my thesis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ..............................................

Chapter

1. THE CHALLENGE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION ........

The Teacher Educators’ Mission
The Discourse of Reform

The Problem
The Case Study

2. MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: THE NATIONAL DISCOURSE . .

Multicultural Education: A Marginalized Discourse
Multicultural Education: A Period of Transformation

3. METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH SETTING .................

Selection of Participants and Field Research
Overview

Background
Educational Reform
Team System
Diversity and Multiculturalism in the Program

Minority Perspectives on Multicultural Education
The Minorities' Perspective

4. THE PROSPECTIVE TEACHER ..............................

The Preservice Teacher: Who Is She?
Culture Is What Other People Have
Educating Prospective Teachers

vi

..l

4

.12

18

32

5. CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS: THE INTELLECTUAL
CURRENCY .............................................. 4O

Visions of Multicultural Education and Diversity
The Multiplicity of Terms: The Problematic Nature of Deﬁnitions
Concepts and Critical Views

The Construction of Multicultural Education and Diversity

6. APPROACHES TO MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND
CULTURE ................................................ 49

Individual Approaches to Multicultural Education
The Celebration of Diversity Approach
The Social Knowledge and Power Approach
The Service-Learning Approach
The Ideology Deconstruction and Reconstruction Approach
The Cultural Difference Approach
The Social Construction of Reality and Ecological Approach

7. THE LOCAL DISCOURSE ................................... 71
Multicultural Education and the Concept of Culture
The Concept of Culture in Anthropology
The Use of Culture by Teacher Educators
Approaches to Multicultural Education at the Local Level

8. THE DILEMMA OF TEACHING ......................... w ..... 85

The Measurability of Success
The Long-Term: Maintenance of Cultural Awareness Among Teachers

9. ANTHROPOLOGY AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION ....... 91
Appendix
A. INTERVIEW QUESTIONS .................................. 96

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................... 98

vii

INTRODUCTION

Dilworth (19922xi) reports that the current impetus for educational reform comes
from segments of the educational community who acknowledge that racial and ethnic
diversity in the student population is an issue that must be confronted and accommodated
in educational practice. More importantly, she argues, that this new understanding is
believed to be related to three social conditions; which, if they are not addressed by the
educational community in the coming decades may threaten the global economic and
political position of the United States: 1) students of color are performing poorly
compared to Euro-American students; 2) there is an increasing need for a highly trained
work force in this period of rapid change; and 3) there is a desire for providing resolution
to domestic and international social problems.

The national advocacy for reforming the current approach to teacher preparation is led
by various government bodies, political leaders, and the majority of educational
organizations found in the United States. These groups, in part, are responsible for
guiding the course and direction of this educational restructuring. Brown (1992:1-2)
argues that unless this restructuring is addressed promptly by these groups, the nation will
be subject to a substantial loss of economic and political power in the global community,
due to our inability to bring all our human resources to bear in the global economy.

In order to counter this trend, many teacher educators have argued that there are two
areas that must be addressed, during this period of rapid change in science, technology, and
industry. First, Brown (1992: l) argues, the position of minorities in American universities
must change. As the nation's population continues to diversify in the coming decades, he

suggests, minorities can no longer accept the question of equity as simply an issue of

recruitment, as many believe Afﬁrmative Action portrays it. Second, Kobus (1992:224)
reports that educational leaders have recently come to recognize that preparing children
and young adults for their role as citizens in a world, which now requires expanded
participation and responsibility from its citizens, is a problematic proposition at best. Thus,
it is no longer acceptable, he argues, for American educators to present our own
democratic system as an idealized model, when so many of our own citizens, simply due to
their cultural and ethnic minority status, are subject to social and economic dislocation and
inequity.

To address the question of reform, many educators have begun to incorporate a
multiculturalist perspective into their own home institutions' preservice teacher education
curriculum; this is generally referred to as multicultural education. As Sleeter and Grant
(19872421) point out, "Multicultural education has been a reform movement aimed at
changing the content and processes within schools. Originally linked only to concerns
about racism in schooling, it has expanded to address sexism, classisrn, and handicappism."
The ultimate goal of the reform discourse is to prepare prospective teachers to operate
effectively in diverse classroom settings, which will provide beneﬁts and expanded learning
opportunities to students of color.

The reform movement in multicultural education as these scholars have shown is a
national movement. However, what does this reform movement look like at the local level,
in an actual teacher education program? Rosaldo (1993) argues that in order to
understand more ﬁrlly social actors and their motivations, they must be studied in their
local context. This thesis involves such a case study of teacher educators who are involved
in multicultural education: to demonstrate the importance of social agency and to
document the diversity of approaches at the local level. In particular, I will document how
teacher educators at the local level use the culture concept in their work and determine
whether the deﬁnitions recorded are based on a Boas-Benedict construction, as Wax

(1993) argues. By drawing upon Sleeter and Grant's (1987) typology of multicultural

education approaches, 1 will attempt to categorize the approaches found at the local level.
The intent of this study is to inform teacher educators of the complex task that lies before
them in restructuring their practice and to open a dialogue between teacher educators and

anthropologists regarding these issues at the national level.

Chapter 1
THE CHALLENGE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

In recent years, teacher educators involved in the multicultural education movement
have come to the realization that the typical preservice teacher, who is generally Euro-
American and female, will be called to ﬁll the vacancies in urban public schools. However,
her preferred choice is to teach in a suburban school setting rather than in the. central city
(Ladson-Billings 1992b:107). The prospective teacher generally comes from a small-town
or suburban community, with little intercultural or interracial experience. Overwhelmingly,
the preservice teacher desires to teach children who are culturally like herself in a
community that is similar to where she grew-up (Zeichner 1992:4).

She will be asked to teach students of color who have very different backgrounds and
life experiences than her own. For her, teaching will require being able to have the
necessary skills to communicate effectively interculturally. Essentially, she will encounter
students who are different from her in social class, culture, ethnicity, and language
(Zeichner 199221); in many cases she will be forced to operate in unfamiliar conditions.
Zeichner notes, "These students of color are more likely to be poor, hungry, in poor health,
and drop out of school than their white counterparts" (Ibidz3).

Recently, the recruitment of ethnic minorities into the ranks of the teaching profession
has become even more difﬁcult (see Chinn and Wong 1992 and Arends, Clemson, and
Henkelman 1992). However, the question of whether students of color have a higher level
of achievement with minority teachers is still open to debate. There is no empirical
evidence that links the ethnic identity of teachers with student achievement levels (Ladson-

Billings 1994:26). Yet with the small likelihood of recruiting large numbers of minorities

into the teaching profession, the question that must be answered is what kind of
preparation will the typical educator need to be an effective teacher in culturally diverse
settings?

The Teacher Educator's Mission

Multicultural education in teacher education has its origins in reforms mandated
during the 19805. Zeichner (1992) argues that these interventions, as currently conceived,
do not adequately address the issue of diversity in education. They do not prepare
preservice teachers to work in diverse cultural settings. Generally speaking, the teacher

preparation programs as they are presently structured

. . . are not powerﬁrl enough interventions in the lives of teacher candidates to help
them to become effective and reﬂective practitioners. . . . Teacher education is simply
too weak either to produce a paradigm shift for teacher candidates or to provide

them with a suﬂicient repertoire to make serious departures from what they already
know and can do well (Arends, Clemson, and Henkelman 1992:162-3).

This problem, in part, may be traced to a weak connection between the theory of
multicultural education as advocated by practitioners and the application of those ideas in
teacher preparation programs. It is generally perceived that the development of theory has
outpaced the question of application in the ﬁeld (see Banks 1993, Gay 1992, Sleeter and
Grant 1987).

According to Sleeter and Grant (1987:43 7), there is generally a weak connection
between theory and application in multicultural education, as advocated in the literature,

which leaves the question of application unanswered. They argue,

They [author of models] do not provide a thorough discussion of the theoretical
ﬁ'ameworks supporting their goals. Statements concerning goals are often vague,
and clear connections between what authors expect of the approach and what
they recommend as practices for educators are either ambiguous or missing
altogether.

A second problem facing teacher educators in their practice (see Ladson-Billings 1994

and Ahlquist 1992) has been documented. Many prospective teachers passively resist the

materials (generally historical information on Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos,
and African Americans) introduced in multicultural education or human relations courses.
There is the perception that multicultural education classes are designed to make them feel
guilty. Many students ﬁnd it difﬁcult to believe that Euro-Americans have economically
and politically gained from the prevailing political and economic status quo; consequently,
they simply ignore the course content, which apparently hinders many preservice teachers
from critically examining issues of cultural diversity.

The Discourse of Reform

The current multicultural education movement is set to address these problems: ﬁrst,
how can a stronger connection between the theoretical considerations of multicultural
education and its application by practitioners be forged in the classroom? Second, how can
preservice teachers be prepared to understand adequately issues of cultural diversity and to
operate effectively in culturally diverse classrooms? Given this orientation of the reform
movement, the question of linking theory with practice is closely tied to the issue of
preparing preservice teachers to operate in culturally diverse classrooms. The actual
preparation of prospective teachers becomes the application of theory for these
practitioners.

In response, several scholars (Gollnick 1992a, Gollnick 1992b, Brown 1992, Garibaldi
1992, Irvine 1992, Winﬁeld and Manning 1992) have offered a variety of perspectives on
addressing the question of increasing preservice teachers' understanding of cultural
diversity. Many educators are advocates for the restructuring of teacher education
programs; restructuring is believed to be necessary to provide preservice teachers with
adequate preparation. Before agreeing upon any course of action, virtually all teacher
educators concur that a single course in multicultural education or human relations is
insufﬁcient to prepare prospective teachers, for the challenges of the profession (Garibaldi
1992223).

Before the current reform movement can have a positive impact, specialists argue that

there are two important considerations that teacher educators must bring to the center of
their practice. The ﬁrst area is an understanding of cultural diversity issues (see Garibaldi
1992, Gollnick 1992a). To achieve this goal, teacher preparation programs will need to
concentrate on the social and cultural context of learning throughout the teacher education
curriculum. Central to this reform is that notions of culture, race, ethnicity, and gender
need to be integrated into the curriculum and pedagogy. For example, prospective
teachers will need to understand that culture plays an important role in producing multiple
learning distinctions, and that these and other environmental factors can inﬂuence success
in the classroom; having been instructed, prospective teachers will have to take these
questions into consideration. According to Gollnick (1992a267), "The goal should be that
graduates of teacher education programs are actually able to transfer this knowledge and
these skills to their classrooms when they begin to teach."

The second area is the clinical experience; a pedagogical method, which is believed to
provide the most comprehensive means for reinforcing lessons upon preservice teachers.
The purpose of the clinical experience can vary in intensity and duration, ﬁom volunteer
work to a full year student teaching internship. The intent of the experience is to
demonstrate to students that there are no ideal heterogeneous classrooms, and to provide
preservice teachers with practice in learning how to transfer what they have learned in the

program to actual classroom settings (Garibaldi 1992:33-4).

The Problem

Despite the recent pledge by educators to restructure teacher preparation programs,
there appears to be no readily available answers to solve the problems underlying the need
for reform. This prospect, I believe, raises the question of how the reform movement plays
itself out in a local context and how this differs from the national discourse? In this thesis,

I report on a case study of a teacher education program and document how the practice of

teacher educators is played out at the local level. Given the importance of the concept of
culture to multicultural education, I document how the teacher educators that submitted to
being interviewed use the concept in their work; I will determine whether this concept is
based on a Boas-Benedict construct of culture, as argued by Wax (1993). Finally, I draw
upon Sleeter and Grant's (1987) typology of multicultural education approaches as a means
for classifying the approaches used by the teacher educators that I interviewed. It is hoped
that by documenting how teacher educators both deﬁne the concept of culture and practice
multicultural education in an actual program, this case study will provide a database of
information that will facilitate a healthy dialogue between teacher educators and
anthropologists over the questions addressed in this thesis.

It should be noted that even though the term multicultural education is being used in
this study to refer to the work of teacher educators involved in the preparation of
prospective teachers, there are other terms that are also applicable for identifying this type
of work, but these terms encompass varied meanings depending on how they are
employed. The best example that comes to mind is the notion of diversity, which is
generally viewed as an idea that incorporates difference beyond the level of culture, such as
disabilities and special needs. In this study, I am more concerned with examining the
cultural aspect of this practice; thus I believe multicultural education is a more appropriate
term.

The Case Study

Drawing upon the work of Rosaldo (1993), I conducted a case study of teacher
educators who practice multicultural education in Michigan State University's (MSU)
teacher education program. By examining a local setting, this provides an actual
documented case of how a group of teacher educators practices multicultural education.
Rosaldo (1993 :21) argues that to understand social actors (teacher educators) more fully,
it is necessary for cultural analysis to embed them within the context they inhabit (the

teacher education program), since participants are shaped by local interests and their

actions and perceptions are colored by surrounding events. To understand the interplay
between human action and their built-environment, Rosaldo (1993:102-3) observed, it is

important to take into account subjectivity and how it inﬂuences behavior. He stated,

In this context, the study of consciousness becomes central because people always act
(however imperfectly) relative to their desires, plans, whims, strategies, moods, goals,
fantasies, intentions, impulses, purposes, visions, or gut feelings. No analysis of
human action is complete unless it attends to peOple's own notions of what they are
doing. Even when they appear most subjective, thought and feelings are always
culturally shaped and inﬂuenced by one's biography, social situation, and historical
context (Ibid).

Thus, one part of this study is to survey the context in which teacher educators are
embedded and examine how their intersubjectivity and experience impacts upon their
professional interactions, centered on the practice of educating prospective teachers. This
survey provided an opportunity for glimpsing a view of the actual subjectivity of teacher
educators and their academic practice through studying their intersubjective and narrative
experiences, which allows an examination of how these educators respond, both as
professionals and individuals, to the issues that comprise their profession.

In recent years, many anthropologists have observed that educators who are involved
in multicultural education have appropriated a distorted concept of culture into their
intellectual discourse, without developing more than a superﬁcial understanding of the
concept (see Turner 1993, Greenbaum 1992, and Peny 1992). In particular, Wax (1993)
attempts to demonstrate how anachronistic the prevailing notion of culture in
multiculturalism is compared to recent anthropological notions of culture. Wax (1993)
proposes that the model currently being used in the national multicultural education
discourse is based on a Boas-Benedict notion of culture, which he believes is no longer a
useﬁil framework for educators.

In this thesis, I will assess whether a Boas-Benedict notion of culture is, in fact,
employed in MSU's teacher education program by the teacher educators that l have

interviewed, and I will determine whether Wax's hypothesis is a feasible premise given the

10

lack of empirical evidence supporting his claim. Wax (1993: 108) observes, that the notion
of culture being used most closely approximates one offered by the Boas-Benedict legacy
in anthropology. That is, this notion of culture is one that characterizes cultures as ". . .
plural, separate, distinct, historically homogeneous. . . ." Regarding the multiculturalism
discourse, Wax (1993: 105-6) argues, the following cultural themes can be observed. First,
every person is a participant of culture and a product of culture. Second, since individuals'
are participants in culture and are a product of the same, schooling should begin at the
point of reaching toward the student in his or her native culture, and the school curriculum
must be designed to reﬂect this goal. It cannot be assumed that since a student is
unfamiliar with certain aspects of the mainstream dominant culture, that he or she is
culturally deﬁcient. Finally, the school culture should reﬂect the population of the
institution; rather, than reﬂecting the larger dominant culture. The beneﬁt derived from
this arrangement is that ethnocentrism will be avoided and minority students will be given a
sense of belonging and models of achievement.

The Boas-Benedict notion of culture when embodied into multicultural curricular
rhetoric, Wax (19931108) argues, generally translates into ". . . a struggle for political
empowerment or dominance, but it has no relevance to the historical realities of the
development of world civilization. " He suggests that such a portrayal of the dynamics of
culture in multicultural education is inaccurate since human grth and innovation are
found not in separate or isolated cultures, but at the crossroads where cultures come into
contact. Given that the world is becoming more globally interconnected through
communication technologies, commerce, and political-military relationships, Wax
(1993 : 109) believes that it is no longer feasible for educators to rely upon the Boas-
Benedict model of culture, since it fails to recognize the growing interdependency of the
”global village." Wax calls on teacher educators to reconﬁgure the notion of culture that is
being used in their practice.

A second purpose of this thesis is to determine what approaches to multicultural

11

education are being used by the teacher educators that I interviewed in MSU's teacher
education program. To accomplish this task, I will draw upon the multicultural education
typology offered by Sleeter and Grant (1987) as the means for classifying the approaches I

documented at the local level. I will discuss Sleeter and Grant's typology in Chapter 2.

Chapter 2
MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: THE NATIONAL DISCOURSE

In this chapter, I will highlight some of the relevant issues in the national multicultural
education discourse that are being advocated by educators across the nation. This survey
will attempt to accomplish the following tasks. First, I will discuss the marginalized
relationship of multicultural education within the context of teacher education. Second, I
will trace the historical development of the multicultural education discourse. Third, I will

discuss the various approaches to multicultural education that are currently being used.
Multicultural Education: A Marginal Discourse

Grant and Miller (1992) have argued that while many teacher educators have
acknowledged the importance of multicultural education, it is still largely an issue assigned
a marginal status within the teacher education literature. Zeichner (199222) has observed
that a substantial corpus of works has recently appeared, addressing such issues as: 1) the
growing disparity between the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of our
nation's teaching force and that of the student populations in public schools; 2) the
problematic nature of recruiting and retaining more minority teachers; and 3) the glaring
problem of inequity in schools and society. Yet, he suggests, a majority of teacher
educators have shown little interest to the question of reforming teacher education, by
incorporating a multicultural perspective. In particular, Zeichner states that "there has
been relatively very little attention in the current literature of teacher education reform to

issues of educational and social inequity and to ideas about how to prepare teachers to

12

l3

teach an increasingly diverse student population more effectively" (Ibid).

The antecedents of multicultural education are found in the civil rights movement of
the 19605. The result was revolutionary change to the American educational system;
schools were desegregated and several new educational programs addressing cultural
diversity were born. Ethnic studies, women's studies, multiethnic education, intergroup
relations, citizenship education, bilingual education, and special needs education all have
their origins in this era (Kobus 1992:225).

The contemporary multicultural education discourse is similar to previous reform
movements, since it represents a projection of historical tension, centered on societal issues
in education; consequently, educational historians argue that the current movement should
be seen as an extension of earlier reform movements. In the past, the advocacy for these
movements has frequently culminated in a call for reform, which have effected change in
both the educational curricula and pedagogy (Brown 19922).

Banks (1993) provides an excellent historical account tracing the course and direction
of the previous reform movements; he demonstrates how their inﬂuences can be gauged in
the current multicultural education movement. He identiﬁes four historical periods, with
the ﬁnal period extending into the current discourse of multicultural education. The ﬁrst
phase, which began during the civil rights movement, is characterized with the emergence
of ethnic studies. Ethnic studies developed when scholars, who specialized in the history
and culture of minority groups, sought to incorporate concepts, theories, and information
about ethnic groups into the teacher education curricula. The development of multiethnic
education characterized the second phase of the multicultural education movement. These
same educational pioneers realized that the incorporation of information about ethnic
groups into the curricula was insufﬁcient to address the needs of minority students, nor to
build democratic racial and ethnic attitudes among all students. By responding to the
unique needs of minority students, the advocates of multiethnic education intended to bring

systematic and structural change to schools, which, it was hoped, would encourage all

14

students to develop more tolerant attitudes toward racial and ethnic diﬁ‘erencesuthe aim
was to increase educational equality for all students. The third period emerged when other
groups, who viewed themselves as victimized by society and educational institutions,
expressed their dissatisfaction over how the school curriculum was organized and
structured. Women and people with disabilities, among others, demanded that their
histories, cultures, and voices be incorporated into the school curricula, both in secondary
and higher education. They believed themselves to be "invisible," or rnisrecognized by the
prevailing curricula of the time. The current period in multicultural education is
characterized by practitioners focusing on the development of theory, practice, and
research that centers on the integration of such variables as race, class, and gender, which
are now considered important. It is important to realize that contributions from each
period in the evolution of multicultural education are observable today, with the more

recent developments being more prominent than earlier ones (Banks 1993:19-20).

Multicultural Education: A Period of Transformation

Commentators have observed that there is no one speciﬁc approach available to
multicultural education--multiple approaches have been advocated in recent years. Brown
(1992:7) describes the current period of educational reform as a formative period; the
agenda transforming teacher education programs is still emerging, which has resulted in
many different interpretations being offered on how multicultural education should be
implemented, as will be discussed in detail below. Banks (1993 :4) echoes this sentiment;
he argues that the emergent status of the current reform movement has spawned numerous
typologies and conceptual schemes, which, often time, disagree over goals and aims.

Several scholars have developed typologies (see Sleeter & Grant 1987, Gibson 1984,
and Prattle 1983) to distinguish between the multiple multicultural education approaches

that have been advocated in the literature. There is overlap in the conﬁguration of the

15

typologies, since scholars do not agree on the speciﬁcs of each multicultural education
approach; yet each approach within a typology is discernible by its stated aims, goals, and
methodologies.

Sleeter and Grant (1987) have identiﬁed ﬁve approaches to multicultural education in
their review of the literature. I will provide expanded coverage of the ﬁnal two approaches
in Sleeter and Grant's typology, since they will play an important role in our understanding
of the approaches used by scholars consulted in MSU's teacher education program. The
ﬁrst approach is the "Teaching of the Culturally Different" perspective, which advocates
the assimilation of students of color into the cultural mainstream, and the current social
structure. A basic tenet of this approach is advocating the development of positive group
identity. This is accomplished by adapting existing school programs to build bridges
between societal institutions and minorities, which, it is hoped, will provide these groups
opportunities for social mobility and achievement.

Second, the "Human Relations" approach is designed to encourage students from
different backgrounds to understand and appreciate cultural differences. Advocates believe
improved relations can be achieved by facilitating more communications between people of
different cultural backgrounds.

The third approach, "Single Group Studies," can be characterized as a pedagogical
orientation that uses lessons to focus on cultural experiences of one single gender or ethnic
group. The primary aim of this type of ethnic education is to foster acceptance,
appreciation, and an understanding of cultural diversity in our society. Practitioners
emphasize prescription and application over goals and theory to achieve their aims.

Fourth, the "Multicultural Education" approach is the perspective that much of the
current school reform movement is centered upon; it appears to be the most widely
accepted form of multicultural education. The primary aims of this approach are the
following: 1) valuation of cultural diversity; 2) respect for human rights and for cultural

diversity; 3) tolerance for alternate lifestyles; 4) advocacy for social justice and equal

l6

opportunity for all; 5) equitable distribution of power among the membership of all ethnic
groups.

Sleeter and Grant (1987:431) have observed that the advocates of this approach, in
their writings, are interested in addressing a wide-range of issues, which include language,
culture, social stratiﬁcation, and so forth. The issues that receive the most attention are:
"institutional racism in society and schools, unequal power relationships among racial
groups, and economic stratiﬁcation and social class." To address the question of inequity,
advocates believe it is necessary to understand the importance of race and ethnicity.
Despite the shared consensus regarding the goals of "multicultural education," however,
the development of curriculum and instruction is in a dismal state and the instructional
process has been signiﬁcantly overlooked in the literature (Ibidz435).

The ﬁnal multicultural education approach, "Education That Is Multicultural and
Social Reconstructionist" (EMSC), which places an emphasis on social action, is an
outgrowth of the "multicultural education" approach discussed above (Sleeter and Grant
1987:434-5). Advocates of the EMSC approach characterized it as "an approach to
education that prepares young people to take social action against social structural
inequality", which, it is hoped, will reduce racism and construct a society that is more
socially just. To achieve these goals, teacher educators and educators have to address two
considerations. First, students need to develop a better understanding of the causes of
oppression and inequality, and how to address or eliminate these social afﬂictions. They
argue that "Students should learn to use power for collective betterment, rather than
learning mainly obedience" (Sleeter and Grant 1987:435). Second, educators need to
change their teaching practices in ways that will make classrooms more democratic.

Even though the EMSC approach is related to "multicultural education," it is less
developed than the latter approach; rather than concentrating on the goals of incorporating
social action, advocates spend more energy criticizing "multicultural education." Yet

despite an interest in social action, there has been little treatment of the question of

l7

curriculum and instruction in the literature; therefore, practice and application in this
approach are dismally developed, as well (Sleeter and Grant 1987:436).

In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate how the national discourse of multicultural
education is marginalized within the ﬁeld of teacher education. Multicultural education has
a long history in education, but the current discourse has only recently begun,
incorporating larger issues like the transformation of the institutions themselves. Despite
all the recent change, there are ﬁve primary approaches to multicultural education (Sleeter
and Grant 1987). It is the "multicultural education" approach that characterizes the current
reform movement. In this thesis, I will attempt to determine which approach to
multicultural education is the most commonly used by teacher educators in MSU's
education program. In the following chapter, I will survey the setting where teacher

educators work.

Chapter 3
METHODOLOGY AND THE RESEARCH SETTING

In this chapter, I will discuss the research methodology employed in this thesis, and I
will address how recent organizational change has transformed the college's mission
toward multicultural education. This will involve identifying and surveying the key beliefs
held by teacher educators regarding their intellectual and professional environment, and

how they believe the changes have effected their research and educational practice.

Selection of Participants and Field Research

In this section, I will discuss the methodology employed in this study. Speciﬁcally, I
will discuss why MSU's College of Education was chosen as the research site; how the
research participants were chosen; the development of data gathering methods; and the
methods used in data analysis.

Since the College of Education's teacher preparation program has publicly committed
to incorporating multicultural education into the curriculum, Michigan State University's
(MSU) was chosen as the research site (see MSU College of Education 1988). The
decision for choosing this program was strongly inﬂuenced by the national ranking of the
college, which is ranked seventh in the nation among peer programs (US. News & World
Reports 1995); I believe the institutional course charted by MSU regarding multicultural
education is likely to inﬂuence the direction of other teacher education programs across the
nation.

By documenting the work of teacher educators at MSU, this may provide an

18

l9

opportunity for gauging the future direction of the multicultural education discourse, as
documented by this local example. The ﬁndings in this study should prove valuable for
teacher educators who are interested in understanding the dynamics of social change
associated with the implementation of multicultural education, and how it might impact
their own institution.

My task was to interview individuals who are currently researching and teaching
about multicultural education. The participants were selected in consultation with Douglas
Campbell, a teacher educator in the Department of Teacher Education, and a member of
my graduate guidance committee. He ﬁrrnished a list of 31 individuals who expressed an
interest in multicultural education, ranging from professors to graduate students; these
individuals have taught introductory multicultural education courses for undergraduate
education students.

To limit the potential bias of the list, I held informal discussions with two faculty
members from the teacher education program, to gather additional input regarding
potential interview candidates. Following these procedures a total of 22 names were
collected. By collecting my candidate list in this manner, I believe I was able to create a
reasonably unbiased pool of interview candidates, from which to make my selection. The
ﬁnal method employed in selecting research candidates was participant referral; this
procedure was added in order to obtain additional names and to periodically check the
validity of the candidate list.

The initial contact with participants was made by a letter; I introduced myself and
announced my interest in seeking teacher educators to interview, to discuss their views on
the practice of multicultural education, the concept of culture, and the discipline of
anthropology. If an individual responded positively to my solicitation, I would contact him
or her by the medium of their choosing (telephone or electronic mail) to arrange an
interview. In most cases, the teacher educators that I solicited expressed an interest in my

research, and most agreed to be interviewed. In a few cases, participants who showed an

20

interest in my topic were unable to schedule an interview, due to time constraints.

After a series of informal talks regarding multicultural education with teacher
educators, I developed an interest to explore further this issue; subsequently, I decided to
pursue this project, assessing how teacher educators deﬁne multicultural education, the
culture concept, and perceive the discipline of anthropology in their work. The original
problem under investigation envisioned conducting a comparative study of how
multicultural education is practiced in one faculty team in the program (see team system
discussion below); this team was thought to have a higher proportion of teacher educators
interested in multicultural education. Through a later series of discussions with teacher
educators, this was determined to be a false assumption. Consequently, the decision was
made to expand the research focus, to survey teacher educators in each of the three teams.

To collect data for this study, I used the ethnographic method, which is the traditional
anthropological procedure for data gathering. However, my use of ethnography in this
study was not in the traditional anthropological sense, since the participants (teacher
educators) that I interviewed do not reside in a single, naturally existing community with a
shared identity; rather, teacher educators are members of a complex society, and reside in a
community of their own choosing, and generally only associate with colleagues in their
shared professional setting--Michigan State University.

I decided to interview teacher educators who are currently teaching and researching
about multicultural education. Data collection lasted ﬁ'om the Summer through the Fall of
1994. A total of eight women and four men were interviewed. The ethnic breakdown of
the participants is as follows: 8 Euro-Americans, 3 Aﬁican Americans, and 1 Hispanic. In
every case, these individuals have employment as teacher educators in the College of
Education; ten participants are afﬁliated with the Department of Teacher Education, while
two individuals are associated with the Department of Counseling Education, Psychology,
and Special Education.

The typical interview lasted for approximately two hours, and focused on the question

21

of how the participant practices multicultural education. Each interview was tape-recorded
and no participant refused my request. The questionnaire was formulated to ascertain how
teacher educators theorize and practice multicultural education. It was divided into ﬁve
areas, which included the following topics: 1) biographical data, 2) deﬁnitions of
multicultural education, 3) views on culture and ethnicity, 4) multicultural education and
the curriculum, and S) anthropological perspectives on diversity and multicultural
education.

The original protocol contained sixteen questions; but it was subsequently modiﬁed
after the initial pilot study, which comprised the ﬁrst three interviews. After analyzing the
responses from the pilot study, the protocol was revised; irrelevant questions were
removed and more focused questions were added. The revised protocol (See Appendix A)
contained seventeen questions and was used in the nine remaining interviews.

On recommendation from my graduate guidance committee, a total of eight
interviews were transcribed. This decision was made since it was believed that eight
interviews would provide a reasonable sample of opinion among the participants
interviewed. The interviews chosen for transcription were selected only after a review of
my ﬁeld notes and an audio replay of each interview to determine its suitability for
transcription. Each participant was assigned a pseudonym to maintain conﬁdentiality.

After each interview was transcribed, a narrative report was written to summarize the
positions taken by each teacher educator on each of the questions. Upon the completion of
the narrative reports, I attempted to assess the major issues that repeatedly reoccurred; on
this basis, I determined the topics that I would address in this study. Speciﬁcally, 1) how
do they deﬁne the intellectual currency of their practice; 2) who are the prospective
teachers that will be prepared; 3) what multicultural education approaches are used by
teacher educators; and 4) what are the constraints that teacher educators encounter in their
practice.

To address these questions, I will address the following themes: how teacher

22

educators perceive the work of their colleagues (Chapter 3); the characteristics of the
typical prospective teacher in the program (Chapter 4); the intellectual currency used by
teacher educators in the program (Chapter 5); the approaches to multicultural education
and the concepts of culture used by individual practitioners (Chapter 6-7) (in these
chapters, the teacher educators consulted have been assigned pseudonyms to maintain their
conﬁdentiality); and ﬁnally, the constraints that teacher educators encounter in their

practice (Chapter 8).

Overview

Given the nature of the academic enterprise, the fostering of intellectual ideas, the
most noteworthy characteristic distinguishable among the practitioners involved in
multicultural education is the sheer multiplicity of perspectives on multiculturalism and

diversity. A female teacher educator explained,

We have one program within our college that attends to several principles. I mean
they [teacher educators] are looking at ways in which our students can teach and learn
challenging subject matter. For example, we are very much interested in

pedagogical content and knowledge or ways in which the subject matter and the
pedagogy come together in its more powerful forms. We are very much interested in
having this available and offer it to every child. We are interested in our own students
becoming lifelong learners. I mean those are sort of some of the kinds of themes that
we attend to across the teams. Now, how we attend to them is going to vary

because each of us is an individual, and when we come together, we make these
unique couplings.

There are a variety of attributes that make up the individuals involved in multicultural
education, in the teacher education program; they account for the multiplicity of
perspectives, beliefs, and approaches to the issue. The teacher educators, within the
college, come from various socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, cultural, regional, and religious
backgrounds. Yet most tend to be Euro-American, professional, and middle class. Added

to this milieu are the various academic disciplines and intellectual specialties that are

23

claimed, which ﬁirther adds to the diversity.

Since the publication of the College of Education's Report of the Task Force for
Reform of Teacher Education at Michigan State University in September 1988, the
college has undergone a series of structural and organizational changes designed to reform
the teacher education program. In this report, a number of goals were identiﬁed as
necessary for achieving the desired reforms. My discussion will only focus on factors
relevant to the diversity and multicultural education curriculum reforms.

Educational Reform

An important goal of the document centered on the development and expansion of a
viable multiculturalism component in the teacher education program at MSU: According
to the report, "Our program should inculcate a deep commitment to equitable access for all
children to valuable, empowering knowledge. Furthermore, our graduates should be
equipped to ensure that all their students achieve this high standard of learning" (p. 8). A
second statement says, "The professional studies program should assure the development
of the teacher candidates' ability to promote equity and social justice in their classrooms
and schools" (p. 18). These pronouncements are the basic guidelines for teacher educators
in the newly expanded multicultural education component of the teacher education
program.

Before the reforms of the early 19905, the teacher education program was organized
into one "standard program" (a series of course requirements that students ﬁrlﬁlled), which
enrolled the majority of students, and four alternative curriculum tracks that specialized in
various professional and pedagogical issues relevant to teaching. The alternate tracks were
designed to provide a select group of preservice teachers with more thematically focused
preparation in a particular area of teaching. Many in the faculty who shared similar
interests were placed in the alternative tracks; this arrangement resulted in the construction
of learning communities for both faculty and students, which provided a degree of

intellectual support and encouragement within each group. Teacher educators, who were

 

24

interested in diversity and equity issues, were placed in the "heterogeneous classrooms" or
the "learning community" tracks.

Team System

Through my discussions with several teacher educators, I have been able to piece
together the details of the transition from the learning communities to the teams. An
important element of the current system has been the development of three college-wide
faculty teams. Originally, each team drew its leadership, intellectual inspiration, and faculty
ﬁ'om the aforementioned alternative programs. The purpose of the faculty teams was to
create learning communities of individuals, who are interested in working in the same
geographical area (e.g., Flint, Michigan), and to spread the faculty's expertise across the
program, so that the entire teacher education program can beneﬁt from their knowledge.

Despite the implementation of the team system, there are mixed feelings among the
teacher educators that I consulted as to whether the new organizational arrangement is a
successful alternative to the learning communities. The comments of one female teacher

educator, I believe, capture the current state of the team system. She said,

Currently, there is no intellectual difference among the three teams. We have three
teams because we wanted to ﬁnd a way to develOp the student and faculty cohorts.
We wanted to build on the strengths of the alternative programs. One of the strengths
was the fact that students went through as a cohort, and I think another strength was
that faculty who taught in the program knew one another and they were all working
together toward the same goal. So that in part is what we tried to do with the teams.
The teams originally came together based on the geographical location of our
affiliated school districts. Some faculty prior to this transition had been working in
Flint, East Lansing, and so forth. And then people elected to join a team by virtue of
what districts were represented. Now we have extended from that initial go around.
That is initially how the faculty teams came together.

The chief concern expressed by two teacher educators, who are displeased with the
team system, is that each team has failed to produce an educational mission statement,
which they believe has weakened the commitment to the ﬁeld; this concern is coupled with

the perceived negative impact of the break up of the learning communities, such as

25

"heterogeneous classrooms," which provided academic support for teacher educators
involved in multicultural education-mo such support is now available. For example, one
female teacher educator expressed the feeling that the commitment to multicultural
education, within the college, has weakened since the implementation of the teams.
According to her, in the previous alternative track program most of the faculty involved in
multicultural education, diversity, and equity issues were located in the heterogeneous
classrooms track. Currently, they are now split up among the teams, with two or three
teacher educators who are interested in these issues out of about thirty persons in each
team. She indicated that there is a sense that they are now a minority voice within the

college, and in each of the respective teams. She said,

What they have done is deliberately try to sprinkle people across teams. So that
Lisa is in team three, I am in team one, Carrie Harper is in team one, Lauri Gellasch
is in team two, Michelle Hillis is in team two. So they were trying, 1 think, to inﬁrse
the idea somewhere, so that all teams would beneﬁt from hearing it. But what has
happened is that those two or three little voices in this pool of thirty people get
drowned out.

She felt the waning commitment to multicultural education has resulted in increased
competition with other educational issues for scarce faculty time and resources, without
the beneﬁts of a centralized learning community, which in the past provided a locus of
support and encouragement among teacher educators. A second female teacher educator,
who believes the teams have had more of a negative impact on multicultural education than
positive, said, "When the learning communities were in existence, the college was better
able to offer a multiculturalism perspective than the current faculty teams."

However, not all teacher educators interviewed agree with the above assessment of
multicultural education in the college; three teacher educators believe that the
implementation of the team system has further centered and strengthened multicultural
education, and has in no way weakened it, given that it was already considered an

important issue in the program. A male professor indicated that the team system is central

26

to multicultural education, and that multicultural education is at the core of the program,
with people from each team working on this problem. Unlike many other programs across

the nation, multicultural education is not ancillary or an afterthought. He said,

I mean it is not just an important issue: it is the issue. That is why despite all the
problems we have had with this new program; despite the sort of cloud of

resource shortages that is pretty frightening; despite all that stuff, I still think this
program is one of the most promising in the country because of that commitment and
because we don't think we have a formula. It is the kind of issue that you have to
work out on a day by day basis and every faculty member has to be involved in this.
And it has to consciously be a part of not just what is going on in courses with
students, but it has to be going on with faculty as they work on these courses
together.

At least two of the interviewed teacher educators believe it is unfair to judge the team
system harshly, since they were only recently implemented, in Fall 1993. They believe that
too little time has passed for the program to have worked out the normal organizational
bugs associated with such a momentous undertaking. In particular, one female teacher
educator commented that too much time has been devoted to comparing it with the

previous program, which had ten years worth of experience behind it. She explained,

What I am saying is it is very difﬁcult to develop and run a program at the same time.
We have one year behind us. I know that next year we will be a lot stronger than

we were last year. It is growing pains. Sometimes there are comparisons done
between the old program, but we are just now starting our second year in the new
program and we are comparing it to the old programs which were at least ten

years old.

They also expressed the belief that the current period is a transitional phase that will
be followed by a more established and organized team system--each team having its own
mission statement. One female teacher educator indicated that she is conﬁdent that each
team will develop a mission statement, provided that people work toward that goal. She
explained, "I think so, over time. It is hard to say what that will be. But I would think that
a group of people who work together over time will develop some kind of intellectual

coherence. "

27

Diversity and Multiculturalism in the Program

Similar to the national trend (Grant and Miller 1992 and Zeichner 1992), the actual
numbers of teacher educators involved with multicultural education teaching and research
in the teacher education program at MSU are quite small; they represent a minority within
the college. One female teacher educator commented on her professional minority status.
She said, "I think all faculty members would emphasize obviously that it is important. But
when you give them rating sheets that have diversity as a choice and ask them to pick their
top three interests, it wouldn't come up very often." In assessing the perception of other
teacher educators interviewed regarding this issue, most observed that the majority of their
colleagues would agree that multicultural education is a positive and necessary pursuit for
the college to undertake; but many noted that not everyone has taken a personal interest in
the topic, given the wide range of pursuits that fall under education.

Among teacher educators involved with multicultural education, there are mixed
views on how supportive their colleagues are to their work. While most acknowledge that
only a minority of the faculty is involved in this type of research, there is disagreement over
the perceived level of support among their colleagues. One female teacher educator
expressed concern that there is little interest in doing multicultural education beyond the
level of discussion and theory; there is little desire for preparing preservice teachers for
urban education, where educators will work with diverse children. Rather, the program's
energies are concentrated on what she labeled suburban education; i.e., preparing
preservice teachers to work in homogenous settings with people like themselves.

During the interview, she discussed a multicultural education typology (see Sleeter
and Grant 1987) to situate her work and the work of her colleagues. For the purpose of
understanding her perspective, she interpreted this typology as having ﬁve levels; with level

one through four being theory and level ﬁve as application. She described the work of her

28

colleagues as falling within the ﬁrst four levels, while her own work is characteristic of

level ﬁve. She explained,

So people might stay in theory that works, but I have thirty kids in my class what do I
do for all of them? You know that tug back to being fair and being manageable,
viewing the constraints as being immovable that may be physical or mental. So I

have talked to several people; they are exhausted after I talk with them because we
have a healthy banter-~a few banters with people here, who keep continually saying,
"yeah, you will never get published with that stuﬂ‘. Or, teachers just won't listen to
you because you are so far removed from where they are." I used to worry about it
and now I don't worry about it, thinking their must be plenty of work that needs to be
done and plenty of people who feel comfortable working within the one to four range.
[ﬁve tier model for practicing multicultural education in (Sleeter and Grant 1987)]
Those teachers working in the one to four range will get some help. What I am
worried about is the teachers who are at the four and half and are ready to do this blast
of true multicultural enactment, and nobody is talking to them. My colleagues
presume teachers aren't ready for the ﬁfth level and they are working vigorously at the
beginning of the continuum. . . . There are people here talking about the ﬁfth position,
but they are not practicing the ﬁfth position. We are preparing teachers for the
mainstream.

Despite this teacher educators grim perspective on the state of multicultural education
in the teacher education program, it appears a majority of teacher educators that I
consulted do not share this assessment. In fact, ten teacher educators expressed the
opinion that while their colleagues may not be directly interested in those issues, they are
supportive of the goals of multicultural education. The opinion of one female teacher
educator that captures this sentiment is quoted below; she explained, "I am primarily more
involved with the development of case studies and interviewing and these kinds of things
with my students. But I think the themes and the bottom-line issues of equity, most of my
colleagues would be very supportive of."

Two teacher educators expressed critical views of how their colleagues actually go
about doing multicultural education. The chief criticism centered on a concern that their

colleagues were primarily interested in ﬁxing attitudes. A male professor explained,

There is also a kind of orientation in the program that I am not fond of. That is, it
is only a tendency, but it is a strong tendency to think of teacher preparation as
primarily a process of attitude adjustment and what we are trying to do is

29

adjust the attitudes of preservice teachers so that they will be able to think that
diversity is good and that inequality is bad and that a good teacher is one who can
function successfully in a diversiﬁed setting and treat everyone equitable and
believe that all kids can learn equally. It is not an unworthy goal, my concern is
the program is more concerned about changing attitudes than changing practices.
The key is to prepare people with the kinds of technical, subject matter,

and analytical skills that will allow them to carry out very complex tasks like
teaching and in the course of doing that, think about issues of inequality and
diversity in intelligent ways and incorporate that into the logic. That is a much
bigger and more involved task than simply convincing people that diversity is good
and inequality is bad. I am concerned sometimes that students think that is all they
should be getting out of the program; and that is all they are getting out of it.

A second male teacher educator expressed a similar concern that the teacher preparation
program is mainly concerned with ﬁxing the attitudes of preservice teachers. He said, "Are

we just using them [examples of cultural diversity] to just ﬁx an attitude. Like, 'See people

 

are culturally different so you better be sensitive.’ It is a threat."

Minority Perspectives on Multicultural Education

A topic that dominated several interviews with minority teacher educators was the
level of diversity among the faculty within the teacher preparation program; speciﬁcally,
minority teacher educators are concerned that, for the most part, mainstream, Euro-
American, and middle-class teacher educators may not have the appropriate experiences
and training to sensitize their own students to issues of cultural diversity.

There is a concern among minority teacher educators that since many of their
colleagues have not been subjected to racism and discrimination, which many minorities
take for granted as a normal part of their existence, they may not be able to understand
ﬁrlly these issues beyond an intellectual level. A female teacher educator, who expressed
frustration over her colleague's ignorance on this question, explained, "I am not upset
anymore. I was. But now I realize a lot of people who teach here are from the Midwest,

50 they themselves can't draw upon their own experiences beyond the cognitive level."

30

There is one minority female teacher educator, who is a literacy specialist, that favors
using the "phonics" or skills approach over the "whole" language method in teaching
Aﬁican American children to read. She believes that these children who learn to read
through the skills approach are more successﬁil than with the whole language method. She
faults her Euro-American colleagues' lack of ﬁrst hand experience with diversity in their
endorsement of the latter perspective. She indicated that her colleagues may be making
incorrect judgments about situations and people since they may not understand the
intricacies of a situation, because they have not been exposed to diverse people and

environments. She explained,

Like I was in a discussion just yesterday and people wanted to do whole language.
And I said that whole language is ﬁne, but you also have to teach them skills, which is
part of whole language. Whole language is a method of how you teach reading, which
long ago used skill and drill. They are making the assumption that our kids come to
school with a certain level of education. But when some kids come to school they
don't have a clue or a set of alphabetic principles, which means they don't know how
to read the letters in front of them. So how can you sit there and read a book, when
you can't even enunciate syllables in a word?

She indicated that when she discusses her feelings with Euro-American teacher educators
they give her strange looks. She responded, ". . . which to me means don't hire diversity, if
you don't want to listen to it."

Among the minority teacher educators that I interviewed, it is not universally held that
Euro-American teacher educators are at a disadvantage in their practice as scholars and
educators; given the proper preparation and a commitment to helping disadvantaged
children, many believe that Euro-American teacher educators would be effective scholars
and educators of multicultural education. A female teacher educator indicated that even
though her Euro-American colleagues have not experienced inequity themselves, as she
personally has, they still are excellent teachers in helping prepare preservice teachers to

cope with cultural diversity. She said, "Experiencing discrimination isn't a requirement for

teaching about it."

31

In this chapter, I have discussed the methodology used for data gathering, and
surveyed various views about the importance of multicultural education in the teacher
preparation program. The recent implementation of the team system has been received
with mixed feelings by many of the teacher educators that I consulted, regarding how it
effects their practice. Even though a minority of the faculty are actually involved in
multicultural education, it is generally positively perceived by fellow colleagues in the
program. Among minority teacher educators, there appears to be mixed feelings as to
whether their Euro-American colleagues are adequately conditioned to prepare prospective

teachers to work in multicultural settings.

Chapter 4
THE PROSPECTIVE TEACHER

In this chapter, I will examine beliefs and attitudes held by teacher educators about
prospective teachers, and the current and near-term employment opportunities for
preservice teachers. In particular, I will look at teacher educators views and impressions
concerning their preservice teachers' ability to understand cultural issues, and how they
might evaluate their students' understanding of such knowledge.

Teacher educators who are involved in multicultural education believe they are
responsible for providing preservice teachers with the necessary tools to operate in
classrooms with culturally diverse students. Teacher educators, through their own
experiences as instructors, have come to an understanding of whom they will be instructing
and what limitations their students face in the learning process. More importantly, through
previous instructional experience, they have come to the realize that many of their students
lack an understanding of the culture concept and how it is applied to their everyday life, let
alone to their profession. The task of the teacher educator, before attempting to do
anything else, is to convince their students that they have culture and are, in fact, cultural

beings.

The Preservice Teacher: Who Is She?

Nationally, Ladson-Billings (1992b: 107) suggests that the typical preservice teacher is
generally a Euro-American female from a small town or suburban community with little

intercultural or interracial experience; she will be called upon to ﬁll the vacancies in the

32

33

urban school districts. Zeichner (1992:1-4) argues that the typical preservice teacher
desires to teach children who are culturally like herself and in a community not unlike her
own community of origins. However, she will be asked to teach students of color who will
have very different cultural backgrounds and life experiences than her own, in an urban
setting.

When examining the demographic data of prospective teachers in MSU's College of
Education, the trend is similar to the national picture. In Fall 1995, there were 1,023
undergraduate students enrolled who declared either elementary education, secondary
education, or K-12 education as their primary majors. When taking this student cohort and
breaking down the numbers by ethnicity, there were 916 whites or Euro-Americans, which
accounts for approximately 90% of the total student enrollment, and 107 minority (i.e.,
Aﬁican American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian-Paciﬁc American) students in the
teacher preparation program (MSU Oﬁce of the Registrar 1995). Clearly, Euro-
Americans are in the majority in the program. When looking at the gender breakdown of
the student cohort, there, again, is also a similarity to the national trend. There are 738
females enrolled compared to only 285 males (MSU Ofﬁce of the Registrar 1995); thus,
72% of the primary education majors are female, which is clearly a majority.

Many of the teacher educators that I interviewed strongly agree with Ladson-Billings
and Zeichner's characterization of prospective teachers, regarding their subjectivity and
professional standing. It appears they generally perceive the majority of prospective
teachers in the program as ﬁtting this characterization; they are overwhelmingly Euro-
American, female, middle class, suburban or rural in origin, and the ﬁrst in their family to
go to college. A female teacher educator, whose statement best captures this commonly
accepted belief, explained, "The portion is humongously white, female, rural or suburban,
like 90% of all preservice teachers in the country. Our students here are no different. Our
students might be even more white, female, rural or suburban because of where we are

located. "

34

It is noteworthy that the teacher educators I interviewed found other characteristics of
their students worthy of mention. For instance, a majority of teacher educators
characterized the age of the average preservice teacher as being very young. A male
teacher educator explained, "When I was teaching the introductory courses for elementary
teachers they were almost all females; they were almost all white; and, they were almost all
young. They were almost all 19 or 20 years old. Occasionally, you would have an older
women, somebody in their 30's. "

Another interesting offering was a contrast in the level of diversity found among
students enrolled in the different educational tracks. The students in the elementary
education program tend to more homogenous, with the majority being female, young, and
Euro-American, than students in the secondary education program. A male professor
characterized the type of student who studies elementary education; he explained, "Well,
certainly the undergraduates are predominantly young white women. That is who goes
into elementary ed." It appears that secondary education students in the teacher
preparation program tend to have more diversity in gender, but are still predominantly
female. One male teacher educator commented, "I have been teaching secondary students
and they tend to be gender wise, more diverse. I tend to get more men at the secondary
level."

The majority of teacher educators consulted agree with Ladson-Billings and Zeichner's
assessment of the current and near-term job market for educators trained in the US. and in

Michigan. A male teacher educator explained,

I mean that is one reason why I think we have a responsibility to prepare them to
teach in a variety of situations because Michigan is a major exporter of teachers since
there are just not jobs here for all the teachers we have. I mean Eastern [Michigan
University] produces: what 1,800 to 2,000 teachers every year. That is an incredible
number of teachers. So, what we got is this huge surplus of teachers, 50, you know,
where they are more likely to get a job is where the country is expanding and it is
expanding in those places where there is the most diversity. South Florida,

Southern California. I mean you just start looking around at the growth places and
the growth places are the ones that are most diverse. I mean it is interesting--

35

somebody just came back ﬁ'om Miami--and they were saying that they were in a
conference in Miami, and they were in the conference hotels and they were
constantly ﬁ'ustrated because they didn't speak Spanish.

Yet not all agree with this pessimistic assessment concerning ﬁiture employment
prospects for teachers. One male teacher educator, in particular, explained, "That is the
ideology of this particular college and I don't think that it is quite true. Students want to
return to the same kind of school that they were taught in and I think that is quite fairly
likely."

He believes that this ideological framework concerning the future of preservice

teachers serves as a method to promote the college's views on education. He explained,

I think they hope that our program here would be in fact preparing small town and
suburban white middle class students to rush out and make them teach in Flint and
Detroit. That is where the key problems are and this programs tries to orient toward
those problems, thinking that their is a real possibility in courses like mine that they
will have the exact opposite effect and say: "No way am I going to do that. That is a
terrible situation and I really feel sorry for those kids and I am not sure what I can do
for them. It is too big of a problem; it is too difﬁcult. I will do what I can . . . ."

He indicated that racist reasons are not the motivating factor that propels educators to

desire to return home at the beginning of their teaching careers. He explained,

It is easier to teach students who are like yourself. It is less stressful and it is less
problematic. It is nice to teach students who are more likely to be successﬁrl and it
will make you feel more competent as a teacher. It is also easier to be successﬁrl
when you are dealing with people you know.

It appears that three other teacher educators that I interviewed, while they agree that
their preservice teachers do not desire to teach in urban settings with students of color,
they also view this set of circumstances negatively. A female teacher educator reported,
"About half of our students come from the suburbs of Detroit, but they don't plan on
teaching in Detroit." Given the homogenization of the teaching force, another female
teacher educator observed that with fewer minorities entering teaching, the current batch
of preservice teachers will have no choice but to teach in these areas, since jobs in

suburban and rural areas may be hard to ﬁnd. She suggested that the number of minorities

36

entering teaching will be few, at least through the year 2000, while the numbers of minority
students in the educational system will be increasing.

Even though many preservice teachers may desire to return to home, the realities of
the job market could prevent them. A male teacher educator explains that this is not an
uncommon feeling among preservice teachers. He pointed out that it is the responsibility
of teacher educators to train their students to work in a variety of multicultural settings,
since many of them will have to relocate. He said, "Their chances of getting a job in their
home towns is very slim. They should consider getting a job in Miami, Texas, or Southern

California."
Culture Is What Other People Have

During my interviews with teacher educators, I heard professors repeatedly voice the
belief that the majority of their preservice teachers lack knowledge about themselves as
cultural beings, or that they have had little experience in interacting with individuals unlike
themselves. A female teacher educator explained that the current cohort of preservice
teachers grew up in settings where they have had little experience with a wide range of
children, nor have they had ﬁiends or classmates that are racially diverse. A second female

teacher educator explained,

So what I am saying is that most of the students that I have encountered in class here
come ﬁom rather sheltered environments in a certain sense. In their own communities
they pretty much have interacted with people who pretty much look, and in certain
kinds of ways, think like they do.

For another female teacher educator, she ﬁnds that the majority of her students have very

little cultural awareness or experience. She commented,

Because what we are doing in a sense is preparing teachers, who are going to work in
diverse schools in a very diverse society, they themselves don't come from particularly
diverse comers of our society; that is, they grew up in settings where they haven't had
a lot of experience with a wide range of children. For example, to the extent that they

37

are white, they have probably known extremely few minority children That is, they
didn't have friends who were racial minorities, they weren't in the classrooms. But
even the racial minority students didn't necessarily come from multicultural contexts,
so their experience with sort of a multiple range of people isn't very great.

Many of the teacher educators I interviewed have determined that their preservice
teachers have very little understanding of themselves as cultural beings, or of the culture
concept. One male teacher educator expressed the opinion that his Euro-American students
view themselves to be culturally neutral. He recounted a discussion with a female student

who refused to believe that she had culture,

I actually had one of my students say that in class to me one time. We were having a
discussion about an article that talked about culture and power. It was written by an
Aﬁican American women. And, I asked the student what do you think about the
argument that the woman is making. She said that she is really uncomfortable with
this. I said, "Why?" She said, "Well, because I really don't have a culture." Well,
then I said, "What do you mean you don't have a culture?" She said, "Well, you
know, I don't really have any culture." She was a very smart white women who grew
up in a farming family somewhere up north, around Gaylord. And, her perception was
that everyone had a culture, but she didn't have a culture.

To many preservice teachers, only ethnic minorities have culture, not Euro-Americans.
A female teacher educator indicated that she found it interesting that many of her students,
who are juniors and seniors, were just now learning that their values and world views are,
in fact, a product of their upbringing. She said, "I think the students sometimes feel that
they were just sort of beamed here. Bearned here in ﬁrll-force with all the values, etc." A
male teacher educator commented that many of his Euro-American students believe that
they do not have culture; minorities are the ones with culture. He said, "That is back to the
point I said about exoticizing others. It is other people that have culture, you know, and it
is exotic to have a culture, but I don't have a culture. White middle class people who come
from farms don't have a culture."

A problem that many teacher educators face that challenges their work is that some
well meaning preservice teachers, who genuinely want to go into teaching, are interested in

doing "missionary" work to help less fortunate children. As a group of students, they tend

38

to prove problematic for teacher educators, since they are less receptive to the message
they are trying to get across to them. A female teacher educator observed, "They really
want to go into teaching because they want to work, but they are naive about it." This
translates into a strong desire to help children less fortunate than themselves, but they tend
not to know how to do that, which she believes translates into a patronizing attitude
toward diverse students.

One minority teacher educator expressed a concern that her Euro-American preservice
teachers, due to their majority status, have never had the minority experience; thus, putting
them at a disadvantage to developing an empathy and understanding of cultural issues,
since they lack direct experience with many of these issues. She noted, "It is'really hard to
feel passionate about something if it doesn't come up in your daily life. " Even though some
minority teacher educators believe that Euro-American preservice teachers cannot bring in
personal, subjective experiences to relate to their students of color, they can bring in a
cognitive understanding to the issues of cultural diversity.

Educating Prospective Teachers

Overcoming ignorance about culture and cultural diversity is viewed as one of the
most important issues that has to be confronted in their work, since many believe these
future teachers will be working in diverse settings. A female teacher educator said, "Yet,
that is a central thing that they [preservice teachers] are going to be doing [interacting with
diverse children] as teachers working in multicultural contexts, and in a society in of itself
that is multicultur ."

A male teacher educator expressed the need for preservice teachers to develop a sense
of awareness, be it their cultural system, belief system, or value system, so that they can be
more eﬁ‘ective teachers. To illustrate the complexity of educating prospective teachers
about cultural identity, he talked about an experience he had when he ﬁrst came to
Michigan. He said,

39

They just don't see it. They don't recognize that the stuff they do is just as exotic in
some ways, you know. When I ﬁrst moved here from Alaska and we were living in
Cherry Lane, and we went out bike riding on a Saturday morning and we came
across at 9 AM in the morning all these vans parked outside, and people had their
grills out, and they were all dressed in green: they were tailgating. I was ga ga. I

had never seen anything like this before and I was sorry that I didn't have a video
camera; 1 would have loved to tape that and send it to my Eskimo friends because
they would have thought that it was the weirdest ritual they had ever seen in their life.
I mean it is; stop and think about it. Here are people--all dressed in green--

with green drinks, and everyone is getting drunk at 9 AM in the morning. They set
their grills up in a ﬁeld, and all of this is a prelude to a game! You know, then they
are going to go in. . . . Guys with lots of pads on and stuff are going to go run
together around this ball for a couple of hours. . . . But I mean that is an example of
something that people . . . my student's would not call that a cultural phenomena. Do
you see what I am saying? She wouldn't see that as a cultural phenomena because
she is so accustomed to it.

The same teacher educator stated, "How do you do that? How do you get people to see
that they are in water?"

A second male teacher educator observed that at times it can be very difﬁcult to
convince Euro-American prospective teachers that they do have a cultural identity. He

explained,

I think it would be wonderful if students had a real understanding of cultures in a
plural sense. In particular, it would be wonderful if they could see themselves as
having culture as opposed of thinking of culture as only existing in people who are
different than themselves. I had a very unsuccessﬁrl experience last year trying to get
a group of students to think about whiteness as an ethnicity. And it was impossible
for them to conceive that, since ethnicity is the other. They thought whiteness doesn't
exist; that it is generic; it is invisible. It is very diﬁcult to break through that mindset
that students have.

In this chapter, I examined how teacher educators perceive the attributes of the
preservice teachers that they are preparing to become educators. This survey included a
discussion of how the teacher educators understand the economic reality of job availability
for educators, which appears to be a central consideration in their educational philosophy.
In the following chapter, I will examine the intellectual and analytical tools used by teacher

educators to prepare prospective teachers to work in diverse settings.

Chapter 5
CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS: THE INTELLECTUAL CURRENCY

In this chapter, I will examine how teacher educators who are involved in multicultural
education conceive, deﬁne, and operationalize the intellectual concepts that form the
foundations of their practice. I will look at how the polemical nature of the intellectual
concepts affects their viewpoints on issues, the ﬂuid nature of the concepts, and the general
intellectual framework that teacher educators use to understand and apply their intellectual
currency.

Teacher educators are a product of their own socialization and education. Their life
stages have played an important role in shaping how these individuals view the intellectual
landscape in which they inhabit. Teacher educators work in an intellectual and professional
environment where it is absolutely necessary to develop a feasible intellectual perspective
that provides a framework in which research problems are examined and studied.
Consequently, there are numerous concepts and deﬁnitions that have been advanced by
teacher educators, which have been constructed to assist in the selection, identiﬁcation,
and examination of the issues that make up their intellectual enterprise.

In this early period of the intellectual enterprise, as many teacher educators believe the
current period represents, there are large numbers of deﬁnitions available for practitioners
to choose ﬂour, as the profession attempts to discard concepts that fail to be useful. It can
be argued that there are virtually as many viewpoints on conceiving and deﬁning the
terminology, and how they are used, as there are practitioners. These circumstances, in
part, are due to the nature of the academic enterprise, which is concerned with the

production of competent researchers and the construction and manufacturing of

40

41

knowledge.

Added to this milieu are the intellectual traditions of the various disciplinary
backgrounds of individual practitioners, which plays an important role in how scholars and
researchers frame questions. Consequently, scholars ﬁnd themselves in a very complex
environment in which they have to cope. With the recent implementation of the team
system, many teacher educators feel confused and ﬁustrated over what concepts and
meanings are most appropriate for their own work; many believe they are grappling with
several different concepts in their practice.

Despite the chaotic nature of the intellectual discourse, there are generalizations that
can be made about the work of teacher educators and the intellectual concepts that are
used. Teacher educators are interested in both the theoretical and the practical side of the
research questions, and there are several intellectual ﬁameworks that are in use, which are
used to position the issues. These ﬁ'ameworks, which will be discussed below, provide
them with a method for understanding the theoretical issues that underpin their practice;
that is, the application of their ideas in the context of the classroom, in the preparation of

preservice teachers.

Visions of Multicultural Education and Diversity

Many practitioners expressed the opinion that they are only at the beginning, in their
own work, in understanding the issues that make up the multicultural education enterprise.
Nationally, there is a belief among teacher educators that there is a long way to go before a
satisfactory understanding of many of the issues that make up multicultural education will
be achieved (Brown 1992); this belief also appears to be widely held among the teacher
educators that I interviewed, who see themselves as trying to discern the issues of
multicultural education. One teacher educator commented that the current period can be

characterized as a time where most attention is being focused on unpacking the various

42

issues of multicultural education, and applying theory to practice. He said, "I probably
have done as much research in this area as anyone in the country, and yet, it is not easy to
move, ﬁom what I have learned in my research, over to ﬁguring out what it is that you do
with students." He indicated that this question has become a central pursuit of his work.
While the majority of teacher educators I consulted appear optimistic about the future
of their profession, there is one female teacher educator who believes that there are no
models of multicultural education that are unreﬁrtable in one form or another. She has
made the decision to devote much of her research energies to addressing this important

issue. She explained,

This is, I think, if you would substitute multicultural ed. with any other kind of
educational reform issue, is a time of great challenge for everyone because we have no
models. I mean we have models to learn from but none of the models have been
ﬁ'uitful enough to bear to say that this is the model.

 

The Multiplicity of Terms: The Problematic Nature of Definitions

In this relatively early period of the multicultural education movement, three teacher
educators that I consulted have observed that across the intellectual landscape, there is an
overabundance of intellectual concepts available to practitioners, which has left them
somewhat confused. A female teacher educator, in expressing her frustration with the lack
of clarity among deﬁnitions, explained, "I don't quite know what multicultural education is
because different peOple deﬁne it in different ways. " A second female educator observed
that concepts such as diversity have multiple meanings that vary from discipline to
discipline. She explained, "Ah, this [deﬁning diversity] is so eclectic among people that
there are issues in science education that I never dreamed of."

The multiple deﬁnitions represents a challenge for at least two teacher educators in
their attempt to understand their colleagues' work, since often times they may be using
similar concepts with subtle differences in meaning. This may lead to problems in clearly
communicating ideas. One female teacher educator indicated that everyone has their own

"set of jargon" that they use in their work. A second female teacher educator described the

43

intellectual landscape as "a loaded terrain of language." In her own work, she is still
"groping" for the best terms that most clearly express her ideas to others in a politically
charged environment.

Several teacher educators observed that many of the concepts and deﬁnitions are
fraught with problems over meaning and are subject to being overused and misused. A
male teacher educator indicated that most of his colleagues use the concepts of diversity
and multiculturalism interchangeably, and do not understand the difference between the
two in most cases. He attributed this condition to the psychological orientation of

education. He said,

I think they pretty much see them interchangeably. I mean if you press the more
knowledgeable ones, they will recognize that culture is only one form of diversity.
Usually, the two terms are used interchangeably. And the interest is in issues of
diversity, I think more. I think there is actually a fear of culture and the inherent
sharedness and the potential that you are somehow stereotyping people when you talk
about people sharing a culture. Sharing is something of a dirty word in education. It
comes out of individual psychology . . . that has always been its tradition. I don't
think most people really have a sensitivity toward a notion that a group of people at
some level may somehow be similar.

A second male teacher educator observed that his colleagues have a tendency to
overemphasize the similarities and differences among people, and fail to devote enough
attention to particular subject matter and particular groups of children that preservice

teachers will teach. He stated,

On one level there is too much [multiculturalism] with a focus on sirrrilarities and
differences and not enough on the particular subjects and the particular groups of
kids that are effected. Keep in mind that those kids might be different from the
teacher, but that is not the ultimate issue.

Concepts and Critical Views .

There are teacher educators within the college that are critical of how they see
multicultural education being deﬁned. Even though deﬁnitions are fraught with ideational
ﬂuidity, there are still discernible characteristics that are observable in the concepts offered

by teacher educators in the college. A female minority teacher educator criticized her

44

colleagues for using a deﬁnition of multicultural education that deﬁned it as people of
color, excluding Euro-Americans. She indicated that the United States is made up of
pe0ple coming from a wide range of countries, including peoples of European descent;
therefore, Euro-Americans are culturally diverse, too. She explained, "You see I think
multicultural education is being deﬁned as people of color, but even white people can be
multicultural."

The problem of excluding Euro-Americans is not the only inadequacy observed by
minority teacher educators. There is a female minority teacher educator who is critical of
her colleagues' deﬁnitions, since she believes they only assume an Aﬁican American
population, due to the college's proximity to Detroit, Michigan, which excludes other

minority groups. She explained,

Diversity here assumes an African American population and I think that some of that
is valid, given the proximity of the geographical area and the population we are
working with, but I think it is very short sighted. There might be individuals in the
college at large beyond teacher education, that might have an interest in diversity,
such as in special education and diversity or religious diversity, but that doesn't get
heard because the most physical and apparent form of diversity is skin color, and the
most contrasting skin color is black or African American.

Another belief held by critical teacher educators is that the terms tend to obscure the
issues. A male teacher educator indicated that both the concepts of diversity and
multicultural education are what he calls "bumper sticker" labels; they highlight the issues,
but as they are currently used tend to be content-ﬂee. As a result, they shed little light on

the issues that he is most concerned about. He said,

I don't ﬁnd either term [diversity or multicultural education] to be all that
interesting or useful in my line of work. They seem to be code words or almost
content ﬁ'ee words. The most interesting issues seem to be masked by the terms
themselves. . . . I think both terms are ones that when operationalized tend to shut
oﬂ‘ thought and provide answers, rather than questions. In that sense they tend
to become more of a marker of trade and less of a window into something that
they are actually exploring. As a teacher, the key thing for me is to try to make
these issues problematic and available for analysis and not simply . . . as a
banner that you wave, which happens all too often.

45

Diversity is presented either as a problem that needs a solution, which doesn't
make any sense to me, or as a positive, which simply means celebration. Neither
approach provides much help to me. The interesting thing to me is the connection
between diversity and inequity. That is diversity is not an educational problem; it
becomes an educational problem only when different varieties of social differences
among people become the basis for unequal treatment for those people or unequal
outcomes for those people. It is the way in which diversity translates into
inequality through various social structures that makes the problem interesting.
But, that is a very problematic process and there is nothing on that which is simple.
In fact, I try to focus it.

The conﬁrsion and ambiguity over deﬁnitions of diversity and multicultural education
has led one female teacher educator to call for a clariﬁcation of the speciﬁc goals that
scholars are aiming to achieve in their practice. She suggested that the various disciplinary
approaches of practitioners are, in part, responsible for this lack of clarity. She indicated
that if goals can be agreed upon as worthwhile, they have to be both philosophical in

nature and grounded in issues of practice. She said,

Given that diversity can take on so many shapes, that is why I think it is such a loose
term that is not productive in the end product, being some kind of educative, ah,
reform effort, something in practice. Not that I don't think theory is important,
because that is where we start. Because diversity can mean one thing to

science educators, which is diﬁ‘erent to literacy educators, I don't see it in their work,
but they probably do; they probably don't see it in our work. . . . Ok, how are we
going to have a multicultural education? Let's come up with ﬁve goals of
multicultural education. Say two are philosophical and three are grounded in issues
you see in the classroom. Then, I think, you might get into lots of more arguments,
but you would probably get more clariﬁcation of what the science guy thinks about
what multiculturalism is.

The Construction of Multicultural Education and Diversity

Many of the teacher educators that I interviewed view the concepts of diversity and
multicultural education from multiple perspectives. Three teacher educators that I
consulted used concepts in their practice other than diversity or multicultural education. I
will identify and discuss a few examples.

A female teacher educator described the concepts of diversity and multicultural

46

education in her own work, which involves a dualistic perspective. The ﬁrst perspective is
that each concept has a geographical component. Diversity, she suggested, is both global
and local in nature, while multicultural education is based only in the local context. She
explained, "I think of diversity in both the global and local sense. We are part of a world
where we really need to know each other because we are becoming so interdependent."
The local component of diversity, she indicated, would be the cultural diversity found at
MSU. Regarding the concept of multicultural education, she said, "The way I refer to
multicultural education is from a local perspective."

The second approach, she described, is that diversity in its most basic form is
essentially theory, which represents the theoretical foundations that guide the work of
teacher educators. Multicultural education in her work becomes the application of theory
(diversity). Together, they become an educational intervention program designed to effect
change. While she acknowledged that multicultural education has a theoretical basis, its

application is by far its most predominant characteristic in her own work. She explained,

Well, I think, people could talk about diversity. Multicultural education requires
action, going beyond talk. People can intuitively agree that diversity is favorable,
and, ah, and the current issue, and so on. So I guess you can pontiﬁcate about
diversity, and theorize about it, and argue about it. Multicultural education, I see
that having that dimension but also some practice, some action, and there has to be
a program. There has to be some education in the multicultural education.

A male teacher educator uses the concept of diversity as a descriptive term. He
commented, "Diversity to me describes the existing situation that we have in the world. In
other words, we have diverse people; we have a diversity in ideas." For this teacher
educator, the concept provides a descriptive analysis of the social world we inhabit. He
also deﬁnes multicultural education as the following, "Multicultural education, on the other
hand, I would say it is an attempt to get students of various types to understand what
diversity is, and the impact that diversity has on their lives and has on the world in which

they live." He also hopes to impart upon his students that diversity should be valued and

47

not seen as a problem.

A second male teacher educator draws a comparison between diversity and
multicultural education in the following way: he simply views diversity as the recognition
of diversity among people; within an educational setting, it means discerning the
differences among students. For him, multicultural education requires prospective teachers
to understand that the culture concept and cultural difference, which is one type of
difference, are both central ideas. He believes multicultural education is the following type
of practice: "I want to provide people with a knowledge base on what the cultural
difference possibilities are and not simply that there are cultural differences. "

A female teacher educator indicated that she views the concept of diversity as simply a
term that describes difference and variability in humanity--it is an idea that includes more
than just cultural difference. To her, multicultural education involves the "explicit infusion
of curriculum or educational process with rather explicit attention to different cultures in
the curriculum, both teaching about cultures and having the materials and context."

One female teacher educator indicated that she found the concept of diversity to be a
more encompassing term than multiculturalism; she said, "I see diversity as a more
encompassing term than multiculturalism; diversity incorporates notions of gender and
disability." She prefers to use diversity over multiculturalism. Despite her preference, she
has found that multiculturalism can have an American focus, encapsulating cultural
diversity in the US, or an international orientation, which incorporates international
examples of diversity. She prefers multiculturalism ﬁom an international perspective over

the American version. She said,

I have debates with my colleagues about this because I see multiculturalism ﬁ'om an
international perspective. A colleague I teach with says there isn't an international
multiculturalism. So I see diversity and multiculturalism in a little different
perspective ﬁ'om that. I draw ﬁ'om my intercultural and international backgrounds
when I think about multiculturalism.

In this chapter, I have surveyed how the teacher educators that I interviewed deﬁne

48

the intellectual concepts that make up their practice. The most characteristic feature of the
local discourse of multicultural education is the multiple deﬁnitions available for the
notions of culture, multicultural education, and diversity, which has produced much
conﬁrsion among practitioners. In the following chapter, I will discuss the various
approaches to multicultural education and the concepts of culture used by the teacher

educators that I interviewed.

Chapter 6
APPROACHES TO MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND CULTURE

In the previous chapter, I discussed how the teacher educators that I consulted deﬁne
the concepts that are the central analytical tools in their work. In this chapter, I will
examine the intellectual approaches and the concepts of culture that are used by teacher
educators to frame the issues, which, are also used as a vehicle for educating preservice
teachers.

The individual approach is the vehicle that the individual teacher educator, who is
grappling with multiple theoretical and application issues, uses to position the problems
and questions of his or her practice; the concept of culture, or some other construct,
appears to be the underlying foundation of the individual approach, as I will attempt to
demonstrate. By documenting the individual approaches of the teacher educators who
were consulted, I will demonstrate how these teacher educators perceive and understand
the issues that make up their enterprise.

I will identify the commonalties among the individual approaches and categorize them
into larger approach categories based on shared intellectual, theoretical, and
methodological themes. 1 will discuss each of the documented approach categories, by
assessing how they are deﬁned, constructed, and put into practice. In examining the
categories, I will identify and discuss the following issues: 1) the underlying theoretical
assumptions of each category; 2) the goals of each approach; 3) the theoretical and
pedagogical framework employed to accomplish the stated goals; and 4) the underlying
concept of culture, or another analytical construct, that is used to understand and convey a

notion of diversity.

49

50

It appears that teacher educators in constructing their individual approach to
multicultural education draw upon the intellectual tools and concepts from their disciplines.
In addition, the graduate school experience plays an important role in grounding these
scholars into the theory and methodology of their respective disciplines. This socialization
process proves instrumental in laying the intellectual foundations of their analytical tool kit;
it will become the intellectual lens that they bring to bear on the issues that comprise
multicultural education. For example, a male professor, who was trained in sociology, uses
his disciplinary orientation to frame the problems and questions in his research; he deﬁnes
multicultural education as an intersection between class differences and educational
institutions. A second example is a male teacher educator, who is trained in anthropology.
Thus, he takes a decidedly anthropological perspective in his work, which emphasizes
cultural factors in the education of at—risk children.

Scholars are a product of their own personal and intellectual socialization; personal
subjective experiences of individual scholars play a signiﬁcant role in molding how they
will view the issues that are central to multicultural education. It appears that the
individual experiences of a teacher educator become an important tool that can be useﬁil in
their work; they provide opportunities for students to gain insight into ethnic relations.
Teacher educators often times will use these experiences as learning aids in the classroom,
which can be used to help their students understand issues of cultural diversity. For
example, the notion of cultural relativism became important for one male teacher educator.
He moved to Michigan after spending several years in Alaska, where he conducted
research for his doctoral dissertation. Upon his return, he observed that many customs,
such as tailgating, which is a commonly practiced ritual at American college football
games, bafﬂed him--he had no ﬁrst hand experience with tailgating. The dissonance, he
indicated, was due to being immersed in a cultural lifestyle and rhythm-diving in an Eskimo
village, in rural Alaska--that signiﬁcantly differed from his own cultural upbringing, which,

for him, made the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

51

A second example that spells out the importance of personal experience came much
earlier in the life of a female teacher educator; she grew up in the turbulent 19605 during
the civil rights movement, in Georgia. She was one of only six black students in an all-
white high school, which had just recently become desegregated; her struggle to gain
acceptance among her Euro-American peers proved instrumental in developing many of
her present-day views on multicultural education. For many teacher educators, it is these

types of personal experiences that prove pivotal in shaping their views toward their work.

Individual Approaches to Multicultural Education

A teacher educator's individual approach serves to embody their amassed theoretical
knowledge, with an accompanying pedagogy, of multicultural education; this represents a
set of beliefs and practices regarding how to educate preservice teachers about issues of
cultural diversity. As often is the case, within an approach category, an individual
approach will vary in content and form, but shared thematic and practical similarities
warrants an individual approach to be classiﬁed as part of a larger class of approaches.

I have identiﬁed six categories for practicing multicultural education among the
individual approaches surveyed: 1) the celebration of diversity approach, 2) the social
knowledge and power approach, 3) the service-learning approach, 4) the cultural
difference approach, 5) the ideology deconstruction and reconstruction approach, and 6)
the social construction and ecology approach. In my discussion below, I will survey the
individual approaches that best illustrate the properties of the categorical approaches that I
have identiﬁed as being used by the teacher educators that I interviewed.

The Celebration of Diversity Approach

This approach, which appears to be rapidly falling out of favor among the teacher
educators that I interviewed, is concerned with exposing preservice teachers to cultural

forms and artifacts that are associated with speciﬁc cultural and ethnic groups. Nationally,

52

the approach has recently come under criticism for its simplistic conception of cultural
diversity; the once dominant approach proposed to educate preservice teachers about
diversity merely by demonstrating a link between a cultural group and their associated
cultural artifacts or forms. For example, in order to educate preservice teachers about
Hispanic culture, expose them to various cultural objects, such as foods, clothing, or
festivals.

A concern many teacher educators both locally and nationally hold is this approach
may reinforce cultural stereotypes about certain minority and ethnic groups. After
preservice teachers enter the profession and begin evaluating their minority students on the
basis of stereotyped knowledge, many teacher educators believe this will only" do a

disservice to minority students. A male teacher educator explained,

It is a critical part of it that gets overlooked. I am a little worried about the view that
diversity is merely learning about other people. Because, I think, what that tends to
mean for white middle class students, it tends to exoticize other people. "Isn't it
interesting that in the typical Chicano family these kinds of relations exist and

people should pay deference to the man and da...da....da....da." To me that is one
kind of knowledge that people identify as knowledge of diversity. I think that kind
of knowledge of diversity, while it may have some use, is also dangerous because
what it really does is that it really encourages people to stereotype.

No teacher educators that I consulted claim to practice this form of multicultural
education. Yet, however, one female teacher educator was concerned that the majority of

her colleagues still advocate this approach, especially in their practice. She explained,

I think MSU [the teacher education program] has done quite a bit of thinking about
including it in theory. However, in practice, our teaching is pretty mainstream; it's
pretty much in school; it's pretty much let's celebrate diversity, with no pedagogy.
And nobody is doing it. I've tried and it has been pretty much an uphill battle
because of the various positions I take. I am not tenured, I am only an assistant
professor.

A male teacher educator held an opposing opinion on this matter; it was his belief that only

a few of his colleagues use the celebration of diversity approach. He explained,

Well, I think that there is more emphasis now on thinking about diversity in

53

relationship to knowledge and power issues than about the celebration of diversity.
I am not saying that this is universal, but I think that is reﬂective of the kinds of
activities that we have students do, and what we have students read.

The Social Knowledge and Power Approach

The social knowledge and power approach to multicultural education, which appears
to be the most commonly used approach among the teacher educators that I interviewed,
emphasizes the relationship between the internalization of a discourse by social agents,
associated with Euro-American, male, professional, and middle class attributes, and the
acquisition and maintenance of social and political power. This discourse becomes
exclusionary for those who lack access to it, such as cultural minorities and the poor.

It is through the possession of the exclusionary discourse of knowledge that people
from the cultural mainstream are accorded a privileged place in our society, which gives
them access to higher education, the best professions, and places to live. The advocates of
this approach believe that by raising awareness about the discourse among preservice
teachers, and how it impacts teaching, they hope to prepare teachers for the various
circumstances and situations that they will conﬁ'ont as educators. In describing how the
discourse of exclusion privileges some over others, a male teacher educator discussed a
school-based example to illustrate the importance of the social knowledge and power

approach. He said,

For a lot of working class kids, in particular, coming into the schools they often feel
they are coming to a place where you have to learn a new language, and you are being
evaluated on the basis of what you can do with that language. Where as other people
are being taught in the native tongue and evaluated by the same punitive and objective
criteria that results in working class kids having linguistic disadvantages and are
related to the larger kind of cultural disadvantages that they have. . . . Well, I mean
schools value analytical and theoretical skills over practical ones and cognitive skills
are valued over manual types of skills. They focus on competitive over cooperative
activities and all those are class related types of characteristics and the upper middle
class kind of kids that are raised in an environment where analytical and theoretical
knowledge is the way in which their parents make a living, so it seems like a natural
way of understanding the world, where theory is practical and where cognitive skills,
particularly, language and verbal skills are everything, and where manual kinds of
skills are what the working class kids are familiar with since they have a different

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54

orientation. The same is true of cooperation and competition. All of this works to
make a cultural salience in schools that tends to be more conducive to familiarity,
comfort, and swimming in familiar waters for middle class kids.

Each approach that I have documented represents a variation on the social knowledge
and power theme; there are two areas where the variation is most pronounced. First, each
teacher educator places an emphasis on a particular set of problems that appear to be
chosen based on prior existing research interests. Second, each teacher educator
depending on the problem focus will attempt to achieve a speciﬁc set of goals that may
differ from their colleague's pursuits. Three teacher educators that I interviewed use an
approach that falls within this category. I will discuss two examples of this approach.

One variation of the social knowledge and power approach, advocated by Professor
Clark, a male teacher educator, argues that American society is racist in nature; this
ideology manifests itself through stereotypes and generalizations about minority groups.
The discourse of racism allows the cultural mainstream in our society to maintain its power

and the status quo. He explained,

It doesn't mean we don't, but what it does means is that at least we aren't
suppose to admit that we . . . I mean it is like this study they did after the mayoral
elections in New York and the governor's election in Virginia, I guess, back in 1990
when Dinkins was elected in New York, and Wilder was elected. What they did
was they asked people who came out of the polling places who they voted for.
There was a big variance between what people said they did and what they really
did. And part of this is that people don't want to admit that they are racist. They
don't want to admit that they will make a decision based on race. You know, it
doesn't ﬁt with middle class norms--it is not cool to be a racist. Well, we grow up in
a racist society . . . I mean this is a very, you know, racist society. I mean it is sort
of embedded in things; particularly in things like school curricula.

So, you have teachers who, you know, know these generalizations. They
know the ones they are suppose to act on and the ones they are not suppose to act
on. But the fact of the matter remains, whether or not it serves the interests of
children to be treated on the basis of a generalization about a group that they
accidentally happen to belong too.

Professor Clark believes that the discourse of racism is embedded in the school
curriculum; and teachers, who are political actors in political institutions, will often use

these generalizations and stereotypes to simplify their task, which could have detrimental

55

effects. For example, one such generalization that is frequently used about Native Eskimo
children is that they are shy and are quiet and seldom participate in classroom activities.

Professor Clark explained,

The danger is that with prospective teachers, if their program consists primarily
of generalizations about groups of people, it sort of conforms in their mind that what
they can do is use those generalizations when it comes time to teach. Now, certainly
some of those have value. For example, I'm not saying it's bad that teachers know
that in Eskimo society when children don't look you in the eye it is a sign of respect,
as it is among other Asian cultures. All-right, white teachers are likely to misinterpret
that as disrespect given what the cultural norms are and mainstream WASP culture.
At the same time, however, I think there is a real danger that what teachers may end
up doing is, and I have seen this in interviews with teachers in culturally diverse
situations, is that they take a generalization and that becomes an explanation and an
excuse for certain types of student behavior.

So for example, teachers will say about Native Alaskan students is: "that Peter
doesn't talk much in class, but then Native students don't." The fact of the matter is
that there is a muchnas you might expectnvariability within Alaskan Natives, as there
is with any other group of people. You have people who are very gregarious and
talk a lot and you have people who don't talk very much.

Professor Clark believes his most important task as a teacher educator is to show his
preservice teachers the relationship between knowledge, power, and control in society, and
how they beneﬁt from this relationship, while others are excluded. Professor Clark

explained,

. . . it is difﬁcult at a place like Michigan State to get teachers to understand that
because they don't see that they themselves live in a particular kind of culture that has
a particular set of relationships, and a particular relations of power, and they don't see
themselves to be the beneﬁciaries of this relationship. I am talking about the typical
MSU student who tends to be white, middle class, and comes ﬁom a small town or
rural area. They don't see these kinds of power relations since they live in them; they
are like ﬁsh in water so they don‘t see them, and they don't see the relationship
between that kind of knowledge and power.

To show his students the link between power and knowledge, Professor Clark has
them read about different cultural groups, with the hope, that they will develop some kind
0f cultural understanding of the groups sampled. The development of cultural awareness,

Professor Clark described, is a conscious process that involves several steps, which he

56

attempts to repeat in his own instructional practice. First, he hopes his students will

develop an awareness of themselves as cultural beings. He said,

I think it is absolutely critical; that is where you got to start. You got to understand
what your own values and norms are. Where you stand; why you stand where you
stand; why is it that what you want to do on Sunday morning, get up late, have a cup
of coffee, and go off to church. Everybody else around is doing that; you don't even
notice that is what you are doing. That in itself is an incredibly important cultural
ritual.

Second, he strives to encourage an awareness of how the cultural "other" views their own
cultural system. Finally, he fosters the development of an awareness of their own value

system, and how it is embedded into everyday life. He said,

Well, I think some of the things that I have mentioned, getting them to see through
the eyes of people who are on the outside of a culture that they are very much a part
of, and how they see it. Getting them to be more aware of the values, and so forth,
that are embedded in their everyday activities and things that are around them. So,
you end up getting them to do the kinds of things, you know, the sort of cultural
artifacts exercise, where they have to collect these things and write about them and
think about what they mean and what they represent.

The notion of culture that guides the work of Professor Clark is conﬁgured around his
perspective toward multicultural education, which closely correlates knowledge and the

possession of power. He explained,

But there is another view that says that a teacher is to understand the ways in

which different groups have contributed to knowledge in different ﬁelds, and to
understand that there is a very close relationship between knowledge and power.
What we come to call knowledge has a lot to do with who is in control of things. To
me that seems like a fairly fundamental understanding, and it is difﬁcult at a place like
Michigan State to get teachers to understand that because they don't see that they
themselves live in a particular kind of culture that has a particular set of relationships,
and particular relations of power, and they don't see themselves to be the beneﬁciaries
of the relationship. I am talking about the typical MSU student who tends to be
white, middle class, and comes ﬁom a small town or rural area. They don't see these
kinds of power relations since they live in them; they are like ﬁsh in water so they
don't see them, and they don't see the relationship between that kind of knowledge and
power, so getting them to understand more of the discipline is, in part, getting them to
understand this relationship between power and knowledge.

Through his teaching, he attempts to encourage students to explore and develop an

57

awareness of culture, and the power and knowledge question that is embedded in

relationships. Professor Clark explained,

I guess my perspective is always a cultural perspective. There is nothing that I don't
do with students in which I don't try to highlight the cultural context in which any kind
of knowledge that we have is related to a cultural context, and that we need to
understand what the cultural context is.

A second example of the social knowledge and power approach is offered by
Professor Johnson, a female teacher educator, who is interested in the cultural dimensions
of mathematics. Professor Johnson argues that mathematics in American society has a
cultural dimension, which only a few can master, due to the exclusive nature of the current

discourse of mathematics. She explained,

Within mathematics teaching for me, the ﬁeld is sort of a big mess on this issue now.
I think that what matters a great deal are issues that deal with the curriculum; ‘
mathematics is usually thought to be a neutral subject as mathematics is mathematics,
is mathematics, which is clearly not the case. There have been some impulses that
peoples ﬁom different times and different places have had about quantifying their
world or about talking about space or about time or whose quantiﬁcation. So these
are issues that have to do with whose mathematics; that is curricular. And then there
are issues that have to do with what are really more pedagogical and discourse related.
Like around the pedagogy that I try to create in my class, I am searching, thinking,
and worrying a lot about how the discourse, on the one hand that I might see as
valuable, because, as an educator, I have the responsibility to think careﬁrlly about
what is valuable for my kids; how those discourses privilege some kids and don't
privilege others, or exclude others. . . . I am concerned with changing the way
mathematics gets taught in schools.

In our society, she indicated, that the discourse of mathematics privileges Euro-
American males, who are middle and upper middle class, while excluding women from all

backgrounds. She explained,

It is privileged, but it is a funny thing to call it privileged because again it only
privileges a few, small fraction of our population. It is very narrow and it is very
exclusive. On the other hand, it is also very clear, as to what you have to do to
succeed. Now it may be something that is so out of the mode that isn't part of your
cultural discourse, or your norm that you can't succeed. White middle class and
upper middle class males are the ones who generally succeed. In our society,

there is fairly strong evidence that women are systematically disengaged with

58

mathematics.

From the passage above, Professor Johnson deﬁnes culture as a form of cultural capital or
discourse that provides speciﬁc social actors with certain advantages, over others; in this
notion of culture, power goes hand in hand with the possession of knowledge.

In her work, Professor Johnson desires to transform the discourse of mathematics.
She envisions the creation of an alternative discourse of mathematics that will allow people

to be successﬁrl at math. She explained,

80 an alternative could be a discourse in which there would be a lot more student talk;
a lot more encouragement of multiple ways to frame problems, accept problems,
pursue them, solve them, and talk about them. Like it would be legitimate to use
pictures to represent the way you were thinking to bring objects; to act something out;
to use language to use symbols. Symbols wouldn't be privileged over other things,
but symbols wouldn't be bad either. So you would open up the discourse to a wide
range of modes for representing thinking. You would also open it up to a wide range
of interpretations. Math is extremely interpretative, so you would open it up in order
to make it more acceptable and encourage it. That sounds great, so if you have
students of different cultural backgrounds, who in their cultures have acquired or
developed different modes of interacting, different norms for interaction, different
modes for engaging with adults, with peers, make use of that knowledge. It sounds
like what you might be trying to create a classroom in which a wider range of things
are legitimate; therefore, more of those kids can have access and can engage and

can ﬁnd things interesting.

In order for Professor Johnson to demonstrate to her students how the discourse
operates in mathematics, she has to reorient them to math since many of them, especially

the women, have had negative experiences with it. She explained,

One has to do with them becoming more self-conscious. . . . It is what I was
saying . . . more self-conscious of who they are, and a concrete example of that has to
do with gender. Probably ninety ﬁve percent of the students in my class are women
and this is a class about mathematics. In our society, there is fairly strong evidence
that women are systematically disengaged with mathematics. I am trying to ﬁgure out
what verb I want to use here. You would easily say that the system excludes women.
It just depends on how you want to put it. By the time you get to college, the
students that I have mostly stopped taking math some time in high school, and a large
proportion of them think that they aren't good at math. They see this as an individual
matter; they think that they--one-by-one--without having talked to anybody else they
are not good at math. Patricia doesn't think that she is any good at math. Kyle is not
good at math. They think they are not good at math. They don't see it as having

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anything that has to do with structural issues. . . . So one thing that I want them do
is to come to understand that it is not like happenstance that they happen to be in
class with a lot of other people who don't think they are good at math. It is not that
they aren't good at math, there is something about how schools work, and the
experiences that they have had, that have left them feeling that way. They are not
uniquely bad at math, and I want them to consider the way that our school and society
work to construct their identity; that their identity is constructed out of the social
situations that they have been through, overtime, and that is a really new idea for
them. They really take this on as a really individual weakness. It is sort of an
individual psychological view of themselves. A concrete example that relates to my
course is that I want them to come to understand that: A) one thing that I want them
to understand is that they are competent and the reason that they don't think that they
are good at something isn't unique to them.

After having convinced her students that they are not individually bad at mathematics,’
but rather that their negative experiences are a product of cultural forces, Professor

Johnson describes how a classroom would be oriented under the new discourse. She said,

But one thing that would be happening is that you would be in a class where you
would be doing things that would seem to you to be very different than what you are
used to math being, and that would be troubling and exciting. Probably some of that
would be very disconcerting because it is not what you are use to. Some of it might
be interesting and exciting and you might ﬁnd that you like some of that, and you
might be surprised by that, maybe. You might ﬁnd that as you do things that you
don't think are mathematics, I would say that is really clever, what you just did.
Because it would be and you would be very surprised because that is not mathematics,
just what I did. Because I did such and such. I did, and I would say, "But, why aren't
you saying that is mathematics?" As you would listen to what other people in the
classroom did and what you did, I would be trying to help you stretch to see that
what you are, in fact, doing is mathematics, because it would be and I would

already know that it would be. Another thing . . . and so that is about you. So one
thing is that you might be engaged in things that where mathematical. . . . I would
want you to understand the larger social, cultural, and historical parts of this. To me,
it is not just a matter of having you feel . . . it is partly having you feel more
competent; that is not irrelevant to me, it is that it just doesn't stop at that, and I think
a lot of math educators who are concerned with issues would be mostly trying to get
you to understand that you are more competent than you are and that math is viable.
But, it would be about you as an individual, it wouldn't be systematic or cultural.

After having developed an awareness of the cultural dimensions of mathematics, it is
Professor Johnson's desire that her students do not reproduce the prevailing discourse of

mathematics, once they enter the teaching profession.

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The Service-Learning Approach

This approach to multicultural education is used by one female teacher educator,
Professor Tangers, that I interviewed; the approach is centered on the method of
instruction. The ﬁrst instructional tool is an in-class component that involves lectures,
audio-visual presentations, and class assignments and discussions, and outside clinical
experiences. The clinical experience, which is the second instructional tool, differentiates
the service-learning approach from other types, since it strongly stresses the out-of- F“
classroom experience as a central component in the educational process.

For preservice teachers, the service-learning approach requires attending a classroom-

based program that provides them with ﬁrst-hand experience in working with minority

 

students in a context that equalizes the power arrangement between the teacher and
students. The preservice teacher is given support and feedback to promote a positive
learning experience. Professor Tangers described this approach as a form of social action
that attempts to prepare the prospective teacher to be successful in a diverse classroom.

Professor Tangers, who is a specialist in literacy education, prefers to use the notion
of multiple literacies over the concept of culture, which she believes is less useﬁrl in her
work. Multiple literacies is a concept that is used to demonstrate the type of information
that social actors need to adapt to their social environment; she indicated that multiple
literacies can be subdivided to include ideas such as personal literacy (the knowledge base
of the individual subject), school literacy (the knowledge you need to be successful in

school), and community literacy (the knowledge of a shared community). She explained,

I would interchange at this point the terminology we used here: literacies/multiple
literacies. You have to realize to be literate occurs during all the stages of your life.
So we just come up with a heuristic school literacy, being the things you most

closely associate with the conventional school environment. Personal literacy is

how you as an individual understand things. You have knowledge based on your

own life experiences. The community literacy being a person in a larger community.
The community literacy might be the "Latina perspective" or Latino issues. As a
Latina, as an individual in that community, you may or may not agree totally with
those issues. Sometimes associations are aligned with personal issues, sometimes they

61

aren't. So that is how I think of culture; it is not ethnicity bound; it is not religious
bound; it is not gender bound, which puts it into that same predicament of being
either marginalized as: this is culture, oh, I know that; American culture. You know,
this marginalization of surface features because that is the only way you can
categorize people is by surfaces features to the continuum on the other side where it is
so complex that if you have to safe guard against it being too diluted, where
everything and anything is culture.

According to Professor Tangers, she started an after-school program in a local school,
where preservice teachers work with minority students, who are in grade school; this
program was established to accomplish two goals. First, to reconﬁgure what she refers to
as the inequitable power relations in the classroom between students and the teacher (the
preservice teacher in this case). In her after-school program, the children are more familiar
with the workings of the program due to past involvement. In addition, the preservice
teachers and school children eat lunch together, and address one another on a ﬁrst name
basis. This, she suggested, serves as a leveling mechanism between students and the

teacher. She explained,

So the [teacher education] students that I had experienced a graded experience
through my after school program, which was my attempt to provide both
preservice teachers and kids ﬁom third to ﬁfth grade-but often times they bring
their older and younger siblings with them-~with an alternative learning environment
after school, twice a week. My idea was two-fold. My ﬁrst thought was even these
thirty preservice teachers, who have managed to make it into this cohort, are in
schools right off the bat, so they gain exposure to kids. In this program there are
no mentor teachers, just them [preservice teachers], just kids. Ah, volunteer kids.
The ratio is much lower, maybe three kids to each TE [teacher education] student.
We have snacks and call each other by our ﬁrst name; we try to make it so
unschool-like that they could say, "Wow, they look the same as those kids but they
act really differen ." Toward what end? So that they can deal with their cultural
relativism, both their ethnicity and background, and their upbringing, and sort of
bundling that into personal histories by themselves, and their academic histories.

So when the students go over there, often times, the ﬁrst thing that they are
struck by is just how dynamic the place is, and they are also struck by the fact that
kids know much more about what is going on than they do. So the hierarchical
teacher/ student authority, or presumed authority, that the teacher knows all is
changed, and in this anything goes. In fact, it sort of ﬂattens the hierarchy because
kids know the program, but obviously to these students, they come with some
strategies, and prior learned experiences, and background that can aid kids. It is not
like they are pretending they know nothing, or that they are ﬁfth graders.

62

We tape-recorded these sessions to see whether it is actually causing them to
think about classrooms differently, or their role as a teacher; it has been very helpful.
Themes that keep coming up is the role ambiguity. Prospective teachers will say,

"It is real clear who I am in the classroom, and what I am suppose to do, but it is not
clear in the after school program." I think that is an advance. I don't think you

want to come to clear resolution about who you are because I think it is ﬂuid,
depending on the activity you are involved in and the composition of who you are
involved with. I think that is multicultural education. My little bit in my course
work is multicultural education for social change.

I think I have been somewhat successﬁrl in that with documentation of some
pondering of these topics by young people; they are barely 21 or 22, so they
haven't been in a classroom and they haven't really caught on to the politics of
school, although, they do touch upon that in a naive way. They kind of say, "Well,
my classroom teacher would never let me do this." That really hints upon the
imbalance of power in the classroom.

Second, the experience provides preservice teachers with what she calls "a deliberate
opportunity to take them off of the beaten path on to one that is uncharted." The impetus,
she explained, for setting up this program is that many Euro-American preservice teachers
are in a problematic situation, when it comes to understanding cultural diversity, given
their culturally dominant position in the American society. She said, "It is not that they
can't be sensitive or interested in issues of cultural diversity; rather, if they have been
happily going along in life, they can't use their lived experiences as part of the curriculum."

It is precisely the lack of this type of experience among her students that prompted
Professor Tangers to set up a program, which will supply these encounters to students.

She explained,

The after-school program places the preservice teacher into a multicultural classroom,
which is characterized by cultural and ethnic diversity. The project is beneﬁcial for
them since they are exposed to children who are different. The pedagogy is applied in
this alternative context so that all students seem the same, and have the same chances.
The alternative setting is designed to move away ﬁ'om the "strict" relations of power
found in the classrooms. Three students are assigned to each preservice teacher.
They have snacks together and address one another on a ﬁrst name basis.

Professor Tangers argues that this approach to doing multicultural education, a
clinical experience combined with the classroom component, provides a powerﬁil teaching

tool in educating preservice teachers about issues of cultural diversity, since it forces them

63

to examine their views in a relatively safe environment, while they are receiving support
from the teacher education program.

The Ideology Deconstruction and Reconstruction Approach

The basic assumption of this approach is that America is an inherently racist society,
and many preservice teachers have been socialized by the ideology during their sheltered
upbringing, and it is unlikely they are aware of how their perceptions are colored.
Consequently, the lone proponent of this approach, Professor Rogers, a female teacher
educator, argues that these preservice teachers, who will shortly be entering the teaching
profession, will continue to reproduce the dominant ideology of racism in the classroom,
by having diminished expectations of achievement for students of color.

Professor Rogers argues that racism in this society is a reality; it will continue to exist
until we collectively confront it. She indicated that her goals are the following, "My
interests are, in particular, ways in which we can provide better, expanded, and more
substantive opportunities for poor children, particularly children of color within this
country." Before a teacher can be effective in the classroom, she argues, he or she must
have a strong understanding of the social, historical, political, and philosophical
foundations of education, and the role that institutions have on the growth and
development of children.

Professor Rogers indicated that she is not trying to make her students understand the
core of what it means to be Aﬁican American or Hispanic; such an endeavor, she feared,
would be ﬁ'aught with problems, since further stereotypes may be created. In addition, she
has no desire to teach her students the "correct" behavior they should follow in their

teaching practice; rather, Professor Rogers explained-that she is interested in the following,

So if I am trying to get my students to be really thoughtﬁrl, reﬂective thinkers, then I
want them to be able to interact with children that they will encounter in their
classrooms, who it is increasingly likely that those children will not have experienced
childhood in the way that they did; they might not look like they do, so I want my
students to be able to make judgments based upon what those children bring to the

64

learning environment, and not based upon judgments that my students have of what
they think these children bring to the learning environment.

Since teaching requires making multiple judgments over time, she sees her mission as
helping her students make sound judgments, and understand the basis of those decisions.
Professor Rogers advocates that before students can deconstruct the racist ideology they
have internalized, and before they can be effective decision makers in the classroom, it is
necessary for them to be aware that their own world-views are a product of socialization;

they need to understand that their beliefs are not universal. She explained,

Despite the fact that most of the students in teacher education that I have taught
are juniors and seniors, they seem rather surprised to ﬁnd out that their own values
and ways of seeing the world were developed and they were developed and
inﬂuenced by the virtue of the community in which they were raised.

Professor Rogers apparently has no interest in exploring or using a concept of culture in
her work; while she recognizes the importance of culture, she believes that this concept has

limitations that make it less relevant to her work of deconstructing racism. She said,

Let me begin by saying that multicultural education is a narrow but an important part
of what it would take to improve opportunities for all children. And the reason that I
think it is a narrow part is because I think the focus I mean I look at it as being a focus
being centered around cultural deﬁnitions and trying to ﬁnd ways in which children by
their membership in a particular culture get respect and get respect across

cultures. 1 think that even if we did that it would not solve all the problems or
dilemmas that a number of children face in this country. I think what the term omits
are the structural and the political inﬂuences on institutions and communities that the
cultural parts don't even begin to interface. So, I don't know . . . my background is
not in anthropology, and my background is not in the study or the examination of
culture. The lenses that I would bring more strongly center around ways in which

the "isms" inﬂuence what happens within schools and institutions. For example, I
guess I see racism as being something different from culture and whereas we might
help our students--preservice teachers--1eam to quote and unquote respect different
cultures. I think that until they and we all kind of confront the racism that exists, it
will continue to exist until someone confronts it, I think. So, for me there is a
distinction between culture, racism, or sexism.

Professor Rogers is interested in having her students explore the origins of certain

beliefs and dispositions that they hold. She explained,

That through the exploration they no longer take certain kinds of beliefs for

65

granted. That kind of experience can be a bridge by which they can begin to explore
whatever beliefs and dispositions that someone else holds, rather than just kind of
saying: I see you, and by virtue of certain cues, I then would think that you would do

certain things.
Professor Rogers hopes to accomplish this goal within the context of the classroom, by
using traditional pedagogical techniques, such as lectures, readings, and classroom
discussions.

The Cultural Difference Approach

The lone practitioner of this approach, Professor Thompson, a male teacher educator
who received his graduate training in anthropology, sets off his approach to multicultural
education from his fellow teacher educators in several ways. First, since he is trained in
anthropology, he believes this has provided him with a more solid understanding of the
concept of culture than many of his colleagues, who generally lack any formal training in

the anthropology. He explained,

I myself see that there is an incredible strong difference between diversity and
multicultural education. I am constantly ﬁghting battles to get cultural differences to
be seen as a central issue. I think most people have a very superﬁcial knowledge of
what diversity or multicultural education means. I think that I have inﬁnitely more
sophisticated knowledge about what other cultures are about than other people in
education, with the exception of a couple of people, because I am trained as an
anthropologist. I studied at the feet of people like Ward Goodenough, on what
culture meant. I think there is a real superﬁciality. I think they take the term culture
and throw it around without any sense of what the history of the struggle for
deﬁnitions of culture have been about. It is sort of used as this meaningless global
term. For somebody who has written about the concept of culture, I have studied
with some of the leading thinkers about it, I ﬁnd this superﬁcial, to say the least.

He views the concept of culture as a central analytical tool in multicultural education.
Second, he contrasts his own practice in multicultural education ﬁ'om his colleagues. He
believes they are often motivated by the desire to ﬁx attitudes and preach tolerance to
preservice teachers. He refers to this as the "You better be sensitive" approach. Professor
Thompson argues that he is interested in training his students to be competent teachers

Who can successfully deal with students from different cultural backgrounds.

 

66

Professor Thompson argues that before a teacher can work successﬁrlly with diverse
kidsin the classroom, she or he has to develop an awareness of herself or himself as a
cultural being. While staying away from ﬁxing attitudes, Professor Thompson indicates
that he assumes his students are going to be sensitive about these issues. He shows
students real and in-depth examples, from an analytical perspective, that will attempt to

demonstrate the kinds of ways that people can be culturally different. He explained,

I assume you are going to be sensitive; let's look in real depth at these particular
examples. Let's understand the kinds of way that people can be culturally different,
so that you can start generating, if you go into a situation if you don't have this
speciﬁc example, you can start thinking about what there might be.

It is his belief that this approach will provide prospective teachers with the necessary

 

analytical tools to go into new situations where they do not have speciﬁc examples to
guide them; this process will prepare them to start thinking about these issues. He
explained, "I want to provide people with a knowledge base on what the cultural difference
possibilities are, and not simply that there are cultural diﬂ‘erences. In order to do that you
have to have a pretty damn good sense of yourself and that is where having a real
anthropological background comes in."

To provide his students with these analytical tools, he indicated that he uses many
varied examples of cultural difference that his students can explore at a fairly intense level.
According to Professor Thompson, one of the more powerful tools for educating about

cultural differences is the use of folklore examples. He explained,

For undergraduates, I do try to use educational examples. Some of the most
powerﬁrl stuff I use comes from my folklore. Because developing a sense of the
cultural differences in the construction of literary texts is a very powerful thing. One
of the most powerful pieces of teaching that I do is to take children's book versions
that have been rewritten for white audience and show them the differences. "Here is
a picture book. Here is how the story was told originally. Look at the difference."

Professor Thompson indicated that many children's story books have their origins in

folklore tales that were passed on through oral tradition. By taking the original tale and

67

contrasting it with the Euro-American version, a powerful educational tool is created for
showing cultural differences, since you can compare the American version with the original
version. On this basis, be indicated, you can compare your own cultural values with the

value system of the group where the story originated. He said,

One of my favorites examples is a Cherokee story that James Loony collected back in
the 19th century. A few years ago, a children book's author created a picture book
of this story about in which-J forget the title--a daughter of the sun gets killed. It is
kind of a horrible death and basically the sun is shining too bright and killing off
people. The sun needs to be killed, and by mistake the sun's daughter ends up being
killed by snakes. The sun then disappears, you know, he's weeping . . . he doesn't
come out anymore, and in order to get him to come out, they go and try to rescue the
daughter. So they go to the underworld to bring her back. This is where they do the
Pandora's box thing, and open the lid and she escapes and become the red bird or the
Cardinal. But because they failed to bring her back successﬁrlly, and opened the

box, death has come to creation. That is sort of your basic story line. Well, in the
original native version there are a lot of differences, but one of the really neat ones is
everything in the Loony version involves the community as a whole, or a large number
of people. Like seven people go to the underworld; you know, a tribal council makes
decisions. It is all groups, you know. In the white people's version everything gets
turned into a single hero doing it. That is a nice example of cultural difference that
can be fairly dramatic for teaching little kids and adults.

This technique, he indicated, is the foundations for how he educates preservice teachers
about cultural diversity.

The Social Construction of Reality and Ecological Approach

This scholarly approach is advanced by a female teacher educator, Professor
Partridge, who uses a dualistic notion of multicultural education to frame the problems and
questions she examines in her research, which represents an intersection between the social
construction of reality and a notion of ecology. First, she uses the social construction
model to understand how people, as social actors, are constructed. Professor Partridge
explained, "80 the meaning we attribute to multiculturalism, to students of diverse
backgrounds, that meaning is constructed through social interaction." She indicated that
She uses this approach to illustrate how people hold different beliefs on similar issues,

Which provides a basis for comparing cultural values. Second, the ecological approach,

 

68

she indicated, is used to understand the environmental context in which people (students)

are socialized. She explained,

An ecological model basically says that how everything about a student can be
understood in terms of the interaction between the environment and the student. So
that when you look at a student-J am teaching teachers, prospective teachers. Then,
I ask them not to look at the characteristics of the students alone, but within an
environmental context--that is the ecological approach. Social construction is similar
to that but it talks about meaning as being socially constructed. So the meaning we
attribute to multiculturalism, to students of diverse background, that meaning is F
constructed through social interactions between people. In the classes that I teach,
I am always encouraging a multicultural perspective. We look at a student and then
one person says, "Well, I see this," and then another persons says, "I see this," and
then we talk about that. And, how they could come to have these very different
perspectives on about the same phenomena and the same student. That is basically
a social constructionist perspective.

{.5 _I.5.r.vilh —- II .-

 

While the social construction and ecological approach attempts to provide a picture of
the problems and issues that are to be examined, Professor Partridge indicated that she
overlays a process model template to analyze and understand intercultural relationships.

She explained,

This is a model for analyzing intercultural interaction. It is a way of understanding
intercultural relationships. So it is more of a process model. As a person, how do you
process cultural differences? It is divided into three areas: emotional areas,
knowledge areas, behavioral areas. So it is cognitive and affective in behavior.

It appears that intersections between the social constructionist and ecological approach
becomes the notion of culture that Professor Partridge uses in her work; that is, social
actors are a product of their social reality and environment. It is this ﬁamework that she
uses to convey to her students a notion of cultural diversity.

Professor Partridge believes that it is important for her students to take
multiculturalism as a serious issue. In effect, she wants her students to value
multiculturalism and be able to view issues from a multicultural perspective, and act

accordingly. She explained,

We try to approach diverse learners and multicultural education not only at a cognitive
level, but at an affective level. You can give them all sorts of information on

69

deﬁnitions of multicultural education, deﬁnitions on diversity; they can pass a test with
ﬂying colors; you know the deﬁnition of diversity is a, b, c, (1. But, if their behavior,
emotions, and feelings haven't changed, then there has been no change.

To achieve her goals, Professor Partridge uses a two-fold pedagogy. The ﬁrst
incorporates a contact component, which exposes her students to diverse people, while the
second is the more traditional academic approach that is based in the classroom, which
includes role playing, and intellectual assignments that challenge beliefs and
understandings.

A basic assumption that guides her work, which she draws from Gordon Alport's
book Prejudice, is that people's attitudes are not going to change unless they come into

direct contact with people who are different from themselves. She explained the

 

importance of Alport's ideas to her own work, "Alport's idea is that you don't change
unless you have a number of personal experiences. You can't just have one because you
will stereotype people on the basis of that one experience." Therefore, Professor Partridge
arranges for speakers from various minority communities to come and give talks about

how they view issues. She explained how the speakers affect her students,

We invited a panel of gay/lesbian folks to talk to them about their experiences and
perspectives. In addition, we had a panel of community activists from the Hispanic,
Black, and other minority communities. So contact and experience ﬁ'om this basis--
hands-on and face-to-face experiences-~forms the basis of how I try to make people
have a little more acceptance.

The traditional academic component of Professor Partridge's program of study
involves students examining case studies, role playing (putting themselves into situations as
if they were a member of a minority group), and written critical analysis of children's
books; in this latter activity, students attempt to address the question of how realistically
does a particular children's book treat the issue of diversity.

In this chapter, I have surveyed and identiﬁed the individual approaches to
multicultural education, and the notions of culture, that the teacher educators I interviewed

use in their practice, and I have highlighted the theoretical assumptions, goals, and

7O

pedagogies of these approaches. After having surveyed the individual approaches at the
local level, it will then be possible to juxtapose the local level with the national discourse,

and determine how each level of the discourse differs in terms of theory and practice.

Chapter 7
THE LOCAL DISCOURSE

In this chapter, I will address the questions posed at the outset of this thesis. First,
how do the teacher educators that I interviewed deﬁne the concept of culture in their
work, and do they draw upon a Boas-Benedict notion of the culture concept? In addition,
I will test Wax's hypothesis and determine whether his premise is valid--that all teacher
educators use a Boas-Benedict notion of the culture concept. Second, how do the
approaches to multicultural education of these teacher educators compare to the

approaches documented nationally in Sleeter and Grant's typology?

Multicultural Education and the Concept of Culture

In this section, I will document the concepts of culture or alternative analytical
frameworks that are being used by the teacher educators that were interviewed for this
study. Before I turn my discussion to the concept of culture, I will brieﬂy treat the use of
culture in anthropology to demonstrate how the concept has been addressed recently
within the discipline, which will provide a reference point to compare the work of the
teacher educators that I interviewed.

The Concept of Culture in Anthropology

Given the long and complex history of anthropology, it is beyond the scope of this

survey to trace the development of the culture concept; therefore, my survey of culture will

only attempt to highlight important intellectual issues relevant to the focus of this study.

Peacock (1986:10) observes that culture is the primary analytical tool used by

71

 

I n

72

anthropologists in studying humankind, and it is the attempt to connect the material world
we inhabit with cultural meaning, which ultimately distinguishes the discipline from other
social sciences.

Despite the enormous value of the culture concept, it is a term that has proven elusive
to deﬁne, since the term has multiple meanings. The classic deﬁnition oﬂ‘ered by EB.
Tylor (1871) deﬁnes culture as the following: "Culture . . . taken in its wide ethnographic
sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." E.B.
Tylor‘s deﬁnition has set the stage for a controversy in anthropology over the conﬁguration
of the concept that has lasted over one hundred years.

Many anthropologists throughout this century have offered deﬁnitions of culture. In
fact, around the middle of the century Krober and Kluckhohn (1952) published a volume
that represented an inventory of deﬁnitions of culture offered until that time. Yet since
that period, numerous deﬁnitions of the culture concept have been offered by
anthropologists and other scholars; there is little agreement over these deﬁnitions. The
debate over the conﬁguration of culture used by anthropologists generally is dependent
upon the school-of-thought or the branch of the subdiscipline the practitioner belongs too;
thus, there is a wide-range of deﬁnitions that exist across the discipline.

It appears to be impossible to formulate a deﬁnition of culture that satisﬁes all
requirements; it is beyond the aim of this study to attempt such an endeavor. However, I
believe, it is more useful to survey some of the generally agreed upon principles of the
culture concept within the anthropological community, and to highlight characteristics of
the debate within sociocultural anthropology over the conﬁguration of the culture concept,
since, I believe, that sociocultural anthropology is able to inform and enhance the work of
teacher educators given the current thinking on culture within this subdiscipline. Such a
comparison will hopefully lay the foundation of a dialogue between anthropologists and

teacher educators regarding the conﬁguration of the culture concept, which is one intent of

73

this study.

Peacock (1986:7), in discussing the principles of culture within anthropology, deﬁnes
it as the following: "Culture, then, is a name anthropologists give to the taken-for-granted
but powerfully inﬂuential understandings and codes that are learned and shared by
members of a group."

Below, I will brieﬂy survey how I understand that the concept of culture has been
deﬁned within sociocultural anthropology in the United States during the past 25 years, to
illustrate the diachronic change in how this analytical concept has been conﬁgured. While
the notion of culture to be discussed is not the only approach that is currently in use, it
does represent an important movement within the discipline. Since the late 19605 in
sociocultural anthropology, the dominant conﬁguration of the culture concept has moved
away ﬁom the materialist or political economy conception to deﬁnitions that approximate
culture as a shared system of meaning, otherwise known as symbolic anthropology (see
Ortner 1984, Sahlins 1976, and Geertz 1973). Most recently, the interpretative
anthropology perspective has become an important approach to cultural analysis (see F ox
1991, Clifford 1988, Marcus and Fischer 1986) in sociocultural anthropology, which is
similar to symbolic anthropology, but differs in that there is an effort to include historical
context and political economy into the analysis, topics often neglected in earlier
anthropological works.

Marcus and Fischer (1986:16) observed that during this current period in
anthropology, through the inﬂuences of interpretative anthropology, the discipline has
moved away from attempting "to construct a general theory of culture to a reﬂection on
ethnographic ﬁeldwork and writing." In turn, the conﬁguration of the concept of culture
has altered to reﬂect this trend. According to Rosaldo (1993:92-3), anthropology is
currently in the process of adopting a case history approach called processual analysis,
which was pioneered by Geertz and Turner. This approach ". . . shows how ideas, events,

and institutions interact and change through time." The perceived beneﬁt of processual

74

analysis, Rosaldo (1993:93) observed, is "It emphasizes that culture requires study ﬁ’om a
number of perspectives, and that these perspectives cannot necessarily be added together
into a uniﬁed summation." This study is an attempt at studying the work of teacher
educators who are involved in multicultural education from the standpoint of how they
understand and practice multicultural education. While I am the researcher, the author of
this study, I have attempted to let the participants I consulted speak their voice about
multicultural education and culture in their professional practice.

The Use of Culture by Teacher Educators

In this section, I will determine whether the teacher educators that I interviewed use a
Boas-Benedict notion of culture, as was proposed by Wax (1993); yet, he has made this
argument without providing any empirical evidence to support this claim. I will test his
hypothesis. As was discussed in Chapter 1, Wax (1993) proposed that teacher educators
who practice multicultural education deﬁne culture as a concept that is based on a Boas-
Benedict understanding of culture, which is a school-of-thought that has been referred to
as "salvage" anthropology. This notion of culture that can be characterized as being
"plural, separate, distinct, and historically homogenous. . . ." Wax postulated that the
culture concept found in multicultural education is operationalized into practice as having
three qualities, which represents the basis of a model of culture that currently guides the
work of teacher educators in the national discourse. First, every individual is a cultural
being and participates in culture. Second, since peOple are a product of culture, schooling
must attempt to reach the student in his or her native culture and the curriculum must
reﬂect this goal. Finally, the culture of the school must reﬂect the school and not the
society at large. This will result in the avoidance of ethnocentrism and provide positive
role models stressing both belonging and achievement for minority children.

Wax proposes that once this notion of culture is infused into the curriculum, it
translates into a struggle for political power and dominance among different cultural

groups. He argues that this notion of culture does not reﬂect the dynamics of culture,

75

which is a product of intercultural contact; thus, he believes teacher educators need to
reconﬁgure their deﬁnitions to reﬂect this process. By documenting the deﬁnitions of
culture used by the teacher educators I have interviewed, it provides an opportunity to test
Wax's hypothesis, and to determine at what points anthropologists can make a contribution
to the work of teacher educators.

A wide range of conceptions of culture can be found among the teacher educators
whose views on culture I have recorded, including those who do not use culture. In
assessing Wax's hypothesis, it does appear that the Boas-Benedict conﬁguration of culture
is to be found in use among the teacher educators that I consulted; it is one of many
competing notions of culture, but it is manifested in its own particular form at the local
level. In my review below, I begin with a discussion of analytical frameworks other than
culture, this will be followed by a treatment of the deﬁnitions of culture, including the
Boas-Benedict framework, documented in use among the teacher educators that I
interviewed.

There are teacher educators that I interviewed who do not use culture. For example,
Professors Rogers and Tangers do not use culture as a central concept in their work, even
though they do recognize it as a legitimate concept. As was discussed in Chapter 6,
Professor Rogers, who advocates what I refer to as the ideology deconstnrction and
reconstruction approach, believes that the concept is too limited for her own work, since
she is interested in deconstructing the racist ideology that many of her preservice teachers
appear to possess unknowingly. For her, culture represents the generalizations or
stereotypes that can be made about a group of people. Professor Tangers, who subscribes
to the service-learning approach, prefers to use the notion of literacies/multiple literacies
over culture (see Chapter 6) as the intellectual framework that guides her work. I believe
she has chosen this concept over culture since her focus is on literacy education.

There are two examples of culture being used by teacher educators that I interviewed,

and I believe they represent a version of culture as identiﬁed in Wax's model. They are

76

offered by Professors Clark and Johnson, who use an approach to multicultural education
that I have identiﬁed as the social knowledge and power approach. As was discussed in
Chapter 6, this approach perceives American society as inherently racist or discriminatory
in nature; they attempt to show the relationship between the possession of a certain
discourse of knowledge among social agents, associated with Euro-American, male,
professional, and middle class attributes, and the acquisition and maintenance of power by
a dominant group in society, which possesses the above characteristics. It is through the
internalization of this specialized and exclusive discourse of knowledge that people from
the cultural mainstream are accorded a privileged place in our society, which provides
access to higher education, the best professions, and places to live. Generally speaking, the
poor and cultural minorities who lack access to this discourse are excluded ﬁ'om many
opportunities.

The two proponents of this approach (Professors Clark and Johnson) appear to
advocate the need to raise and develop an awareness of cultural identity among their
mostly Euro-American preservice teachers. For example, in Professor Clark's approach, he .
is concerned with raising his students' awareness that they have beneﬁted in numerous
ways by virtue of being Euro-American. He attempts to demonstrate how they are
different from cultural minorities that they will end up teaching. Professor Johnson's
approach centers on the teaching of mathematics, and how women are excluded from this
discourse; she is concerned with how to make her students aware of the exclusive nature of
mathematics.

In each case Professors Clark and Johnson, use culture as the central concept in their
desire to raise cultural awareness among students. It appears that the notion of culture
being used operates as a descriptive identiﬁer that allows people to distinguish and identify
differences, such as economic, political, and social found among groups of people. Thus, I
believe that culture in this framework is a means for identifying the condition and

relationship among different cultural groups; culture is distinct--since these qualities are

77

separate-and plural, since there are numerous examples available; it is not that Professors
Clark and Johnson just use culture, but the concept embodies social actors with cultural
traits, which are a product of culture. This use of culture reﬂects the ﬁrst characteristic as
postulated in Wax's model; that people have culture and are a product of the same, and
must be understood from that vantage point.

However, from the standpoint of this study, I believe it is difﬁcult to assess whether
these teacher educators in question employ the second and third qualities of culture in their
educational practice, which were discussed in Wax's model. My vantage point in this study
is an examination of the preparation of preservice teachers, and not a study of the educator
in the ﬁelduin the classroom—where these issues would be subject to study. '

The ﬁnal two approaches to the concept of culture that I documented represent
deﬁnitions correlated to the multicultural education approach, but do not represent
examples of the Boas-Benedict model of culture. As was discussed in Chapter 6, one
approach to culture is offered by Professor Thompson, an advocate of what I labeled the
cultural difference approach to multicultural education. Professor Thompson, who is
trained in anthropology, proclaims that an understanding of culture is central in his work.
Unlike his colleagues who he believes are interested in correcting attitudes, which he labels
"The You Better be Sensitive Approach," Professor Thompson assumes his students are
going to be sensitive about cultural difference. By looking at examples, Professor
Thompson is interested in teaching his students about cultural differences; not only that
there are differences, but the range of differences one may expect to encounter as a
teacher. He draws upon his anthropological training by using examples from folklore to
accomplish this aim.

A ﬁnal example of culture being used by a teacher educator that I consulted was
offered by Professor Partridge, who uses the social construction and ecology approach to
multicultural education, which was discussed in Chapter 6. Professor Partridge hopes to

encourage students to value multiculturalism and perceives issues from a multiculturalist

78

perspective. To achieve this goal, Professor Partridge uses a social constructionist and an
ecological framework for understanding cultural diversity; the social constructionist leg of
the model interprets reality as being constructed through social interaction, while the
ecological perspective demonstrates that meaning must be understood within the
environment, where social interaction occurs. Through this framework, for understanding
culture, Professor Partridge attempts to demonstrate to her students that social actors are a

product of their social reality and environment.

Approaches to Multicultural Education at the Local Level

At the beginning of this thesis, I proposed to conduct a case study of teacher
educators who are involved in multicultural education. An important aspect of this study
was to document the approaches that the teacher educators I interviewed use in their
practice to educate preservice teachers. I attempt to address this question by drawing
upon Sleeter and Grant's (1987) multicultural education typology as the means for
categorizing the approaches found at the local level, which will allow for a comparative
contrast between the approaches recorded in the national discourse, with the approaches I
have documented in MSU's teacher education program. It will then be possible to
determine how much variation exists among the approaches between the national and local
discourse. By studying the practice of teacher educators at the local level, the intent is to
provide actual documented examples of teacher educators involved in multicultural
education, which will broaden our understanding of the discourse.

In the teacher education program at MSU, I would argue that the majority of the
approaches to multicultural education used by the teacher educators that were consulted
appear to fall within Sleeter and Grant's typology of approaches (see Chapter 6 for
discussion of approaches at local level). I have documented three examples that fall under

the approach that Sleeter and Grant refer to as "multicultural education." They are the 1)

79

the social knowledge and power approach, 2) the cultural difference approach, and 3) the
social construction of reality and ecological approach. Despite the majority falling under
this category, there are two approaches I documented that are not classiﬁable under this
heading. It is my contention that the service-learning approach represents a version of
what Sleeter and Grant call "education that is multicultural and social reconstructionist"
(EMSC), and the ideology deconstruction and reconstruction approach represents a
perspective that does not appear to be classiﬁable in Sleeter and Grant's typology;
therefore, its conﬁguration appears to be unique.

The criteria used to categorize the approaches that I documented were made with two
factors under consideration. The ﬁrst consideration was the stated goals of these
approaches, while the second factor was based on the range and types of issues addressed
by each approach. While similarities in both the goals and the coverage of issues in the
approaches documented at the local level warrant classifying into Sleeter and Grant's
typology, there are observable differences that distinguish approaches from each level of
the discourse. It is my belief that the variation between the approaches I observed at the
local level contrasts with the approaches that Sleeter and Grant have documented are a
result of the setting and mode of expression. For example, in my discussions with teacher
educators, they often responded to questions with actual examples that centered on
pragmatic goals. The format taken in Sleeter and Grant's article uses a more abstract mode
of expression, in a decontextualized setting, which, I believe, gives a more generalized
interpretation of their positions.

In discussing the multicultural education approaches documented in MSU's teacher
education program, I will treat the goals, main issues, and instructional practices, which
became the basis for categorizing the respective approaches into Sleeter and Grant's
typology. The examples used to illustrate this discussion will be drawn from Chapter 6,
where they were discussed at length.

In examining the goals of the social knowledge and power, the cultural difference, and

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the social construction of reality and ecological approaches, I believe there are enough
similarities with the stated goals of the multicultural education approach documented by
Sleeter and Grant to justify classifying the local examples into this category. As was
discussed in Chapter 2, Sleeter and Grant argue that practitioners who use the multicultural
education approach are interested in advocating the valuation, respect, and tolerance for
cultural diversity, and they are in favor of social justice and equity among the members of
all ethnic groups. I will discuss one example ﬁom each of the approaches to demonstrate
the relationship.

The ﬁrst example of goals is from the social knowledge and power approach, offered
by Professor Clark (see Chapter 6). He is interested in showing students how they beneﬁt
from the present societal arrangement. Since the majority of his students are Euro-
American, he believes, they are privileged because they have access to an exclusive
discourse of knowledge that neither cultural minorities nor the poor can gain access too.
Professor Clark attempts to demonstrate to students how they beneﬁt by making them
aware of the relationship between knowledge, power, and control in society; he wants his
students to become aware of this arrangement, so that they do not reproduce inequity in
their classrooms.

A second example of the multicultural education approach is the cultural difference
approach used by Professor Thompson. He argues that in his practice, he is interested in
helping prospective teachers develop an awareness of themselves as cultural beings, and
provides them with a set of analytical tools that they can use in their own practice. It is
through the acquisition of these skills that he hopes students will be sensitive to cultural
differences, and not act in a politically correct manner.

A third example drawn ﬁom the social construction of reality and ecological
approach, which is advocated by Professor Partridge, centers her goals around having
students value multiculturalism, and to view issues from a multiculturalist perspective.

Professor Partridge encourages students to understand that people may hold beliefs and

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values on topics that differ from their own.

When turning to the question of what are the main issues that receive the most
attention by the teacher educators who advocate the aforementioned multicultural
education approaches, there is a strong similarity in coverage between the local discourse
and the issues documented as important by Sleeter and Grant. As was discussed in
Chapter 2, Sleeter and Grant observe that in the literature a majority of teacher educators
using this approach are interested in addressing institutional racism in both schools and
society, inequity among racial groups, and class and social stratiﬁcation. They pointed out
that it is primarily through the ideas of race and ethnicity that the above issues are
addressed in the literature.

At the local level, I would argue that these issues are also recognized as being central
questions that must be addressed by the teacher educators that I consulted. For example,
as was discussed in Chapter 6, Professor Johnson is interested in studying the cultural
dimensions of mathematics; she believes the way mathematics is currently deﬁned excludes
females of all backgrounds, and males outside the middle and upper middle class. It is the
institutionalized nature of discrimination in mathematics that Professor Johnson addresses
in her work. A second example is offered by Professor Clark, who is primarily concerned
with the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the possession of certain
types of knowledge can give some people social and economic advantages over people
denied access to that knowledge. In his own profession, Professor Clark addresses the
question of how to raise awareness about this set of circumstances among preservice
teachers.

As I indicated previously, I would argue that the service-learning approach, advocated
by Professor Tangers, can be classiﬁed as an example of the "education that is multicultural
and social reconstructionist" (EMSC) approach; the ﬁfth approach identiﬁed by Sleeter and
Grant (1987). Generally speaking, the goals and objectives in Professor Tangers' practice,
which were discussed in Chapter 6, are similar to the EMSC approach (see Chapter 2);

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there, however, appears to be differences that are unique to her approach.

Nationally, Sleeter and Grant observe that proponents of the EMSC approach are
primarily concerned with education that is social action oriented, which prepares teachers
to take action against social inequity in classrooms. While Professor Tangers stresses that
social action is a central component to her approach, she is more concerned with raising
awareness of cultural diversity than directly tackling the question of eliminating oppression.
Nevertheless, she does agree with the objective of equalizing power relations within the
classroom between students and teachers.

Professor Tangers' service-learning approach appears to place an emphasis on social
action, namely through the institution of the clinical experience. Not unlike the EMSC
approach as documented by Sleeter and Grant, the goal of her approach is to combat
power inequalities found in classrooms, especially where diverse students are found. To
address this question, and the general lack of cultural experience she perceives among her
students, Professor Tangers has incorporated a clinical experience to accomplish two aims.
That is, ﬁrst, to supply her students with a series of experiences with diverse children,
which, it is hoped, will provide them with an opportunity to develop a higher degree of
cultural awareness; second, to place prospective teachers and children into a more
democratic classroom setting, through a series of leveling mechanisms, which will lessen
the inequity between teachers and students. Professor Tangers stressed that through the
fostering of cultural awareness among preservice teachers, they will be in a better position
to understand cultural diversity after they have entered the teaching profession.

As I observed above, I believe the ideology reconstruction and deconstruction
approach used by Professor Rogers fails to be classiﬁable within Sleeter and Grant's
typology. As was discussed in Chapter 6, Professor Rogers is primarily concerned with
having students, who she believes have been socialized in the prevailing racist ideology of
American culture, become aware of how racist ideas may color their perceptions; she then

encourages students to consider what the implications of this new understanding will be for

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their own teaching practice. As Professor Rogers pointed out, she has no interest in
examining these issues from a cultural standpoint, since the concept has too many
limitations for her work; rather, she desires to examine "isms" and how they limit learning
opportunities for diverse students. She is interested in showing students how to uncover
the racist ideology that colors their vision, and to discard it.

In this section, I have attempted to document the approaches to multicultural
education that are used by the teacher educators that I interviewed in MSU's teacher
education program. In all but one case, the approaches that were documented are
classiﬁable into Sleeter and Grant's typology. In this case study, I have attempted to
demonstrate that despite the similarities found in the goal statements and issue coverage
between the local and the national discourse, there are signiﬁcant observable differences
between each level. The most important contrast appears to be the practice orientation
found among the approaches used by the teacher educators that I interviewed at MSU.

As was discussed in Chapter 1, many teacher educators nationally have proposed that
one of the most signiﬁcant problems they face is a lack of development in the practice
oriented-teaching; thus, many observers have noted the application side of multicultural
education suffers in many of the models proposed. It is not the purview of this thesis to
assess the successﬁrlness of the teacher educators that I consulted in linking theory with
practice; rather, I hope to suggest that at this local level, it appears that many teacher
educators are involved in the pursuit of linking theory with practice in their work, as the
data demonstrates. These circumstances, I believe, are in part a result of the application
oriented enterprise of educating preservice teachers, compared to the theoretical
orientation of the multicultural education literature, which fails to uncover the practiced-
based work of practitioners at the local level. Making empirical evidence available
demonstrates the importance of the case study method, which this study has attempted to
replicate, by providing teacher educators with a locally-based picture of themselves at

work, through the anthropological method.

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In this chapter, I have attempted to bring closure to this case study of a teacher
education program, by examining the two central themes of this thesis. That is,
documenting how culture is used among the teacher educators that I consulted, and to
determining whether, in fact, a Boas-Benedict inspired model is in use, as suggested by
Wax (1993). The second central theme of this thesis was to document the approaches to
multicultural education being used among this group of teacher educators, and by using a
nationally recognized typology, to classify these approaches. The intent of this study was
to demonstrate how a local example of multicultural education contrasts with the national

discourse.

Chapter 8
THE DILEMMA OF TEACHING

In this chapter, I will examine how teacher educators assess the overall effectiveness
of their individual approaches in regard to preparing prospective teachers to work in
diverse classroom settings. I will identify and survey the constraints that the teacher
educators I consulted face in their educational practice. When teacher educators set about
educating students regarding issues of cultural diversity, in general, each practitioner has
his or her own speciﬁc goals that he or she hope to achieve during the limited contact time
with students; the constraints these teacher educators encounter serve only to complicate
an already complex task.

During the course of the interviews, it was not uncommon for teacher educators to
recount the barriers they face in their educational practice. For example, a female teacher
educator indicated that many of her students are--as she put it--"sick and tired" of
multicultural education and diversity because these terms have become buzzwords that

they are relentlessly bombarded with. She explained,

I think students are sick and tired of hearing diversity as a buzzword. I think the word
and the concept of diversity may have been over used. If it hadn't been misused I
don't think students would feel like there was too much. I can't tell you how it has
been misused, but I have the feeling that it has been misused.

Another female teacher educator indicated that preservice teachers ﬁnd culture as a
classroom topic that is covered far too often in a number of their courses. Prospective
teachers, it appears, are puzzled why culture is repeatedly reintroduced during their

studies. To them, it becomes a topic that has no closure. She explained,

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One of the problems that we are facing . . . is that our students get impatient when
talking about culture. They think that it should be a topic that gets ﬁnished. "It is
kind of like we did that." "You know, we talked about culture in the junior level
courses." That makes a certain amount of sense to me. I think there is a resistance
from majority culture people to keep thinking about culture issues. It feels to them
that it is something that doesn't need to be repeatedly brought up.

Another problem observed by one male teacher educator is the students' own private
lives, and how they intersect with the educational process. He believes that he competes
with other aspects of students' personal and private lives, such as friends, television,
parties, and so forth, which serve to complicate the learning process. Often, these
distractions frequently discourage the individual questioning process that is necessary for

developing an awareness and understanding of cultural differences. He said, _

You know, I can't possibly in a semester's time get them to understand who they are,
and why they are, and where their values are coming from, and so forth. But if I

can get them started on that, I feel like for some of them I get them started. The
problem is that it is very difﬁcult to support that effort once they leave me. Because
they are going to go to other courses and they go back into that mode where it is all
on the outside, it's all external, it is all about other people. There is nothing in people's
private lives to do it. Again, our private lives tend to be hill of distractions that are
about the outside. It is full of TV and ﬁiends, parties, and so forth. Some of that
stuﬁ‘, I mean you could argue, in fact, is more likely to get into the way of them
understanding more about themselves.

Another problem one male teacher educator observed is that during the process of
developing an understanding about cultural diversity--which in several cases involves
students applying both critical and analytical lenses to their own lives for the very ﬁrst

time--many students experience confusion and consternation. He explained,

Here you are asking them to do something they are not use to doing. That is, to take
a look at their own lives and to do that in an analytical way. It is not like, well, write
me a journal. It is like, we are not only going to look at your life, we are going to
take it apart a little. I am asking them to be analytical about their life. At ﬁrst, they
are usually puzzled, skeptical, or a little fearful.

A ﬁnal problem observed by a male teacher educator, which is universal for most
educators, is the propensity of students to perform in a way that they believe will please

their teacher, and lead to good grades. This behavior is frequently chosen by students,

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rather than concentrating their energy on exploring intellectual concepts and ideas. For
example, when students are evaluated they will provide responses that approximate what
they believe the teacher is looking for, rather than engaging in thoughtful intellectual

debate that challenges ideas. He explained,

Students know how to tell you the things that you want to hear. Right, because they
want to please you and they want to get a good grade. 80, any time you get stuff
back from students, you always have to look at it with skeptical eyes.

The Measurability of Success

In this section, I will examine the question of how successful teacher educators believe
they are in eﬂ‘ecting the intellectual development of students, and how accurately they
believe this issue can be assessed. For many of the teacher educators that I consulted this
is an important question; they devote much time and eﬂ‘ort to reconﬁguring their own
approaches, so that as many students as possible can beneﬁt.

Teacher educators widely hold two beliefs regarding the assessment of student
performance. First, many refer to the assessment process of preservice teachers as a
speculative enterprise, which is fraught with many uncertainties. One male teacher

educator discussed the problematic nature of student assessment. He explained,

A fundamental condition of teaching is the uncertainty of whether you made one iota
of difference in a student or not because most of the means that we have for ﬁnding
out what students think are very unreliable. Often, you are going to be uncertain
about the impact you have had on students. If you are interested in getting students
to understand who they are and the values that underline who they are and the
sociocultural conﬁguration out of which they come, then, anytime you try to do that
it is going to be hard to know whether you helped them to do that. You can have
students, at the time, who don't seem to be choking to it, but three years down the
road it starts to make sense for them.

A female teacher educator agrees with this position; however, she believes it is

possible to assess the comprehension levels of preservice teachers in the short-term, during

88

the contact-time period and up to six months afterward. During this period, she suggested,
that a positive impact ﬁ'om multicultural education courses can be observed in prospective
teachers; at the time of the interview, she was involved in her own study to attempt and
determine the answer to this vexing question. However, she pointed out that beyond this
time period pressures are strong on new teachers, after entrance into the professional-
educators' culture, to conform to prevailing beliefs in schools; this leaves ﬁrture

measurement and success in doubt. She explained,

It is very difﬁcult to measure, but I am in the midst of a research project right now
that is really trying to take a close look at this. That is why if we had this
conversation about three months from now, I could tell you whether or not any of this
stuff makes a difference. I at least know that it makes a difference in the short-term"
at least for the ﬁrst six months or so. But one of the big questions is: how these ideas
can be supported in the reality of ﬁrst year teaching.

Second, teacher educators are generally pessimistic about their own success in
inﬂuencing preservice teachers' beliefs and ideas about cultural difference. Despite their
pessimism, most seem to be optimistic about increasing their prospects for success in the
future. A male teacher educator explained, "We never succeed very well in our teaching.
Not only is this [educating preservice teachers] a challenge, but any attempt at
measurement is a challenge." Despite his fears, he believes some students are successful at

developing an understanding of the issues of multicultural education. He explained,

I think that certainly the intellectual depth in which I have aimed is better in showing
difference than other people [teacher educators], and I think that I can certainly point
to numerous examples of my students who I am very pleased with where they are
intellectually. I can't say that is true for all of them.

A second male teacher educator, who is pessimistic about the potential for success,
characterizes his own success as "not very well." He explained, "It is a struggle to prevent
preservice teachers from viewing the culturally different as the culturally 'other,‘ with a
capital 0." He indicated that he does not want his students to view cultural minorities as

exotic, such as an exotic creature viewed from a distance, similar to taking a trip to the

89

zoo, to see exotic animals. He noted that this is a very common reaction among preservice

teachers. He explained,

The danger of simply introducing people [prospective teachers] to other cultures is
that it is kind of a classic and logical problem; that they kind of approach it as a trip
to the 200. They sort of say, "Wow, look at this; this is what it is like living in a
housing project in New York City. There are shootings all the time and drug dealers
are roaming the streets. It is exciting; it is scary; it plucks your heart's strings; it
makes you feel like it is terrible that these kids have to grow up like that and that

I want to be able to do something for them. That is not a bad response, but it doesn't
necessarily lead anywhere and it may, in fact, have the exact opposite affect that you
want. In other words, to erect an enormous barrier between them and the others.
Then they very easily start to slide into a them vs. us discussion. It is like two
different worlds, and all I have done is visited this world and made it as strange as
possible.

However, he is optimistic that he will be able to prepare as many students as possible to

work in diverse settings.

The Long-Term: The Maintenance of Cultural Awareness

I will examine beliefs held by teacher educators about the long-term effectiveness of
their instruction of preservice teachers, and how signiﬁcantly this will impact the future
development of these educators. In addition to the difficulties teacher educators face in the
educational process in the short-term, there is concern that the message they are
attempting to impart to students will, in fact, make any signiﬁcant impact on the
professional development of these educators in the long-run; after they have entered the
teaching profession and have become integrated into the professional-educator culture.

A male teacher educator came to the conclusion that the responsibility falls squarely
on the shoulders of the prospective teacher to do the necessary maintenance work for not
only retaining an awareness, but also increasing their understanding of the issues. As he
explained, it is up to them ". . . to keep the ball rolling." A female teacher educator who

shares these concerns explained, "It is hard for them. I mean because they are at the same

90

time trying to create their own practice. They are trying to be successﬁJl, and they are
trying to be successful in an environment that might not hold the same kind of principles
that they do." She indicated that newly trained teachers face the task of trying to maintain
their views on multicultural education in a professional educator culture that places heavy
pressure on them to conform to the prevailing instructional ideology, which, she believes,
may be detrimental to increasing learning opportunities for students of color.

Often times, newly trained teachers are discouraged ﬁom practicing what they have
learned about multicultural education. A female teacher educator indicated that many of
her former students have reported back to her about the diﬂiculties they have encountered
in their ﬁrst year of teaching. A common complaint, which ﬁ'ustrates many newly trained
educators, she indicated, was that they were not allowed to use their training, since many
of the practices fall outside the ideology of the professional educator culture. For example,
a former student who tried to give diverse learners specialized instruction ran into

problems. She said,

When other white teachers say, "There is no problem in my classroom, I teach all kids
the same way," and they almost wear that as a badge of honor, "that I am not being
prejudiced." Well, there is this new kid who came out of MSU who says, "Well, you
should treat them differently. " That puts their [newly trained teacher’s] head up
against the wall. They are in schools, so given those constraints beyond the physical
constraints of a curricula, of 30 kids, of testing, of doing right by your mentor teacher.

Teacher educators face many difﬁculties in their practice as educators. In this chapter,
I have surveyed the constraints that they identiﬁed in their practice, the difﬁculties in
measuring success as teachers, and the prospect of knowing that their inﬂuence on students

may be short-lived after they enter the teaching profession.

Chapter 9
ANTHROPOLOGY AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

In this thesis, I conducted an anthropological case study of teacher educators who are
involved in multicultural education in MSU's teacher education program. One purpose of
this study was to survey the forces that shape and inﬂuence these social actors; the intent
of this study was to inform the practitioners about the complexity of the reform discourse
at the local level, and to encourage a dialogue between teacher educators and
anthropologists regarding how the concept of culture is constructed and used in
multicultural education.

Through the ethnographic method, I have documented the interactions of these
teacher educators who, through their behavior, produce a complex local context, which is
subject to analysis. By examining their narrative statements, I have attempted to illustrate
and document the issues that they confront in their practice. I have described the setting
where they work, the students they teach, the intellectual concepts that guide their work,
and the constraints they face. In addition to surveying the local context, this study
addressed two questions. First, how is the concept of culture deﬁned by the teacher
educators that I consulted? Second, what approaches to multicultural education do these
teacher educators use?

In regard to the ﬁrst question, I have recorded how culture is used among these
teacher educators, and I have determined whether these deﬁnitions are a Boas-Benedict
notion of culture, as Wax (1993) has argued; another question implicit to this study is the
validity of Wax's hypothesis. ls Wax correct to assert, without empirical evidence, that

teacher educators use this particular notion of culture? As my research demonstrates,

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there are teacher educators who use this perspective on culture, but it only represents one
of many competing deﬁnitions. There appears to be a wide range of available approaches
to culture, but the majority do not seem to be based on the Boas-Benedict model of
culture. In fact, some of the teacher educators that I consulted do not use the concept of
culture; they have chosen to use other intellectual concepts that more closely match the
purpose of their work. Thus, I argue that Wax's assertion is an invalid position.

The culture concept or alternate concepts chosen by teacher educators, as I have
demonstrated, become the core of the multicultural education approach they use in their
practice. That is, culture becomes the teacher educator's world-view, and it positions his
or her educational practice.

My ﬁndings are also of value to the discipline of anthropology. In recent years,
several anthropologists have argued that anthropology has been systematically excluded
ﬁom the current multiculturalism discourse; many of these papers, such as Wax's, raise
awareness of this problem, but do not attempt to address it. This study, I believe, is just
such an attempt: to take the anthropological lens and apply it to the multiculturalism
discourse. My research represents an effort to move beyond the reaction papers cited in
this study, and to ethnographically address the question of how teacher educators practice
multicultural education, and deﬁne culture.

The absence of an anthropological understanding of culture from this local discourse
seems to agree with the commonly held belief that anthropologists are being ignored in the
current multiculturalism discourse, since only one of the teacher educators that I consulted
is, in fact, trained in anthropology. However, my study demonstrates that teacher
educators do, in fact, hold more sophisticated notions of culture than many anthropologists
realize. These circumstances raise the question of whether other teacher education
programs mirror this one under study; if so, there appears to be fertile ground for
anthropologists to get involved in addressing the research issues that teacher educators

already confront in their work. Not only will anthropologists be in the position to apply

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the unique anthropological perspective to the research agenda, they can directly participate
in reforrnulating the culture concept, as Wax clearly indicates is necessary.

The second question this thesis addressed was to survey and classify the approaches to
multicultural education that the teacher educators I interviewed use in their practice.
Multicultural education, and predecessor reform movements, have a long history in teacher
education. Until now no systematic information on an actual response to the current
multicultural education discourse at the local level has been available to the educational
community; my study represents an eﬂbrt to make such information available to teacher
educators.

It is through this empirical study that I have documented the wide range‘of approaches
that teacher educators can bring to bear in addressing this increasingly important question.
By having this information available to teacher educators, I believe, they will be in a much
better position to understand the wider range of issues they must address in their own
work, which will provide opportunities for new insights in the practice of multicultural
education.

As was discussed in Chapter 6, the individual multicultural education approach is the
vehicle by which the teacher educator positions the issues and problems that are central to
his or her practice. The approach embodies the amassed theoretical and pedagogical
positions held by the teacher educator, which represents a set of beliefs and methods used
to prepare prospective teachers to work in diverse classrooms. In this study, I have
documented six approaches that are used among the teacher educators that I consulted.
They are: 1) the celebration of diversity approach, 2) the social knowledge and power
approach, 3) the service-learning approach, 4) the cultural difference approach, 5) the
ideology deconstruction and reconstruction approach, 6) the social construction and
ecology approach. Each of the above approaches are distinguishable in terms of their
theoretical assumptions and instructional method.

By taking an anthropological approach in studying this group of teacher educators, an

94

important beneﬁt of this study is that it allows for teacher educators to see themselves at
the local level; this view would be not available without the ethnographic-based case study
approach, which this study represents. This provides an opportunity to contrast between
assumptions between the local and the national discourse. Second, this study has provided
a glimpse of who the typical preservice teacher is that teacher educators will be
encountering in their practice.

One signiﬁcant conclusion of this study is that at the local level a majority of the
teacher educators that I interviewed are very much concerned with the practice of
multicultural education; this differs ﬁ'om the national discourse, where there is much
greater interest in the theoretical aspect of multicultural education. This local case study
seems to differ with the commonly held belief that theory far out weighs the practice of
multicultural education, since the teacher educators that I consulted appear to be very
concerned with this issue. One can only speculate whether this trend observed in MSU's
teacher education program is at the forefront of a national trend.

While there has been much discussion about the attributes of the typical preservice
teacher in the literature, this study represents an actual documented case study of a group
of teacher educators, and their beliefs about the preservice teachers that they are preparing
to enter the teaching profession. Virtually every one of the teacher educators that I
consulted held similar views regarding the challenges they face in preparing their students.
That is, these preservice teachers who are white, female, and middle class generally do not
realize they are cultural beings-~only minorities possess culture. To teach preservice
teachers that they are, in fact, cultural beings is a formidable task that teacher educators
must overcome.

Having conducted this case study of teacher educators who are involved in
multicultural education an important question is raised by the ﬁndings of this study. After
having documented the approaches to multicultural education at the local level, one

possible avenue for further research would be to expand this analysis of cultural

95

perceptions/deﬁnitions by tracing the historical background of these approaches. That is,
what is the milieu giving rise to the characteristics of these approaches? This is a fruitful
question. By documenting the intellectual schools-of-thought that teacher educators have
acquired, it will provide answers to why anthropology has been marginalized in the

multiculturalism discourse.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Biographical Data

1. Please tell me about your professional background. May I have a copy of your CV?
Multicultural Education: An Overview

1. How do you deﬁne the concept of multiculturalism or diversity?

2. In your view, do you see a difference between the concept of diversity and
multicultural education?

. 3. How do you deﬁne multicultural education? What model do you use in your
work?

4. What cultural and ethnic background do your students generally have?

5. How important is it to understand your own cultural background in trying to
understand another’s? What characteristics of your own background are important?

Views on Culture and Ethnicity:

1. How do you conceive the concept of culture? What does it mean for you in your
work?

2. How do you conceive of ethnicity? What does it mean for you in your work?

Multicultural Education and the Curriculum:

1. What is your own educational model, describing the process, of an individual moving
from a state of cultural intolerance to a ﬁnal stage of accepting cultural diversity?
What characteristics does a multicultural person possess?

2. Is there too much multiculturalism in the curriculum or not enough? Why?

3. Could you describe the level of diversity v. the level of homogeneity found in the

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program. How do you think this effects the credibility of the program?

4. How relatively successful were you in teaching the component on diversity in your
course? Give an example. What assignments did you design and implement
to teach about cultural diversity? How successful have you been in disseminating ideas
of cultural tolerance to your students? Give an example.

Anthropological Perspectives on Diversity and Multicultural Education

1. What contribution do you believe anthropology can make to your work?

2. What anthropological ideas or methods do you use in your research or teaching?

3. Do you have a background in anthropology?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahlquist, Roberta
1992 "Manifestations of Inequality: Overcoming Resistance in Multicultural
Foundation Course, " in Diversity in Teacher Education: New Expectations.
Edited by Mary Dilworth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Arends, Richard 1., Shelly Clemson, and James Henkelman
1992 "Tapping Nontraditional Sources of Minority Teaching Talent," in Diversity
in Teacher Education: New Expectations. Edited by Mary Dilworth. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Banks, James A
1993 "Multicultural Education: Historical Development, Dimensions, and Practice,"
in Review of Research in Education 19. Edited by Linda Darling-Hammond.
Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Brown, Carlton E.
1992 "Restructuring for a New America," in Diversity in Teacher Education: New
Expectations. Edited by Mary Dilworth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Chinn, Philip C. and Gay Yuen Wong
1992 "Recruiting and Retaining Asian/Paciﬁc American Teachers," in Diversity in
Teacher Education: New Expectations. Edited by Mary Dilworth. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Clifford, James
1988 The Predicament of Culture: T wentieth-C entury Ethnography,
Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dilworth, Mary E.
1992 "Preface," in Diversity in Teacher Education: New Expectations. Edited
by Mary Dilworth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Fox, Richard G., ed.

1991 Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press.

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Garibaldi, Antoine M.
1992 "Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Classrooms, " in Diversity in
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Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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