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RE-CONCEPTUALIZING DEFICIT AND HOMOGENIZING
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AS LEARNERS ABOUT DIVERSITY

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RE-CONCEPTUALIZING DEFICIT AND HOMOGENIZING VIEWS:
WHITE TEACHER CANDIDATES AS LEARNERS ABOUT DIVERSITY

By

Karen Lynne Lowenstein

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2004

ABSTRACT

RE-CONCEPTUALIZING DEFICIT AND HOMOGEN IZIN G VIEWS:
WHITE TEACHER CANDIDATES AS LEARNERS ABOUT DIVERSITY

By

Karen Lynne Lowenstein

Teacher educators and educational researchers repeatedly note the disjunction
between the demographics of our nation’s teachers and K-12 students. Colleges of
education continue to prepare a majority of White, female, middle-class, and monolingual
teacher candidates who contrast with a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse K-
12 student population. This contrast, sometimes referred to as the demographic
imperative, is often accompanied by concurrent calls for creating teacher education
programs that foreground issues of diversity. The demographic imperative seems to be
used as license to apply a particular view to White teacher candidates. In this view,
White teacher candidates are a homogeneous group of learners who lack resources or
who have deficient knowledge or experiences from which to build when it comes to
learning about issues of diversity. This dissertation frames, challenges, and revises this
widely held and often unexamined conceptualization of White teacher candidates as
learners.

To make this methodologically concrete, those who have been oversimplified and
deficitized, i.e., White teacher candidates, serve as key informants in this study. As a
teacher researcher using methods of qualitative inquiry, I examine the perceptions of
eight White teacher candidates within the context of my teaching a semester long

foundations course in education that foregrounds issues of diversity. Data sources for

this study include students’ written work, my teacher journal and lesson plans, transcripts
of class discussions, and interviews. Based on initial interviews with the eight
candidates, this study primarily investigates the candidates’ perceptions of three whole
class discussions. The lens of personal experience frames the first discussion, my
pedagogical use of popular culture frames the second, and the third discussion is framed
by the knowledge base about language for teachers. This study explores how teacher
candidates perceived the treatment of their ideas and how they negotiated learning from
each of these whole class discussions about diversity.

This study shows that the eight White teacher candidates are neither a
homogeneous group of learners nor are they a group of deficient learners. Not only was
there variation across the teacher candidates’ ideas, the teacher candidates brought
complex resources to their learning about diversity. These resources included personal
experiences and stories, beliefs about the role of assumptions, ideas about the role of
consensus and multiplicity in learning, and orientations toward knowledge. To
synthesize my findings, a framework of situational variance is used to understand White
teacher candidate competence regarding issues of diversity. This study also points to four
implications for constructing a pedagogy for teacher education: pursuing students’ sense-

making, caring across differences, assessing by comparing, and teaching as (un)learning.

I dedicate this work to my grandfather, Jim Linton,
whose indefatigable love insisted that I believe in myself and in others.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinary
willingness, honesty, and critical reflection offered by Jessie, Alyssa, Amanda, Leigh,
Reenie, Lisa, Jen, and Stan. Though their real names do not appear in these pages, the
reality of their hard work as students, as participants in this study, and as colleagues has
taught me so much about the complexities of teaching, learning, and consciousness.
Their words and ideas are what make this book possible and are what offer a promise of
new possibilities for teacher education and for K-12 students.

I am extremely grateful for the tremendous support that I have received from my
dissertation advisor, Doug Campbell. Throughout this entire process, I have felt Doug’s
unwavering confidence and commitment to my work. Doug is one of the most talented
readers and thinkers that I know. He has always heard what I have wanted to say and he
has helped me articulate exactly what I want to write. I am thankful for the many hours
he has spent reading, noticing, refining, gently challenging, and sculpting my work along
with me.

My dissertation committee members - Susan Florio—Ruane, Cheryl Rosaen, and
Ernest Morrell — deserve special thanks. All three have offered insights and questions
throughout this process, and I am thankful that I have been able to work with such a
talented and supportive committee. I am especially grateful for a year of Spencer
mentorship from Susan and Cheryl. Susan scaffolded the ways in which I have framed
and designed this study. Cheryl helped me analyze my data, organize my ideas, and work

toward chapter drafts.

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I cannot begin to articulate how much I thank James Damico for being my
strongest advocate along every step of this journey. His insightful feedback makes him
an incredibly talented scholar, mentor, and collaborator. Not only has he been my main
intellectual partner and editor-in-chief for every part of this dissertation, his faith in my
capability has nurtured and sustained me throughout my experiences.

I am also indebted to my family for providing me with a palpable foundation of
unconditional love and support. I especially thank my parents, Edie and Phil, for their
perpetual affirmation of my self and my work.

Finally, I would also like to thank Yanping Fang, Jinyoung Choi, Emily Smith,
Rachel Lander, Jeff Lent, Mark Baildon, and Lisa J ilk for their critical colleagueship and
compassionate friendship during my doctoral journey. Each has helped me better
understand and more fully embrace who I am and who I want to be in education and in

life.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................ x
CHAPTER ONE
TEACHER CANDIDATE LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY THROUGH
WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSIONS: AN OVERVIEW ............................. 1
Tracing a trajectory: Hearing and conceptualizing White teacher candidates... 1
Situating this study: Multicultural education and issues of diversity ............. 3
Addressing critical needs ................................................................ 4
Plan of this study .......................................................................... 4
CHAPTER TWO

THE WORK OF MULTICULTURAL TEACHER EDUCATION:
(RE)CONCEPTUALIZING WHITE TEACHER CANDIDATES

ASLEARNERS.............. ................................................................................ 7
Introduction: Challenging a prevailing view of White teacher candidates ....... 7
Inspecting the demographic imperative more closely: A look at assumptions
about learners and bigger pictures ....................................................... 9

Teacher candidates and K-12 students: What is the demographic
imperative? ........................................................................... 10
Preparing teacher candidates: What do we as teacher educators typically
ask? What might we first need to ask? ............................................ 12
A vision of teacher candidates as learners: The lenses of homogenization
and deficitization ..................................................................... 13
The big(ger) picture(s): Situating the demographic imperative ............... 16
Teacher educators .......................................................... 16
Institutional portrait(s) ..................................................... 18
Segregation of our communities .......................................... 21
Summary .............................................................................. 22
Multicultural education: What is it and what has been examined? ................ 23
Definitions ........................................................................... 23
Visions and frameworks ............................................................ 24
Race: A logical and necessary theoretical focus ............................... 27
K-12 pedagogy and teacher competence ......................................... 29
Research on multicultural competence and teacher education ................ 31
Summary ............................................................................. 33
The role of the teacher educator: Rescuing teacher candidates ..................... 34
Business as usual: A caricature of teacher candidates & the sub-text of a
heroic plot ............................................................................ 34
Re-seeing the relationship between pedagogy and student engagement 36
A learning question for multicultural teacher education ....................... 38
Mobilizing pedagogical insights for conceptualizing White teacher candidates
as learners ................................................................................. 39

Conceptualizing students as active learners who bring resources to their

vii

learning ............................................................................... 39

Exploring the practice of teachers and teacher educators ...................... 42
Taking it one step further: Conceptualizing White teacher candidates as
competent learners ........................................................................ 44
Link to methodology ..................................................................... 46

CHAPTER THREE

TEACHER EDUCATOR AS RESEARCHER: LEARNING WITH AND

FROM MY STUDENTS ................................................................. 47
Introduction ............................................................................... 47
Situating this study as interpretive ..................................................... 48
Situating this study as teacher research ................................................ 50
Collecting data as a teacher researcher ................................................ 53
The research setting ...................................................................... 55

Overview of the course ............................................................. 55

Describing the students in the class and myself as a teacher educator ....... 6O
Designing the study ....................................................................... 62

Focal students ......................................................................... 62

Pilot study ground work ............................................................ 66

Building from the pilot study to design three phases of research ............. 67

Listening sessions ................................................................... 68

Reconstructing the semester at the listening sessions ........................... 73

Acknowledging a temporal challenge ............................................. 74
Moving to critical moments ............................................................. 75
Summary ................................................................................... 78

CHAPTER FOUR
MAKING IT TO COLLEGE: EXPLORIN G STUDENTS’ PERSONAL
EXPERIENCES IN LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY .......................... 79
Overview of two critical moments: Personalizing course content and
meta-processing class talk ............................................................... 79
Contextual framing: Connecting course content to students’ personal
experiences ................................................................................ 82

Choosing texts: Course concepts through lived experiences ................. 82

Sharing personal experiences: Community building exercises and

discussion guidelines ............................................................... 84

Teacher reflections: Using students’ personal experiences ................... 86

Mobilizing insights about students: Authorizing lived experiences as

course content ....................................................................... 87
Setting up for critical moments: Unexpected student explorations ............... 89

Leading up to the first critical moment: Class talk about individual choice

and jobs .............................................................................. 90

Critical moment #1: Examining the role of personal experiences in learning. . .. 92
Moving from a general question of “making it” to how students in our
class made it to college ............................................................. 92
From “How did you get here?” to “How did I make it to college?” ......... 94

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Different than Reenie: Jen, Leigh, and Lisa’s reflections on their

own economic support ..................................................... 94

Similar to Reenie: Alyssa and Jessie’s reflections on hard work 96
Making sense of personal experiences: Learning from students’ stories 97

Stories are never “right” or “wrong”: Seeing connections between

experiences and stories .................................................... 98
Personal experiences or stories as right or wrong: Correcting
others’ misunderstandings ................................................ 99
Perspectives on Reenie’s story: Knowing some of her story,
correcting her story, and her experience as truth ....................... 100
Summary .................................................................... 103
Critical moment #2: Examining the role of assumptions in learning .................. 104
Back to the whole class discussion: The moment of meta-commentary 104
Al’s assumption about financial support ........................................ 106
Assumptions as counterproductive to whole class discussion ....... 106
Assumptions as progress in learning .................................... 107
No assumptions being made: Al’s moves as helpful for learning ........... 108
Additional note about Alyssa’s meta-commentary on assumptions 109
Implications of personalization and meta-commentary for teaching and learning
about diversity ................................................................................ 1 10
What does it mean to share stories? .............................................. 1 l 1
What counts as context? ........................................................... 1 12
What is the role of discourse? ..................................................... 1 13
CHAPTER FIVE
BARBIE IS (NOT) THE PROBLEM: CONSIDERING CONSENSUS AND
MULTIPLICITY IN LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY ...................... 116
A critical moment: “I think that they’re really pretty.” ............................ 1 16
Contextual framing for the critical moment: “I think that they’re really
pretty.” ..................................................................................... 1 17
Initial catalyst for Barbie: My curiosities and an after-class discussion 1 18
The class conversation leading up to Amanda’s statement: Describing the
details of the Barbie ad ............................................................. 119
Amanda’s comment followed by an exchange with Stan: Is pretty a
problem? .............................................................................. 121
A framework for a pedagogy of artifacts: Turning to cultural studies ....... 123
Mobilizing cultural studies and media literacy: Tapping into
students’ knowledge, experiences, and commitments ................. 124
Calling for the pedagogical use of popular culture in K-12
classrooms ................................................................... 126
Need for research on popular culture in teacher education
classrooms ................................................................... 127
Barbie as an immediately recognizable text ............................ 127
Situating Barbie in a semester of artifact use ............................ 128
Overview of three key parts to students’ sense-making: Opening or closing the
door to divergence? ....................................................................... 130

ix

Part 1 — “I think that they’re really pretty”: Opening the door to

divergence ............................................................................ l3 1
Opening up the discussion: Amanda pioneering new directions 131
The consequences of Amanda’s comment: Clarifying students’
stances ........................................................................ 132
An explanation for Amanda’s entrance into discussion: Taking an
opposite viewpoint ......................................................... 133
Holding her own (view): Amanda as a strong woman ................ 134
Knowing Amanda and Stan by this point in the semester: A
light-hearted exchange ..................................................... 135

Part 2 -— “I think that they’re really pretty”: Different ideas about what

counted as the issue, if there even was one ...................................... 137
The issue: Barbie as a problematic construction of beauty ........... 137
The issue(s): What can we do about this and a lack of expectations
for girls ....................................................................... 139
The issue: Is there really an issue here? ................................. 140

Part 3 - Situating students’ perceptions of the Barbie discussion in their

ideas about learning: Consensus and multiplicity ............................... 142
Alyssa and Stan: Moving from false consensus to multiplicity to
consensus again ............................................................ 143
Amanda, Jen, Lisa, and Reenie: Moving from false consensus to
multiplicity .................................................................. 1 44
Jessie: Consensus about issue and learning about the divergence
of solutions .................................................................. 147
Leigh: Re-seeing our own lives using the issues discussed in class .148

The power of Barbie: A web of exploration .......................................... 149
Tracing the paper trail: Writing about the discussion and extending the
discussion ............................................................................ 149

Re-visiting Barbie in class discussions: Seeing Barbie outside of our class. 152
Implications of the Barbie discussion for teaching and learning about diversity. 154

Relationships in and outside of class ............................................. 154
Not predetermining answers or the questions ................................... 154
Dilemma of covering material vs. explosion of talk around Barbie .......... 155
The role of consensus and multiplicity ........................................... 156
CHAPTER 6
BLACK ENGLISH AS UN FAMILIAR MATERIAL: CONSIDERING A
TEACHER’S PEDAGOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY ............................. 157
Students’ perceptions of the classroom talk about Black English: What does it
mean to get it? ............................................................................ 158
Contextual framing: “Let’s talk about what is Black English, and where did it
come from.” ............................................................................... 160
My own long-term and recent learning experiences: Linguistic diversity
as a centerpiece ....................................................................... 160
The knowledge base on language: Situating the need to know about Black
English ................................................................................ 162

Language sessions within the course .................................... 165

Black English class: Rationale and readings ........................... 167
Moving to my directive, “Let’s talk about what is Black English, and
where did it come from.” ........................................................... 169
Handout of guiding questions, my lesson plan for the session, and
what actually happened .................................................... 169
A synthesis of the Black English segment .............................. 170
A note post-segment about my concern ................................. 172
“Getting it”: Exploring student talk, whole class talk, and the nature of the
topic ......................................................................................... 173
The three classmates who spoke: A continuum of “getting it” ................ 174
Mixed reviews: This class is (not?) a discussion ................................ 176
Students’ reflections on the nature of the topic and what they think they
(don’t) know .......................................................................... 177
Content as “new” ........................................................... 177
Shared view of Black English as “bad” or “lazy” ..................... 179
Content as “taboo” ......................................................... 180
Content as “academic” .................................................... 181
“Getting it”: Exploring teacher talk and what students end up “getting” .......... 182
A teacher’s role: Helping students “get it” ....................................... 182
Note to the teacher about students’ ideas: Room for improvement? ......... 184
Getting Smitherman: Moving between the past & the present and between
facts & perspective .................................................................. 186
Smitherman as one perspective on the past and present ............... 187
Smitherman as facts about the past and one perspective about the
present ........................................................................ 188
Smitherman as facts about the past, but what about the present? 188
Smitherman as facts about the past and present ........................ 190
Summary of students’ beliefs about Black English as a language ............ 191
A post-class reflection on the reading: Smitherman as one perspective ........... 192
Implications of Black English segment for teaching and learning about
diversity .................................................................................... 194
Knowledge of Black English: Particular foundational beliefs ................ 194
Teaching about Black English: A pedagogy for text comprehension or
scholarly debate? .................................................................... 195
Link to teacher attitudes and knowledge ......................................... 196
Looking across three chapter: A richer analytical portrait .......................... 197
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: CREATING A PARALLEL
PRACTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION .......................................... 199
Introduction ............................................................................... 1 99
Three accounts of students’ sense-makin g ............................................ 200
Competence as situational ............................................................... 204
Future research and policy implications ............................................... 206
Future research ....................................................................... 206

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Policy implications .................................................................. 208

Teaching implications .................................................................... 2 10
Pursuing students’ sense-making ................................................. 210
Caring across differences .......................................................... 212
Assessing by comparing ............................................................ 213
Teaching as (un)leaming ........................................................... 214
Summary: Re-defining teacher educator competence .......................... 215

Conclusion: Tapping into the “untapped potential” ................................. 216

APPENDICES .............................................................................. 218
Appendix A - Catalogue of discussion topics .................................. 219
Appendix B — Catalogue of assigned course readings ......................... 222
Appendix C — Catalogue of guided questions taken from the course
syllabus ............................................................................... 226
Appendix D — Initial interview protocol for interviewing first semester
students ............................................................................... 228
Appendix E — Revised interview protocol for interviewing second semester

students ............................................................. 229

Appendix F — Themes for selecting discussion segments ..................... 230
Appendix G — Additional interview protocol for second semester students

[for listening sessions] .............................................................. 232

Appendix H — One-page handout for listening sessions ....................... 235

Appendix I— Handout for class session on Smitherman’s chapters ......... 236

REFERENCES .............................................................................. 237

xii

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 — Excerpt from my syllabus (Overview and central questions of the

course) .......................................................................................... 57
Table 2 — Characteristics of the whole class (31 students) .............................. 61
Table 3 — Characteristics of the eight focal students .................................... 63
Table 4 — Specific portraits of the eight focal students .................................. 65
Table 5 — Locating discussions within the semester ...................................... 71
Table 6 — Summary of data sources collected ............................................ 75
Table 7 — Students’ identification of critical moments .................................. 78

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Chapter One

TEACHER CANDIDATE LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY THROUGH
WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSIONS: AN OVERVIEW

In her action research, Gallas (1995) describes her discovery that her first- grade
students are far more sophisticated and able to think about difficult science questions than
her schooling had led her to believe. In listening to the experiences, ideas, and questions
that her students brought to her classroom, Gallas identified science within her students’
concerns and was then able to support her students to build complex scientific theories
from their ideas and struggles. My own experiences teaching White teacher candidates in
a foundations course about issues of diversity parallel Gallas’ experiences. Like Gallas, I
entered my classroom as a teacher educator wondering whether a group of mostly White
teacher candidates would have resources to engage in learning about diversity. And like
Gallas, I was continually struck by the rich personal experiences, ideas, and questions
that my students brought to their learning. Although most of my students did not talk
using the concepts or terms of the course, I believe that it was possible to hear many of
the ideas and theories of the course embedded in my students’ experiences and in the
conversations that my students were having. These initial experiences as a teacher
educator of White teacher candidates in a course about diversity led to the dissertation
topic explored here.

Tracing a trajectory: Hearing and conceptualizing White teacher candidates

During my first few years of doctoral study, I noticed that the literature was filled
with important ideas about educating White teacher candidates and preparing them for
teaching diverse students. This critical work is grounded in the mismatch between the

demographics of our nation’s teachers and our K-12 students, or what is often called the

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demographic imperative. The teacher candidates that I taught exemplified the race and
gender demographic descriptions of this imperative. Twenty-nine of the 31 students were
White and 21 were women. In reading this literature, I also noticed a conspicuous
absence - the voices of teacher candidates regarding their perceptions of teacher
preparation in issues of diversity. Although the teacher education literature contains
visions of multicultural education and although some teacher educators have begun to
describe their pedagogies regarding issues of diversity in university classrooms, the lack
of research on how teacher candidates perceive teacher educators’ efforts to teach them
about diversity was apparent. This critical gap led me to design this dissertation study to
examine White teacher candidates’ perceptions of learning about diversity in my teacher
education classroom.

Early in my doctoral program, I also began to notice that a particular
conceptualization of teacher candidates often accompanies the demographic imperative.
This conceptualization depicts teacher candidates as a homogeneous group of deficient
learners when it comes to learning about issues of diversity (Chisholm, 1994; Dilworth,
1992; Zimpher & Ashbum, 1992). I began to wonder how the use of the demographic
imperative to suggest this conceptualization works to mask the complexities of what
White teacher candidates actually bring to their learning. Moreover, I questioned how
the use of these statements might conveniently relieve teacher educators of the
responsibility for educating teacher candidates. This led to initial questions that
motivated the design of this study. Are White teacher candidates a homogeneous group?

What resources do they bring to their learning?

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As both teacher educator and researcher, Florio-Ruane (2001) similarly wondered
about the resources that White novice teachers bring to their study of culture and literacy.
Within a book club structure, she raised the question of whether the seemingly
homogenous group of women was completely without resources for investigating issues
of race and culture. In getting to know the members of her group, she explained, “I was
struck by its diversity as I was by its apparent homogeneity” (p. 54).

As a teacher educator and researcher wondering about the resources that my own
students brought to their learning about issues of diversity, I initially interviewed a set of
focal students after the semester ended. Because all of these students focused primarily
on the whole class discussions from our semester, I refined my initial questions. Thus,
the three overarching research questions that guided this study were:

1. What resources do teacher candidates bring to learning about diversity? What
happens to those resources in whole class discussions?
2. What are the content and process of the talk about issues of diversity in whole
class discussions?
3. What are teacher candidates’ perceptions of “learning about diversity” during
particular whole class discussions?
Situating this study: Multicultural education and issues of diversity

The context for this study, the foundations course in teacher education that I
taught, focuses on issues of diversity. These issues can be situated more broadly within
the field of multicultural education. Recognizing that multicultural education is not a
singular entity, the following definition offered by Banks frames the use of issues of

diversity through this study:

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Multicultural education is a field of study and an emerging discipline whose
major aim is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse
racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. One of its important goals is to
help all students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function
effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to interact, negotiate, and
communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and
moral community that works for the common good. (1995, p. xi)
Increasingly, multiculturalism as a term is used interchangeably with “diversity,” a term
used to detail all types of difference, including racial, gender, socioeconomic, and
linguistic. (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). The course that served as context for this
dissertation study defined issues of diversity in terms of race, class, gender, sexual
orientation, disability, and language.
Addressing critical needs
Much important theoretical work has been conducted in the field of multicultural
education. There are also accounts describing the ways in which teachers have enacted
multicultural education in K-12 classrooms. Despite this burgeoning knowledge base,
few accounts attend to the voices and ideas of teacher candidates in university
classrooms, especially White teacher candidates’ perceptions of their experiences with
issues of diversity. Jennings and Smith note, “Few of these studies [in multicultural
teacher education] look closely at. . .the processes of teaching and learning multicultural
education. . .during a course” (2002, p.2). In attending to eight White teacher candidates’
perceptions of class discussions, this dissertation addresses this research gap. Moreover,
the process of listening to these eight students’ perspectives helps complicate pedagogical
theories and practices and notions of how to revise them (Cook-Sather, 2002) in

constructing a multicultural teacher education for mostly White teacher candidates.

Plan of this study

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The next two chapters provide readers with a conceptual map for the study and
my research methodology. In chapter two, The work of multicultural teacher
education: (Re)conceptualizing White teacher candidates as learners, I frame the
problem that this study addresses in greater depth. I describe and challenge how the
demographic imperative can serve as license to assume that White teacher candidates are
a homogenous and deficient group of learners. I also show how in general, the
“development of multicultural theory has far outstripped the development of multicultural
practice, with refinements of theory depending more on proposals for what should be
than on conceptualizing the lessons learned from what has been” (Cochran-Smith, Davis,
& Fries, in press). Both my challenge to the assumptions about White teacher candidates
and the lack of teacher candidates’ voices in research provide a rationale for this study.
In chapter three, Teacher educator as researcher: Learning with and from my own
students, I describe my methodological choices as teacher educator and researcher
through all stages of the study. I introduce the eight focal students in the study, describe
the three phases of data collection, and highlight the emergence of critical moments
during data analysis. As teacher researcher, my decision to interview focal students
enacts a methodology that dehomogenizes White teacher candidates and explores the
resources that they brought to their learning.

Chapters four, five, and six comprise the data analyses of this study. In each
chapter, I present my analysis of the eight focal students’ perceptions of a particular
classroom discussion. In chapter four, Making it to college: Exploring students’
personal experiences in learning about diversity, focal students discussed the role of

personal experiences and the role of assumptions in understanding personal experiences

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through two critical moments in a class discussion that turned from the assigned reading
to the experiences of a classmate in coming to college. In chapter five, Barbie is (not)
the problem: Considering consensus and multiplicity in learning about diversity,
students foregrounded the role of consensus and multiplicity of ideas in class discussion
through a critical moment in a class discussion about a Barbie advertisement. In chapter
six, Black English as unfamiliar material: Considering a teacher’s pedagogical
responsibility, the students focused on the nature of the content and my role as their
teacher. Although students did not identify critical moments in this class discussion,
analysis of students’ perceptions of this discussion highlights variance regarding the ways
in which the focal students understood the knowledge from the text on Black English.
Taken together, these chapters provide concrete evidence for dismantling a monolithic
view of White teacher candidates as without knowledge and experiences for learning.

In chapter seven, Conclusions and implications: Creating a parallel practice
in teacher education, I extend my conceptual framework first described in chapter two
by drawing upon situational variation (Mehan, Herweck, & Meihls, 1986) to better
understand teacher candidate competence. This framework provides additional support
for the overarching argument: these eight White teacher candidates were not a
homogeneous group of deficient learners; they were a group of students that brought
resources to their learning about diversity. I also point to four pedagogical implications
for teacher education that surface from this study: pursuing students’ sense-making,

caring across differences, assessing by comparing, and teaching as (un)learning.

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Chapter 2

THE WORK OF MULTICULTURAL TEACHER EDUCATION:
(RE)CONCEPTUALIZING WHITE TEACHER CANDIDATES AS LEARNERS

Introduction: Challenging a prevailing view of White teacher candidates

The purpose of this chapter is to frame the problem that this dissertation study
addresses. The problem centers upon a widely held and often unexamined
conceptualization of White teacher candidates as learners about issues of diversity in
multicultural teacher education. In this view, White teacher candidates are a
homogeneous group of learners who lack resources; most of them have deficient
knowledge or experiences from which to build when it comes to learning about these
issues. The primary goal of this chapter is to explore, challenge, and revise this
prevailing conception.

Multicultural education seems well-defined by some policy makers and teacher
educators and researchers; many delineate general principles or guidelines for what
learning about diversity should include in K-12 classrooms and in higher education
(Banks, 1995; Chisholm, 1994; Dilworth, 1992; Gollnick, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1999;
Nieto, 1999; Sleeter & Grant, 1994). However, much less is known about the actual
practice of teaching and learning about diversity. Further, despite a growing body of
research that examines K-12 pedagogical enactments of these theoretical contributions
(e.g., Allen, 1997; Allen, 1999; Comber & Simpson, 2001; Dyson, 1997; Edelsky, 1999;
Fecho, 2000), research in teacher education classrooms remains in need (Cochran-Smith,
1995; Zeichner, 1999).

There has been a promising trend of teacher educators examining their own

practices while teaching multicultural courses. However, systematic studies of teacher

candidates’ perceptions of their learning about issues of diversity continue to remain
largely absent and there is little dialogue centered upon conceptions of White teacher
candidates as learners in multicultural teacher education. The need to research how
learning experiences are interpreted and given meaning by teacher education program
participants (Lapp, 1997; Zeichner, 1999) provides a powerful rationale for this
dissertation study. Ultimately, the viewpoints of teacher candidates need to be
considered to inform and reform the efforts made by teacher educators both to address
issues of diversity in teacher preparation programs and to conceptualize teacher
candidates as learners.

To engage in dissecting and revising the problematic and prevailing conception of
White teacher candidates, this chapter is divided into five sections. In the first section,
Inspecting the demographic imperative more closely: A look at assumptions about
learners and bigger pictures, I first describe in detail what the demographic imperative
is. I then note how this imperative has been used as a rationale for lumping together all
teacher candidates as deficient learners, through what I call the lenses of homogenization
and deficitization. I then situate the demographic imperative in three larger pictures: the
demographics of teacher educators, institutional contexts of education, and larger
segregation trends of our society. The current lack of attention to these three pictures
helps account for a deficit view of teacher candidates.

In the second section, Multicultural education: What is it and what has been
examined?, I foreground conceptions and instantiations of multicultural education to
highlight both the absence of teacher candidates’ experiences and the parallel absence of

debate about pedagogy in teacher education around issues of diversity. In the third

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section, The role of the teacher educator: Rescuing teacher candidates, the caricature
of teacher candidates and the heroic plot of multicultural teacher education are described
and situated within a larger picture of pedagogy.

To mobilize insights for a dialogue around creating a multicultural teacher
education, in the fourth section, Mobilizing pedagogical insights for conceptualizing
White teacher candidates as learners, I turn briefly to theoretical work that
conceptualizes students as having resources as well as the practice of teachers and teacher
educators who pedagogically embrace this idea. To conclude this chapter, in Taking it
one step further: Conceptualizing teacher candidates as competent, I briefly suggest
a conceptualization of White teacher candidates as competent; this notion of competence
will be explored further in the concluding chapter of this dissertation. Taken together, the
sections of this chapter highlight the need for dialogue, debate, and scholarship regarding
conceptualizations of White teacher candidates as learners and point to pedagogical
possibilities for multicultural teacher education.

Inspecting the demographic imperative more closely: A look at assumptions about
learners and bigger pictures

In this section, I first present what is often referred to as the demographic
imperative. This sets the stage for a critical examination of the prevailing ways in which
the demographic imperative as it is stated leads to a view of teacher candidates as a
monolithic and deficient group of learners. Finally, I situate the demographic imperative
in three bigger pictures. This helps question the legitimacy of using the demographic

imperative to deficitize teacher candidates as learners.

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Teacher candidates and K-12 students: What is the demographic imperative?
One essential rationale cited repeatedly throughout the teacher education literature
for why we need some form of multicultural preservice teacher education is what many

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have called “the demographic data, the demographic imperative,” or “the demographic
divide” (e.g., Chisholm, 1994; Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, in press; Colquett, 1999;
Dilworth, 1992; Gay & Howard, 2000; Gomez, 1996; Hopper, 1996; Kennedy, 1999;
Ladson-Billings, 1999, 2001; Landsman, 2001; Melnick & Zeichner, 1994; Paine, 1989;
Zeichner, 1996a). Cockrell, Placier, Cockrell, and Middleton note that “it has become
commonplace to point out that while the US. teaching force is increasingly White,
middle-class, and female, the nation’s PK-12 student population is growing significantly
more diverse” (1999, p. 351). This demographic imperative, familiar to teacher educators
and educational researchers, continually notes the disjunction between the socio—cultural
characteristics and previous experiences of the typical teacher candidate and those of
many of our K-12 students, particularly within our nation’s urban schools. The typical
teacher candidate is White, female, in her twenties, a monolingual speaker of English,
and from a lower middle to middle income background. Generally, these prospective
members of the teaching profession progressed through schooling already familiar with
its literacy traditions and practices and were successful students in school. On the other
hand, “not only are [current K—12] students likely to be multiracial or multiethnic but they
are also likely to be divided along linguistic, religious, ability, and economic lines that
matter in today’s schools” (Ladson-Billings, 2001, p. 14).

Although the demographic data includes race, gender, language, and class,

educators and researchers typically foreground the disjunction between teacher

10

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candidates and K-12 students mainly in terms of race. For example, Gay and Howard
(2000) cite 1999 statistics about the demographic divide from the US. Department of
Education that 86% of all elementary and secondary teachers are European Americans.
They note that the number of African American teachers has decreased from a high of
12% in 1970 to 7% in 1998, the number of Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander American
teachers is increasing slightly, but the percentages (5% and 1% respectively) are still very
small, and Native American teachers comprise less than 1% of the national teaching
force. Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) offer similar numbers, drawing on the
work of the educational demographer, Hodgkinson.

Citing student statistics, Gay and Howard (2000) note that 65% of our nation’s
students are European American and the other 35% are distributed among groups of
color. Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) estimate that some 40% of the school
population is currently from racially and culturally diverse groups. In addition, Gay and
Howard (2000) describe how student enrollments are growing in the opposite direction
racially from teacher statistics. These trends are expected to continue as the new century
progresses (Gay & Howard, 2000; Gomez, 1996). By 2026, some estimate that we will
have the inverse of racial representation in our student body; Hispanic and non-White
students will constitute 70% of our K-12 enrolled student body (Garcia, as cited in
Ladson-Billings, 1999, p. 91).

I highlight both the demographic imperative as well as the typical focus on race
because researchers and teacher educators often foreground this disjunction in order to
urge us to examine how we address issues of diversity within our teacher preparation

programs (Chisholm, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 2001; Melnick & Zeichner, 1994; Zeichner,

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1996a, 1996b). Although this urgency cannot be understated, I believe it is critical to
foreground what usually accompanies this demographic imperative. For the purpose of
Situating this dissertation study, the legitimacy of the demographic imperative seems to
serve as license to apply a deficit view to all White teacher candidates, a view in which
teacher candidates are characterized as deficient learners when it comes to studying
issues of diversity.

Preparirtgteacher candidates:1 What do we as teacher educators typically ask? What
might we first need to ask?

Given the typical understanding of the demographic imperative, teacher educators
usually ask questions such as: how can we prepare teacher candidates to envision how
different their students may be from them and how unlike their pupils’ schooling
experiences may be from their own? What kinds of assumptions do these teacher
candidates have about children who are less economically advantaged, speak a different
first language, and come from a different racial background? And, how can we as
teacher educators help teacher candidates become more aware of their assumptions?
Paine describes a sense of “urgency” regarding these considerations “as schools grow
more diverse and our teaching population does not” (1990, p. 2).

Though these questions remain urgent, I believe that we must first consider a
critical question. How do we, as teacher educators, conceptualize our teacher candidates
as learners about issues of diversity in our teacher preparation programs? In other words,

what conceptualization of our learners is embedded in the work that we do? I believe that

 

1 Although an analysis of practicing teachers’ professional development regarding issues of diversity
(which may include continuing coursework in colleges of education) remains a critical extension of
preservice preparation, especially given a conception of teachers as lifelong learners (Ball & Cohen, 1999;
Little, 1993) about diversity (Florio-Ruane. 2001), this chapter focuses on the preparation of teacher
candidates.

12

making explicit and closely examining these conceptualizations are critical steps in
envisioning what teacher preparation regarding issues of diversity might look like. This
type of work also can frame research that supports the creation and investigation of
teacher preparation programs.

A view of teacher candidates as learners: The lenses of homogenization and
deficitization

The conceptualization of teacher candidates as learners offered by teacher
educators (e.g., Chisholm, 1994; Dilworth, 1992; Gomez, 1996; Zimpher & Ashbum,
1992) seems to be driven by two problematic assumptions. The first is propelled by a
homogenizing lens for applying a particular view to all White teacher candidates. The
second assumption is the use of a deficit lens which describes White teacher candidates
as learners who bring little or nothing to their learning about diversity. Research shows
that variations in teachers’ expectations and standards can contribute to differences in
student academic success and aspirations, and that the actual sight of students (e. g.,
seeing students’ race) affects how teachers judge their intelligence, knowledge, capacity,
and future achievement (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). This has been named as
expectancy theory, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which “it is not the students’
characteristics or behavior that leads to success or failure; it is the expectations that
teachers have for students’ behavior that shapes these academic outcomes” (Mehan,
Hertweck, & Meihls, 1986, p. 71). Mindful of this research, it is important to consider
whether deficit views shared across teacher educators function as a kind of collective
prophecy of teacher candidates’ lack of performance around issues of diversity.

The first lens, a homogenization of teacher candidates as a monolithic group,

reflects a practice that teacher educators want their own teacher candidates to refrain

13

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from enacting. As teacher educators, we are quick to point out the danger of blanket
explanations when a teacher candidate says, “Peter doesn’t talk much in class, but then
Native American students don’t.” Yet at the same time, we often seem to engage in a
process of grouping all teacher candidates into a kind of monolithic category that
dissolves their differences; we ignore the natural variation that occurs within them, as in
any group. For example, Gomez writes, “I depict the perspectives of US. teacher
candidates - the majority of whom are White, middle-class, heterosexual, and
monolingual in English - on diverse students,” adding that she writes about all
“prospective teachers in the United States” for the purpose of describing “who they are”
and “what their perspectives” are (1996, p. 110). She writes that she considers, “how the
current cohort group of US. teachers consider and behave toward those whom they
teach” (p. 109). Zimpher and Ashbum explicitly refer to our teacher candidates as a
“homogeneous clientele” (1992, p. 40). In the university context in which I teach, I have
heard myself and others defend our practice of homogenizing our learners when we
describe our own teacher candidates as “even ‘more’ White, female, rural or suburban
because of where we are located.”

Thus, the kinds of generalizations we want our teacher candidates to avoid when
learning about culture, race, and ethnicity are very similar to those we often use to think
about who our teacher candidates are as a group. Rather than taking the stance that “all
human experience is intercultural and all individuals are intercultural beings” (Gollnick,
as cited in Zeichner, 1996a, p. 162) and that “there is often as much variation within
cultural groups as there is between groups” (Gollnick, 1992), a homogenization lens

masks the complexities of who White teacher candidates are.

14

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This homogenizing lens coincides with a deficit view of diversity. As teacher
educators, we claim that we do not want our teacher candidates to view their own
students’ diversity from a deficit perspective; instead we encourage them to view
diversity as a strength or resource and to work toward both cultural pluralism and social
equality for all students. Our how is that when they become teachers, they will both
honor cultural differences and work toward reducing inequalities in schools and society.
In working for these goals, we want our teacher candidates to view learners from all
backgrounds as bringing rich and legitimate knowledge to school, a perspective noted
and documented in the work of many teachers and researchers (Cook-Sather, 2002;
Christensen, 1995; Duckworth, 1996; Fecho, 2000; Freire, 1994; Gallas, 1995, Heath,
1983; Labov, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 2001; Nieto, 1996, 1999). However, Inow ask
whether or not we contradict the very same principle we supposedly advocate. If we
homogenize our teacher candidates as without knowledge about diversity, we impede any
consideration that they bring legitimate and diverse ideas to their learning. We do not
take seriously our own theory about the importance of legitimate prior knowledge. Put
simply, our actions exemplify the adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Holt-Reynolds
writes,

The principles of professional practice that we as teachers of teachers study,

value, and submit to our students have an annoying and unavoidable way of

doubling back on us. . .I ask myself whether I am reflecting accurately the
principle I am advocating. . .Am I practicing what I am teaching?...We are, after
all, always a teacher and a group of students. Do not the very principles we are

discussing apply to us while we are studying them? (1992, p. 326)

It bears noting that it is not my intention to homogenize teacher education faculty

as always subscribing to particular assumptions that homogenize teacher candidates from

a deficit lens. If a first deficit is attributed to K-12 students and a second to teacher

15

candidates, homogenizing teacher educators would represent a third deficit lens. Teacher
educators, like other groups, are not a monolithic group, and as a collective, we are
marked more by complexities than simple labels.

To understand further how the demographic imperative has been used, it is
helpful to situate the demographics in larger pictures. This stepping back serves as a
foundation for helping teacher educators re-think their views of teacher candidates as

learners.

The big( ger) picture(s): Situating the demographic imperative

 

Situating the typical conception of teacher candidates within three larger pictures
helps illuminate a larger frame for understanding teacher candidates and all of us as
learners. The first picture locates the demographic imperative within the demographics
of teacher educators. The second places teacher candidates within institutional portraits
of education. And a third picture takes into account the segregation of our communities.
Teacher educators

The racial and other demographics of teacher education faculties parallel the
profile of teacher candidates (Gay, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1999, 2001). MacDonald,
Colville-Hall, and Smolen note that faculty in colleges of education share race and other
features with the preservice teachers they teach, noting that 80% of education faculty are
White and 63% have grown up in communities where they had “little or no contact with
people they would later identify as ethnically or racially ‘different”’ (2003, p. 11). In
addition, “fewer than a third have traveled extensively outside their own country” and
“their [pre-K-12] classroom teaching. . .was seldom in urban settings with diverse student

populations” (ibid.). Similarly, Ladson-Billings (1995) points out that a very small

16

percentage of professors in colleges of education have experience teaching in our nation’s
urban schools. Zeichner adds, “Most of the education faculty who must be counted on to
improve the preparation of teachers for diversity are as lacking in interracial and
intercultural experiences as their students” (1996a, p. 138). Melnick and Zeichner write,
“Despite rhetoric to the contrary, efforts to reform U.S. teacher education to address
cultural diversity are severely hampered by the cultural insularity of most of the
education professoriate and by the lack of commitment to cultural diversity in teacher
education institutions” (1994, p. 13).

This demographic data of teacher educators points to some key questions, such as:
“Can they [teacher educators] do the job? What do they need to do it?” and what it might
mean to create “a sense of collective ownership of this enterprise” (MacDonald, Colville—
Hall, & Smolen, 2003, p. 11). These questions suggest the need for multicultural skills
and training given that there are very few professors of education “who have the
prerequisite skills in multicultural education needed to translate the theory of infusion
into the practice of curriculum development and classroom instruction” (Gay, 1997, p. 6).
Ladson-Billings questions, “How can teacher educators teach what they themselves do
not know?” (1995, p. 98) and Gay and Howard acknowledge the need for professors of
teacher education to have space for “multicultural education training similar to that which
we have proposed for their students” (2000, p. 15). Wallace (2000) accompanies her call
for teacher educators to engage in the work of creating multicultural teacher education
with a series of concrete questions that can engage faculty in immediate dialogue about
the construction of multicultural training in graduate schools of education. Thus, a more

complete portrait of the demographic imperative in teacher preparation depicts a majority

17

of White, lower middle class professors who mostly lack urban teaching experiences
preparing White, lower middle class, female students to be teachers.

Sleeter (2000-2001) notes, “As institutions, predominantly White universities
generally reflect the same attitudes and experiences of predominantly White students, and
it is as hard to change these universities as it is to change the people in them” (p. 239).
This points to an institutional picture of our teacher candidates.

Institutional portrait(s)

Recognizing the demographics of teacher educators illuminates a second bigger
picture for Situating teacher candidates as learners in teacher education programs, in
larger national standards for accreditation, and in K-12 schooling experiences. In their
examination of teacher education programs, Melnick and Zeichner (1994) describe what
is usually called “the segmented, single course approach” to issues of diversity as the
most common arrangement for learning about diversity. In this approach, rather than
integrating issues of diversity throughout courses in a teacher education program,
diversity issues are consigned to a single course. Educators and researchers explicitly
note that this single course approach is not sufficient (Gomez, 1996; Zimpher & Ashbum,
1992), and that there is a dire need for integration of multicultural competencies in all
aspects of a teacher education program (Gay, 1997; Gay & Howard, 2000; Smith, G.
1998). Gollnick notes that the application of multicultural requirements in schools and
teacher education has often been handled by “adding a course on multicultural education
or inserting units in existing courses” rather than using “cultural diversity and equity as
the lens through which all reform occurs” (1995, p. 62). Marshall writes that although

the single course typifies the multicultural experience for most teacher education

18

students, scholars have “long called for substantive incorporation of multicultural
education throughout the programmatic structure of teacher education” (1999, p. 57).
Looking at available empirical work, Zeichner (1996a) notes that research has
demonstrated the limited long-term impact of the segregated approach on the attitudes,
beliefs, and teaching practices of teacher education students.

In addition to critiquing the single course approach to multicultural education that
teacher candidates usually experience, educators also problematize the institutional norms
of teacher education programs. Florio-Ruane notes that the university preparation
programs which supposedly afford preservice teachers opportunities as students to reflect
upon school norms also seem to be “under the spell of the institutional norms that
regulate life in classrooms” (1989, p. 4). She explains that “contrary to popular belief,
the university and schools [are] not in competition for the hearts and minds of students;
instead they [collaborate] closely with one another to create a powerful conservative
force for defending existing institutional arrangements from close scrutiny and challenge”
(p. 3). Similarly, Ladson-Billings (1999) notes that teacher education programs continue
to prepare teachers as if they will be teaching in homogeneous, White, middle-income
schools. Grant and Wieczorek (2000) have critiqued the prevailing conception of teacher
knowledge in teacher preparation programs, characterizing knowledge as lacking inherent
and fundamental ties to social, cultural, historical, and political characteristics.

To address some of these challenges, there are policies for the inclusion of
multicultural education in programs that prepare educators. These policies reflect
standards for the national accreditation and guidelines of professional associations and

are the only national policies to which colleges and universities may be held accountable.

l9

However, adherence to these policies is a voluntary process (Gay, 1997; Gollnick, 1992).
Furthermore, in spite of the fact that the National Accreditation of Teacher Education
(NCATE) has required that multicultural education be incorporated into professional
education programs since 1980 through the issuance of Standards for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education, which Banks has described as “one of the most influential
developments during the early emergence of multicultural education” (1995, p. 11) and
Cochran-Smith, Davies, and Fries (in press) have described as “the good news,” nearly
half of the institutions in our country have not responded (Gay, 1997; Gollnick, 1992).

In a similar vein, other service-minded professions including counseling
(Ponterotto, Casas, Suzuki, & Alexander, 1995) and physical therapy (Leavitt, 2003)
have struggled with the inclusion of multicultural training in professional preparation.
Wallace (2000) notes that the call for multicultural training needs to expand to the fields
of administration, psychology, and professionals in health-related fields. Thus, one more
complete picture of the demographic imperative situates teacher education in a larger
educational system that does not value integration of issues of diversity throughout
professional preparation.

Finally, it bears noting that teacher candidates can be situated in an institutional
portrait of K-12 education. O’Donnell (1998) notes that most students enter college
courses with a long history of educational practice that has asked them to be silent
participants in their education. School knowledge is usually distant from the students’
lived experiences and the curriculum encountered in most of our students’ elementary

and secondary experiences lacks a multicultural perspective, including textbooks that still

20

describe a main storyline of White, male achievement (Bigelow, 1996; Landsman, 2001 ;
O’Donnell, 1998).
Segregation of our communities

A third critical piece often missing in descriptions of the demographic imperative
situates the demographics of teacher candidates in the larger picture of our country’s
segregated communities. However, a few scholars and educators do describe this picture
(Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, in press; Gay, 1997; Gay & Howard, 2000). Gay and
Howard (2000) address the segregation of students of color and European students in
school systems, noting that large numbers of European American students do not go to
school with students of color. They note that geographic locations often translate into the
racial separation of students, with students of color heavily clustered in large cities or
urban centers. Thus, “many teachers do not share residential backgrounds with students
they teach and ethnically diverse students are not necessarily in the same classrooms” (p.
3). Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) also write about the segregation of our
country and describe implications for teacher education. They discuss this disjunction in
terms of important disparities (regarding access to resources, opportunities, etc.), and
begin to suggest how growing up in a White homogeneous community affects preservice
teachers’ dispositions toward and knowledge about constructing curriculum and

instruction for students who are not White.2 The disjunction between teacher candidates

 

2 Several teacher educators have written about what it might mean to engage in multicultural teacher
education in communities of predominantly White K-12 students and White teachers (Noel, 1995; Liu &
Meadows, 2003). Liu and Meadows note that the demographics of our nation mask the high concentrations
of White students with White teachers (e.g., 50 states in the U.S. have a White p0pulation of 80% or above)
and wrestle with the question, what does it mean to “do” multiculturalism in geographically homogeneous
communities? They indicate that multicultural education focuses on preparing (mostly White) teachers to
work with diverse populations (e.g., Howard, 1999; Landsman, 2001), and wrote on one slide of their 2003
AERA presentation, “Very little information exists to help guide white professionals who work in
environments that have little or no diversity.”

21

(along with teacher educators) and K-12 students indicates the possibility of pronounced
differences between their experiences and worldviews. Acknowledging a larger picture
of geographic segregation shows how all citizens, including teachers, are affected by
larger national trends.

Summary

Understanding the demographic imperative with each of these three frames shows
that teacher educators continually make choices about what or who “the demographic
imperative” describes in teacher education. Typically, the description does not include
the three pictures outlined here. Neglecting the demographics of teacher educators, a
description of the institutions within which teacher candidates learn, and an
acknowledgement of broader societal segregation may foster a deficit view of teacher
candidates. For the purposes of this study, broadening and deepening our understanding
of the demographic imperative lays the groundwork for reconceptualizing teacher
candidates as learners.

It is my hope to provide opportunities to reflect individually and collectively
about our views of our learners, our pedagogies, roles, and goals in light of the critical
need to integrate issues of diversity throughout our teacher candidates’ professional
preparation. To explore this possibility, I provide a brief overview of some of the central
work of multicultural education. I do this for two main purposes. First, this allows for
some sense of the knowledge base of the field. Second, this sense of the knowledge base
highlights the absence of scholarship and debate regarding issues of pedagogy in teacher
education. This absence reflects a need to explore further conceptualizations of White

teacher candidates as learners about issues of diversity.

22

Multicultural education: What is it and what has been examined?3

Much important work has been done in the field of multicultural education. This
scholarship includes multiple conceptualizations of multicultural education, theoretical
work on race and racial identity, conceptions of K-12 pedagogy and teacher competence,
and research that includes teacher educators’ self-studies. I briefly describe each of these
in order to show that across this body of work, the need to research teacher candidates’
experiences of learning about issues of diversity remains a critical gap. Without this
research, teacher educators may fall back upon a view of teacher candidates as
homogeneous and without resources for their learning. Focusing on teacher candidates’
perspectives is one critical path toward documenting what teacher candidates bring to
their learning.
Definitions

Although there is a major consensus that the demographic imperative indeed
exists, there are many ways teacher educators and researchers have supported addressing
it through multicultural education. The term, multicultural education, is often used as an
umbrella concept for educational practices that deal explicitly with race, class, and
gender; sometimes, disability, sexual orientation, and language are considered (Sleeter &
Grant, 1994). Some proponents of multicultural education, including those who argue for
a focus on race, also foreground the need to recognize that there are “growing

tensions. . .between and among various groups that gather under the umbrella of

 

3 It is not my intention to offer a comprehensive historical account of the development of the practices and
dimensions of multicultural education. Others have taken up this formidable task (Banks, 1995; Cochran-
Smith, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Payne & Welsh, 2000). Some have written comprehensive reviews of
institutional attempts to prepare teachers for diversity (Gollnick, 1992; Grant & Secada. 1990; Ladson-
Billings, 1995; Zeichner, 1992) and others more fully describe national and state initiatives for
multicultural education (Gollnick, 1995).

23

multiculturalism” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 61). Multiculturalism as a term is
used more and more frequently to detail all types of difference (racial, gender,
socioeconomic, linguistic, ability, sexual orientation, etc.), and some scholars argue for a
rejection of a paradigm that “attempts to be everything to everyone and consequently
becomes nothing for anyone” (p. 62). Some teacher educators and researchers align
themselves with an activism and philosophy around race as the focal issue (Feagin, 2000;
Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Martinez, 2000). McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001)
state that their intention is not to marginalize anti-racist struggles, but to focus on both
class and race and highlight the ways in which the exploitative relations in a capitalist
system oppress people of color in disproportionate ways. Wallace (2000) emphasizes the
need in multicultural education for greater emphases on linguistic diversity, immigrant
issues, gay/lesbian parenting and sexual orientation issues, disability studies, and
spirituality. Langman (2000) and Schaffer (2003) argue for the inclusion of Jewish
perspectives, foregrounding the goal of working against anti-Semitism in schools. The
presence of debate seems critical because it indicates dialogue in the field about what
multicultural education is. Nonetheless, what remains noticeably absent is dialogue
about how to engage teacher candidates pedagogically in these ideas.
Visions and frafmemks

There is no shortage of general principles or guidelines for what learning about
diversity should include in K-12 classrooms and in higher education (Banks, 1995;
Chisholm, 1994; Dilworth, 1992; Gollnick, 1992, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Nieto,
1999; Obidah, 2000; Sleeter & Grant, 1994; Smith, G. 1998). Teacher educators and

researchers have noted that conceptions of multicultural education vary in terms of how

24

each names and enacts school-wide and societal goals, who the target students are, and
what curricular practices and instruction look like (Banks, 1995; Gollnick, 1995; Sleeter
& Grant, 1994). Banks notes that there may be an emerging consensus about the aims
and scope of multicultural education, but that the array of typologies within the field
“reflects its emergent status and the fact that complete agreement about its aims and
boundaries has not been attained” (1995, p. 3). Here, I briefly describe several
frameworks for the purpose of showing how much of the multicultural educational
literature remains largely “prepositional” and concerned with K-l2 teaching and learning
goals and outcomes, rather than issues of pedagogy in teacher education classrooms
(Lesko & Bloom, 1998, p. 378).

Several educators offer frameworks for what a multicultural education ideally
includes. Banks (1995) offers a typology of five dimensions: 1) integrating a variety of
cultures and groups into subject matter content; 2) demonstrating how knowledge is
constructed from cultural assumptions, biases, and racial, ethnic, and social class
positions; 3) developing strategies for prejudice reduction in classrooms; 4) building
pedagogies that enact equity or school achievement for students from diverse groups; and
5) restructuring school culture and social structures so that students from diverse racial,
ethnic, and social class groups will feel empowered. Bennett (2001) offers four broad
principles of multicultural education: 1) the theory of cultural pluralism; 2) ideas of
social justice and the end of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination; 3)
affirmations of culture in the teaching and learning process; and 4) visions of educational
equity and excellence leading to high levels of academic learning for all children.

Similarly, Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) suggest that multicultural teacher

25

education can be viewed through The American Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education’s three key assertions: 1) cultural diversity is a valuable resource, 2)
multicultural education maintains and expands the resource of cultural diversity (as
opposed to toleration or assimilation goals), and 3) a commitment to cultural pluralism
should permeate all aspects of teacher preparation programs.

Smith’s (1998) organization of Common sense about uncommon knowledge: The
knowledge bases for diversity, The American Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education’s recent publication, calls for critical examination of the absence of
multicultural teacher education and works toward delineating the content of a
multicultural teacher education curriculum. In an impressive and extensive attempt to
cull what many scholars have said regarding what should be the knowledge bases for
diversity in teacher education, this work seeks to help uninformed teacher educators
locate both theory and research that support each knowledge base. The knowledge bases
that she outlines include foundations work, sociocultural contexts of human growth and
psychological development, culture and learning theory, language, communication and
interactional styles of marginalized cultures, essential elements of culture, principles of
culturally responsive teaching and curriculum development, effective strategies for
teaching minority students, foundations of racism, effects of policy and practice on
diverse students, culturally responsive diagnosis and assessment, sociocultural influences
on subject-specific learning, gender and sexual orientation knowledge, and experiential
knowledge.

Both Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) and Sleeter and Grant (1995)

write about the multiple meanings for multiculturalism and therefore, multiple

26

instantiations of what multicultural teacher education actually is. Cochran-Smith, Davis,
and Fries (in press) offer a framework of eight questions as a way to examine particular
approaches to teacher education, noting that any approach acts either implicitly or
explicitly with answers to these questions. The questions are the diversity question, the
ideology question, the knowledge question, the teacher learning question, the practice
question, the outcomes question, the recruitment/selection question, and the coherence
question. These questions examine, for example, the construction of any program
through its construction of diversity, ideas about public education, what knowledge is
considered important for teaching diverse populations, assumptions about learning to
teach, competencies teachers need to teach in culturally responsive ways, how outcomes
of teacher preparation are measured, how teacher candidates are recruited and chosen,
and the degree to which the program functions like an integrated whole. Sleeter and
Grant ( 1994) characterize five general approaches to multicultural education, organized
from the weakest to the ideal approach. The broad goals of the five approaches range
from teaching those who are different how to succeed in mainstream society, teaching
tolerance for all groups, and studying a single ethnic group, to reforming the entire
educational process to support diversity and foregrounding social justice issues and social
change in order to reconstruct society and schools.

Because much of the recent conceptual work in multicultural teacher education
places an emphasis on race (Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, in press), this area merits
closer consideration.

Race: A logicafimd necessary theoretical focus

27

Given the teacher candidate and student demographics of race and the larger
picture of geographic segregation, the focus on preservice teacher learning about race is
not only logical but fundamental and necessary.4 Ladson~Billings and Tate (1995)
strongly assert the need to theorize race, especially within the paradigm of multicultural
education, and they offer several reasons for this. First, they articulate the belief that
inequalities are a logical consequence of a racialized society. Second, they note that
discussions about race and racism continue to be on the periphery of education. And
third, multicultural reforms continue to be absorbed back into the logic of our racist
system. Duesterberg (1999) also foregrounds the need to theorize race, in seeking to
understand how assumptions about race affect our actions and decisions in the practices
of teacher education. In a similar vein, Ponterotto, Casas, Suzuki, and Alexander (1995)
and Carter (2000) theorize race within the field of counseling psychology, and Carter
writes about the implications for educating both counselors and teachers.

The conceptual work around race has included a focus on self-examination or
reflecting on one’s own ethnicity and understanding oneself as a racial and cultural being
as a prerequisite to teaching for social justice (Carter, 2000; Florio-Ruane, 2001; Gay &
Howard, 2000; Howard, 1999; Marshall, 1999; O’Donnell, 1998; Rosenberg, 1997). Gay
and Howard (2000) delineate particular strategies or “techniques” for developing White
students’ ethnic and cultural self-awareness, including Spindler and Spindler’s (1993)
“cultural therapy” work and Howard’s (1999) use of personal reflections on the process
of White ethnic identity development. Gay also addresses the use of “cultural therapy”

9

and skills that teachers can acquire for being what Giroux (1993) calls “cultural workers’

 

4 The theoretical work on race can be traced through a rich history of scholarship done by African
American scholars, the early ethnic studies movement, and the Black studies movement (Banks, 1995).

28

and Gentemann & Whitehead (1983) call “cultural brokers” (1997, p. 5). A foundation
for entering these roles as teachers is the “development of one’s racial identity” because
racial identity “is a critical component of self-understandin g that can help educators to
understand the meaning of learning and teaching in their own development” (Carter,
2000, p. 888). The difficulty of engaging White teachers in conversations about race
because they do not see themselves as members of a racial group has also been
foregrounded. White teachers’ awareness of the impact of racism on their own and
others’ development has been described as minimal (Carter, 2000; Tatum, 1997, 2000).
Although White teachers may find it challenging to see their own racial identities and
racial privilege, some have written narratives about their own racial consciousness and
how issues of race, racial identity, and racism play themselves out in their classrooms
(Howard, 1999; Landsman, 2001; Paley, 1989).
K-12 pgdagogy and teacher competence

Conceptions of multicultural education have also taken the form of K-12
pedagogical guidelines as well as frameworks for describing teacher competence. Some
have detailed a culturally relevant pedagogy or pedagogy for the success of racial and
language minority students in K-12 schools (Ladson-Billings, 1994; 2001; Nieto, 1999;
Zeichner, 1996a) but a similar pedagogy has not been conceptualized for teacher
education students. Generally, these scholars stress that successful teaching for K-12
students of color involves high teacher expectations, or maintaining and enacting a belief
that all students can succeed. In addition, these scholars note that the teachers’ ability to
bridge the cultures of the school and home, allowing cultural elements that are relevant to

students to enter the classroom in a pluralist or additive approach, is critical to fostering

29

academic excellence and cultural integrity or maintenance of cultures and languages of
students. In her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, Ladson-Billings (2001) also
describes what it means for teachers to know the larger sociopolitical contexts (e. g.,
school, community, nation, world) in which students operate. Others note that explicit
teaching of the codes and customs of the school and larger society so that students will be
able to participate fully is central to good pedagogy (Delpit, 1995; Heath, 1983).
Educators also offer frameworks that describe culturally competent teachers
(Cochran-Smith, 2002; Gay, 1997; Gay & Howard, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002).
Cochran-Smith (2002) has developed a framework of six principles of practice: 1)
enabling important study for all students in learning communities; 2) building on what
students bring to school with them (e. g., knowledge, interests, linguistic resources); 3)
teaching skills and bridging gaps; 4) working with individuals, families, and
communities; 5) creating multiple and diverse means of assessment; and 6) making social
change, power, and injustice explicit parts of the curriculum. Villegas and Lucas (2002)
outline six salient characteristics that define what it means to be a culturally responsive
teacher. In their vision, culturally responsive teachers 1) are socioculturally conscious, 2)
have affirming views of students from diverse backgrounds, 3) see themselves as
responsible for and capable of bringing about change to make schools more equitable, 4)
understand how learners construct knowledge, 5) know about the lives of their students,
and 6) design instruction that builds on what their students already know. Chisholm
(1994) lists six key pieces for teachers to consider. She writes that preservice teachers 1)
need to become reflective practitioners, 2) gain cultural competence, 3) become effective

cross-cultural communicators, 4) understand the interrelationship between language and

30

culture, 5) recognize the cultural roots of cognition and its close link to language, and 6)
adapt the content of instruction and teaching style to students’ cultural and individual
preferences.

While frameworks such as these provide important conceptual work for
understanding culturally competent K—12 teachers, less is known about supporting
teacher candidates to achieve or enact these models of competence. Moreover, an
examination of how these models might offer a parallel pedagogy for teacher education
remains largely unexplored. In the final part of this section, I consider what we know
from some of the research on multicultural competence and teacher education.

Research on multicultural competence and teacher education

Bennett (2001) notes that there is “a long line of research on the impact of teacher
preparation programs on the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of preservice and in-service
teachers” regarding issues of multicultural competence (2001 , p. 172). Generally, this
research indicates that changing teachers’ perspectives is a long, labor-intensive process
(Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1990, 1991; Gomez & Tabachnick, 1992). Research on
individual courses has raised questions about teacher educators’ efforts to challenge and
change the perspectives of preservice teachers within the space of one course; some
teacher educators think that they had achieved limited success (Ahlquist, 1992; Ladson-
Billings, 1992; Beyer, 1991). One shot professional development seminars have not been
characterized as helpful, but rather as hurtful in perpetuating inservice teachers’
stereotypes (McDiarmid & Price, 1990).

Sleeter notes that samples of predominantly White preservice teachers have been

surveyed for years to examine their attitudes about teaching different racial and ethnic

31

ml

[6.11

the

if:

01‘.

in

M

ED

01

groups (2000-2001, p. 211). This survey research has indicated that White preservice
teachers might anticipate working with children of another cultural background, but that
these teachers bring little cross-cultural knowledge or experience. Sleeter also finds that
surveys report that White preservice teachers bring little awareness of understanding of
discrimination, especially racism.

McDiarmid and Price ( 1990) found “the greatest paradox” in examining the
results of a particular intervention designed to provide teachers from dominant White
culture with the knowledge and skills to work with students of diverse cultural
backgrounds with the goal of helping them view cultural diversity as a positive influence
on learning and to improve their perception of expectations for students from culturally
diverse backgrounds. They found that teachers exposed to increasing amounts of
information about children who are culturally different from themselves do not
subsequently recognize and reject stereotypes more often than those who do not have that
information; rather, the presentation of information may have actually encouraged them
to generalize and prejudge students. In her seminal study of 233 preservice teachers’
orientation towards diversity at the beginning of their involvement in teacher education,
Paine (1989) describes “the limited background of prospective teachers” for talking about
issues of diversity. One promising practice for challenging and changing preservice
teachers’ perspectives is the use of field experiences. These experiences placed
preservice teachers in situations where they became the “other” and were simultaneously
engaged in seminars or other ongoing conversations that guided their self—inquiry and

reflection (Mahan, 1982; Larke, Wiseman, & Bradley, 1990).

32

Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries offer a comprehensive look at the empirical
work done between 1992 and 2001 , indicating that much of the research in multicultural
teacher education has been teacher educators’ self-studies. For example, Duesterberg
(1999) uses her own practice as a teacher educator to theorize about the role of race in
teacher education and several teacher educators offer reflections on their pedagogy
(Lesko & Bloom, 1998; Obidah, 2000; Sleeter, 1996). Yet, what continue to remain
absent are systematic studies of teacher candidates’ reflections on their learning about
issues of diversity. There remains a need to research how learning experiences are
interpreted and given meaning by teacher education program participants (Zeichner,
1999). Cochran-Smith writes, “I know little. . .about how student teachers really make
sense of their year in our preservice program” (1995, p. 545). Similarly, Melnick and
Zeichner explain that little is known “about how teacher candidates interpret and give
meaning to attempts to influence them in particular ways” (1994, p. 18).

Summag

It is not my intention to deny the importance of debate and scholarship regarding
what issues should play a central role in creating multicultural teacher preparation
programs, nor to deny the important contributions of each of the key pieces briefly
described in this chapter. My intention is to acknowledge that although much important
theoretical work has been done in multicultural education, especially around the issues of
race and racial identity, the actual practice of teaching and learning about issues of
diversity in teacher education is more nebulous. Despite a growing body of research that
examines K-12 pedagogical enactments of these theoretical contributions (e. g., Allen,

1997; Allen, 1999; Comber & Simpson, 2001; Dyson, 1997; Edelsky, 1999; Fecho,

33

2000), research in teacher education classrooms remains in need (Cochran—Smith, 1995;
Zeichner, 1999). In the next section, I want to draw attention to how the available
scholarship seems to foster a kind of “business as usual” narrative about the roles of and
the relationship between teacher candidates and teacher educators. The absence of debate
about pedagogy may actually encourage a kind of caricature of both teacher candidates
and teacher educators.
The role of the teacher educator: Rescuing teacher candidates

A narrative that depicts White teacher candidates as deficient learners who lack
resources to engage in learning about issues of diversity seems to permeate descriptions
of multicultural teacher education. In addition, often accompanying this caricature of
teacher candidates is a conception of teacher educator as “hero to the rescue.” I believe it
is necessary to examine this narrative critically and re-see the relationship between
pedagogy and teacher candidates. This entails turning to several teachers and teacher
educators who help frame critical questions that foster dialogue and debate about
conceptualizing White teacher candidates as learners.
Business as usual: Micature of teacher candidates & the sub-text of a heroic plot

Often, what seems to accompany the demographic imperative are pictures that
suggest that teacher candidates have little to no knowledge and experiences (or the wrong
knowledge and experiences) for bridging the divide between their own understandings
and those of their future students. Therefore, teacher educators face the task of somehow
rescuing teacher candidates from their lack of knowledge or from their misconceptions.
The scholarship that does focus on actual teachers and teaching typically concludes that

changing teachers’ perspectives is a long, labor-intensive process and notes the problems

34

encounters:
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encountered in teaching multiculturalism. These problems often involve describing the
limited backgrounds of White teacher candidates (Paine, 1989), “the resistance of
European-American students” and “the multiple forms that discomfort takes (e. g., anger,
disengagement, or passivity) in the classroom” (Lesko & Bloom, 1998, p. 378). A kind
of caricature emerges, perhaps best exemplified by Gomez’s statement:

As a teacher educator engaged in challenging - and attempting to change -

the perspectives on ‘Others’ of young, White, monolingual-in-English,

heterosexual females from suburbia, I am keenly aware of the difficulties

and ironies of the tasks I and my colleagues have set for ourselves. I recognize

that it is unlikely that a few semesters in a teacher education program can turn

racists or homophobes into teachers who carefully and joyfully educate the

children of ‘Others.’ (1996, p. 126)

In the teacher educator act of “attempting to change” our students who are “racists
or homophobes,” pictures of teacher candidates as resistant, angry, defensive, passive, or
disengaged ensue (Goodman, 1998; Smith, G. 1998; Zimpher & Ashbum, 1992). Many
educators have written about these reactions from teacher candidates (Ahlquist, 1992;
Chavez Chavez & O’Donnell, 1998; Gay & Howard, 2000; Gollnick, 1992). Allsup
(1995) calls the multicultural teacher education classroom a “stormy environment,”
especially if the teacher is a person of color or a White female. Based on a conception of
teacher candidates as deficient, passive, and disengaged or hostile learners, teaching in
multicultural education seems to be grounded in the teacher educator’s solitary and heroic
act. Multicultural teacher educators enter the classroom to save their students from their
lack of awareness, transforming them into social justice educators. Lesko and Bloom
refer to this as the “realism, rationalism, and the heroic plot in multicultural teacher

education” (1998, p. 379). In some teacher educators’ accounts, the plot of hero actually

turns into combat between teacher educators and teacher candidates. Teacher educators

35

must fight against the “provincial perspectives” of all teacher candidates and teacher
candidates’ “parochialism” must be “overcome” (Dilworth, 1992, p. 13). Dilworth
writes, “The battle must be engaged” (p. 13).
Re-seeing the relationship between pedagogy and student engagement

It is critical to note that reactions such as resistance, anger, or defensiveness may
be a natural part of the consciousness work and racial identity development of White
teacher candidates. However, it is important to consider that perhaps these reactions also
occur in part as a response to the ways in which we as teacher educators construct teacher
candidates and the ways in which we construct our own roles, courses and programs.
Cuban calls the teachers’ belief that students are “unknowing, unthinking, and unaware”
as “patronizing” (1973, p. 105). Britzman (1991) describes the general orientation to
multicultural education in terms of teacher educators preoccupied with supplying students
with “accurate” and “authentic” representations, offering “good realism” as a remedy to
the bad stereotypes teacher candidates have. She problematizes how teacher educators
believe in the power of “the real” to transform, pledging allegiance to the notion that
teacher candidates’ “heads are full of false ideas which can, however, be totally dispersed
when [they] throw [them]selves open to ‘the real’ as a moment of absolute
authentication” (p. 231).

The caricature of teacher candidate as deficient is inextricably linked with our
pedagogical choices as teacher educators; the assumption that our students are deficient
may lead to pedagogies that deaden their engagement. The power of this self-fulfilling

prophecy seems to elude us. We rarely consider that it is possible that our students

36

disengage

Giroux w

Cn‘nztn l
content.
method
for the
and the
belief
inedu

noting

edUt

“r

disengage in the classroom because we use methods that assume they are disengaged.
Giroux writes,

Unless the pedagogical conditions exist to connect forms of knowledge to the

lived experiences, histories, and cultures of the students we engage, such

knowledge is reified or ‘deposited’ in the Freirian sense, through transmission
models that ignore the context in which knowledge is produced and
simultaneously functions often to silence as much as deaden student interest.

(2001, p. 7)

Cuban (1973) argues that “white instruction” destroys the life and potential of “ethnic
content.” He describes white instruction as a shorthand way for naming traditional
methods of telling, explaining, and clarifying that have been the mainstay of classrooms
for the last thousand years, with a view of the learner as passively absorbing information
and the belief that mastery of all the fact must precede analysis. Cuban foregrounds “the
belief that racism can be eliminated by filling up kids with information” as a central error
in educational thinking (p. 103). Similarly, Palmer writes about this phenomenon,
nofing,

Whatever tidbits of truth these student stereotypes contain, they grossly

distort reality and they widen the disconnection between students and their

teachers. Not only do these caricatures make our lives look noble in

comparison to the barbaric young, but they also place the courses of our

students' problems far upstream from the place where our lives converge

with theirs...these stereotypes conveniently relieve us of any responsibility

for our students' problems - or their resolution. (1998, p. 41)

Some educators specifically write about pedagogy in the context of higher
education (Allen & Labbo, 2001; Cochran-Smith, 2000; Cockrell, et al., 1999; Florio-
Ruane, 2001; Holt-Reynolds, 1992; O’Donnell, 1998). Elbow (1986) describes his
frustration with the lack of attention in higher education to the processes of learning and

the belief that ideas can be directly conveyed from one person to another. Florio-Ruane

writes that “teacher education remains hamstrung by a transmission-oriented pedagogy”

37

(1995, p. 14). In the specific context of multicultural teacher education, Zimpher and
Ashbum ask,
What are we teaching by how we do teacher education, beyond the content itself?
If our teacher education programs are not caring and collaborative learning
communities that foster continuous discourse about the pedagogical implications
of diversity, how can we expect our white middle-class students to believe or act
differently from the ways in which they were taught? (1992, pp. 57-58, emphasis
in original)
A learning question for multicultural teacher education
The “learning question” that Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (in press) name
focuses on pedagogical choices for teaching multicultural curriculum to teacher
candidates. They use this term to refer to “how in general teachers learn to teach for
diversity and what, in particular, are the pedagogies of teacher preparation (e. g.,
coursework assignments, readings, discussion) that makes this learning possible” (p. 39-
40). They cite Cochran-Smith and Lytle who argue that “inquiry-based teacher
preparation, rather than the ‘training’ or transmission models that prevail in many places,
are the most promising approaches for preparing teachers to be lifelong learners who can
work effectively in diverse settings” (p. 40). Obidah explains, “For some of us who teach
multicultural education, we approach our classrooms far more confident about what we
want to teach, than about how we will teach it” (2000, p. 1035). Gay similarly describes
the idea of infusing multiculturalism throughout preservice teacher preparation as “a very
powerful idea pedagogically and a very challenging one operationally” (1997, p. 6). Gay
describes how the prevailing pedagogical norms of college teaching” contribute to the
difficulty of infusing multicultural education in preservice teacher preparation (1997, p.

6). She writes that anything that deviates from lecturing is more an anomaly than the

norm; yet, the “inherent nature and intent of multicultural education require more

38

engaging and varied instructional strategies” (p. 6). The existing scholarship offers “only
an afterthought to the teachers and teaching strategies used” (Cuban, as cited in Ladson-
Billings, 1992, p. 106). Britzman writes about a concern about the “pacification of
knowers and what is to be known. When knowledge is reduced to right directives that
demand little else from the knower than acquiescence, both the knower and knowledge
are repressed. Knowledge is expressed as static and immutable” and novices are viewed
as empty receptacles (1991, p. 29).

This points to a key question: what would it mean to enact a pedagogy in
multicultural teacher education that fits with our understandings about how students learn
more generally? To consider how teacher educators might construct a pedagogy of
multicultural education, I turn to the practice of teachers and teacher educators who view
students as active learners who bring valuable resources to their learning.

Mobilizing pedagogical insights for conceptualizing White teacher candidates as
Ieamers

Conceptualizing students as active learners who bring resources to their learning
Florio-Ruane notes that there have been strong calls in teacher education
paralleling the movement in educational theory and practice from a paradigm of
knowledge transmission to one of knowledge construction (2001, p. 57). Constructivist
learning theory is a body of developmental and cognitive research that has led to a
growing consensus about how students learn well; it has led teachers to conceptualize
students as active builders and testers of knowledge. These perspectives, which call for
the collapse of what is usually seen as a gap between students’ experiences and
disciplinary knowledge, are not new. In one attempt to distill key tenets of this rich body

of work, Howe and Berv (2000) describe two basic premises of constructivist learning

39

theory: I
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theory: learning takes as its starting point the knowledge, attitudes, and interests students
bring to the learning situation, and learning results from the interaction between these
characteristics and experience in such a way that learners construct their own
understandings. A central insight from this learning theory is that learners build powerful
maps of the world only by starting from and adding to or revising their existing maps.
Students therefore need opportunities to formulate, test, and revise their concepts about
phenomena in the world.

Howe and Berv (2000) also describe two premises of constructivist pedagogy that
parallel the two of constructivist learning theory: instruction must take as its starting
point the knowledge, attitudes, and interests students bring to the situation, and
instruction must be designed so as to provide experiences that effectively interact with
these characteristics of students so that they may construct their own understanding. This
work of the teacher in supporting students’ active testing, revising, and extending is often
called “scaffolding” (Vygotsky, as cited in Phillips, 2000). This scaffolding may include
direct teaching of certain key information, ideas, or skills, and the provision of key
materials and resources, but it must leave room for students to speculate, create, and
revise. Vygotsky maintained that the acquisition of higher psychological processes
occurs through interactions with others and that over time, these processes gradually take
place within the individual (as cited in Brock & Gavelek, 1998). This social
constructionist view of learning holds that the scaffolding of ideas occurs best in a social
context of discussion, debate, and comparison of one’s own maps with those of others

(Brunner & Tally, 1999).

40

This “new” consensus on learning recapitulates ideas developed by John Dewey.
More than one hundred years ago, Dewey (1902) challenged prevailing views of learning
by suggesting that education is a process in which the learner uses prior knowledge and
experience to shape meaning and construct new knowledge. Dewey’s work (1902, 1904.
1938) reflected a continuing struggle to understand how students learn and how teachers
and schools can foster their learning. In naming the central question as how to erase the
notion that there is some kind of gap between the child’s experience and subject matter,
Dewey did not position himself on either end of this dichotomy, where one side
privileges the transmission of formulated subject-matter and the other side follows the
capricious whims of children’s interests. He argued that we must hold an integrated and
dynamic view of the curriculum and the child, seeing the discipline within the
experiences of the child. Thus, what concerns a teacher are the ways in which a subject
can become a part of students’ experience. Dewey characterized the teacher’s act of
viewing and using subject matter in relationship with the experience of the child as
“psychologizing” subject matter. He also viewed a teacher’s own knowledge of the
subject matter as critical in helping interpret a student’s needs and growth.

Bridging these ideas about learning and multicultural educational theory requires
a recognition that pedagogy assists students’ construction of knowledge. Mathison and
Young (1995) note the potential for merging constructivism and multicultural education.
They argue that a constructivist approach where learners structure information and ideas
in ways that are personally meaningful to them must be mobilized for creating a
multicultural education. Their work implies that constructivism may help counter

0Vergeneralizations about White teacher candidates as a homogeneous group of deficient

41

learners because teacher educators would begin with the varied and nuanced experiences
of White teacher candidates. A central question emerges: what would it mean to enact a
pedagogy where White teacher candidates’ experiences are legitimized as integral to
teaching and learning? To explore this possibility, I turn to the work of some teachers
and teacher educators.
Exploring the practice of teachers and teacher educators

A long line of teachers have sought to draw upon Dewey’s ideas by mobilizing
students’ experiences and ways of understanding so that students can gain access to
disciplinary knowledge. For example, Duckworth (1996) writes from the premise that
often learners’ ways of understanding are often left unrecognized by teachers, teacher
educators, curricula and assessment. To improve students’ learning, she explains that
teachers need to probe students’ thinking and ways of understanding and get inside of
students’ explanations to make connections between students’ ways of knowing and
teachers’ ways of knowing a discipline. Similarly, in her work as an elementary school
science teacher-researcher, Gallas describes what she characterizes as the language that
children use naturally in science discussions, noting that students might not be able to
“use the appropriate terminology or factual references about a scientific phenomenon, but
they were all in full possession of a natural ability to question, wonder, and theorize
about every aspect of the natural and physical world” (1995, p. 3). Rosenberg, a teacher
educator in the field of multicultural education, argues that teacher educators must “show
how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material”

(1997, p. 21). Thus, how can particular kinds of pedagogies that build on students’

42

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strengths and resources be used with White teacher candidates in multicultural teacher
education?

In the field of multicultural teacher education, some teacher educators have used
self-studies to begin to address the critical shift away from a homogenization and deficit
view of teacher candidates to a view of them as learners who bring experiences and
resources to their studies of diversity (Allen & Labbo, 2001; Chavez Chavez &
O’Donnell, 1998; Cockrell et al., 1999; Cochran-Smith, 1995, 2000; Lesko & Bloom,
1998; Obidah, 2000; Rosenberg, 1997; Sleeter, 1996). One group of teacher educators,
Cockrell, Placier, Cockrell, and Middleton (1999), discovered that they had not adhered
to one of the values that they espoused in the course: know your students. This group
describes how “labeling them [their students] as a sea of ‘predominantly White, middle
class females’ was simplistic and denied hidden forms of diversity and differences of
opinion among them” (p. 353). In addition, they note that “describing the students as
‘racist’ or at least ‘ignorant’ probably occurred to [them], but this blame-the-students
position was also contradictory” to their espoused values. Moreover, they were
concerned that “in some cases, initial negativity about diversity may have actually
hardened” as a result of their course (p. 353). Similarly, Allen and Labbo (2001) describe
what they call a shift from a “you should” pedagogical stance to a “who are you?”
starting point when creating culturally engaged teaching with their preservice teachers.
Allen and Labbo describe their own learning through interrogating the stereotypes and
homogenizing assumptions that they held of their students as “sorority girls.” They

describe their goal “to look beyond their [students’] surface homogeneity as young,

43

privileged, white females” to find “their remarkable strength in interrogating some of
their tacit cultural influences” (p. 50).

Across these teacher educators who have conducted self-studies, the beliefs and
lived experiences of teacher candidates are viewed as coherent, legitimate, and necessary
premises from which teacher candidates enter their formal, professional studies. These
teacher educators have sought ways in which the diversity of experiences and beliefs of
their students can enter the classroom, and this diversity provides insights regarding the
ways in which schools and other institutions have asked them to make sense of their
experiences. In accordance with this view of learners, the pedagogical approaches of
these teacher educators for helping prospective teachers make sense of their own
experiences seem to require a radically different approach to teacher preparation. This
approach relies less on receiving knowledge than on knowledge that teacher candidates
actively construct. Perhaps as teacher educators respect and pedagogically use the
differences among their teacher candidates as learners, they model ways for teacher
candidates to enter into relationships with their own future [K—12] students who may
differ even more from them. Perhaps “new expectancies” for (teacher candidates as)
learners “can lead to their learning more than had been believed possible” (Rosenthal &
Jacobson, 1968, pp. 181-182).

Taking it one step further: Conceptualizing White teacher candidates as competent
learners

This chapter has explored various facets of multicultural education. From general
guidelines, visions, and frameworks to enactments in K-12 and teacher education
classrooms, these facets underscore the critical need to consider the ideas of preservice

teachers. I argue that this need involves broadening and deepening our understanding of

the demographic imperative. I offered three additional frames to show how teacher
candidates are not the problem, but rather they become what can be considered “a display
board for the problems of the system” (McDermott & Varenne, 1995, p. 341). I also
demonstrated that although multiculturalism has become more of an established field in
education, with a body of knowledge, texts, and curricula, we know less about the actual
teaching of preservice multicultural teacher education. I then showed how the current
conceptualization of learners may even discourage debate about pedagogy around issues
of diversity because teacher educators get to be “heroes to the rescue.”

It is necessary to reframe the structure of debate about preservice teachers
learning about diversity. I believe this hinges on replacing a conceptualization of teacher
candidates as a monolithic and deficient group of learners with a conceptualization of
teacher candidates as competent learners who bring rich resources to their learning. The
idea of competence can help reconceptualize teacher candidates as learners. This idea
comes with a rich history, with links to a host of educational progressives who have
advocated that students bring experiences and understandings to new learning situations
(Dewey, 1902, 1904, 1938; Duckworth, 1996, Freire, 1994; Freire & Macedo, 1987). My
use of the term is traced more directly to the work of McDermott and Varenne (1995,
1998) and Mehan, Hertweck, and Meihls (1986). McDermott and Varenne use the
context of special education to show how learning disability can be understood as
situational and organized by a variety of contextual factors. Similarly, Mehan, Hertweck,
and Meihls write that disability is not a fixed or stable entity, but rather a construction

that teachers engaged in routine educational practices organize. In this dissertation, I

45

argue that rather than view eight White teacher candidates as homogeneous or deficient,
it is more pedagogically sound to see competence as contextually dependent and varied.

It is important to note that I do not believe that it is easy or possible for some
teacher candidates to know what it is like to experience classism or racism, to know what
it is like to live in a housing project, etc. In addition, I am not discounting the importance
of teacher candidates having experiences with students who are different from them.
This study raises questions about how we are conceiving of the ability and potential of
our White teacher candidates in studying issues of diversity. Using my analysis of eight
teacher candidates’ perceptions of moments during three class discussions, I explore a
conception of White teacher candidates as competent learners. Because the idea of
competence emerged as this study was completed, I explore this notion more fully in the
concluding chapter.
Link to methodology

To make my overarching argument concrete, it is important for those who have
been oversimplified and deficitized, i.e., White teacher candidates, to serve as key
informants in this study. Consistent with this focus on the experiences and perceptions of
White teacher candidates, Erickson notes that qualitative research is rooted in two key
questions: What is happening here, specifically? And what do these happenings mean to
the people engaged in them? (1986, p. 124). To ground these questions in the topic of

this dissertation, I turn to a fuller description of the methodology that guided this study.

46

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Chapter Three
TEACHER EDUCATOR AS RESEARCHER: LEARNING WITH AND FROM
MY OWN STUDENTS

“Some members of the university culture challenge whether [teacher research] should
count as research at all, an issue that is brought into sharp relief when doctoral students
(and their professors) assert the validity of teacher research as dissertation” (Cochran-
Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 21).
Introduction

To dispel views of White teacher candidates as homogeneous and deficient, this
study was designed to investigate and understand the perceptions of eight White
undergraduate preservice teachers regarding their learning from whole class discussions
during a semester—long course about issues of diversity. In this course, issues of diversity
are defined in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. The course
is open to all university students and is required for all teacher education students, who
usually take the course before applying to the teacher education program. This study was
a form of teacher research, since I took on the dual roles of teacher educator and
researcher and studied my students’ perceptions of whole class discussions. The research
questions that framed this study evolved from questions that I had about my practice as a
teacher educator and from a pilot study that I conducted on my own teaching practice.
These questions were:

1) What resources do preservice teachers bring to learning about diversity?

What happens to those resources in whole class discussions?

47

2) What are the content and process of the talk about issues of diversity in

whole class discussions?

3) What are preservice teachers’ perceptions of “learning about diversity”

during particular whole class discussions?

In this chapter, I provide a rationale and description of the research methodology
that supports this study. First, I describe the interpretive approach of this study. Given
that I served as teacher educator for the participants, I then situate this study as teacher
research, addressing both the benefits and challenges of engaging in teacher research.
Next, I describe the research setting, including an overview of the course, the students in
the class, and myself as teacher educator. I then describe the design of this study,
including focal student selection, pilot study groundwork, interviews, and listening
sessions. Finally, I describe my methods of data analysis, concluding with what focal
students viewed as critical moments in whole class discussions. By studying the thinking
and beliefs of preservice teachers, this study provides an understanding of the multiple
ways in which eight White preservice teachers perceived learning about diversity from
discussions.

Situating this study as interpretive

The need for understanding through documentation of the concrete details of a
teaching practice and the need to consider the local meanings for the people involved are
two central reasons for engaging in interpretive educational research (Erickson, 1986).
Erickson (1986) explains that interpretive research in the field of education helps frame
classrooms as socially and culturally organized spaces for learning, noting that

interpretive research foregrounds the sense-making of teachers and learners as integral to

48

the process of education. This dissertation study centered on the “immediate and local
meanings of actions, as defined from the actors’ point of view,” a feature that
distinguishes interpretive research (Erickson, emphasis in original text, 1986, p. 1 19).
This study relied on an interpretive method of inquiry, as its aim was to foreground the
teacher candidates’ perspectives on specific whole class discussions about various issues
of diversity. My fieldwork involved intensive, long-term participation in the setting, as I
documented what happened in the setting through audio recordings, field notes, and other
kinds of documentary evidence (e. g., copies of students’ work, my lesson plans, e-mails
between me and my students, etc.), and as I engaged in subsequent analytic reflection on
this evidence in the form of analytical memos, charts, and detailed descriptions. These
processes of documentation and analysis are what Erickson (1986) describes as the key
components of interpretive, participant observational fieldwork.

Erickson’s ideas about interpretive research resonate with Sleeter’s (2000-2001)
reading of phenomenological research in the field of preservice teacher preparation for
historically underserved children. This dissertation study is “rooted in the belief that
reality cannot be known apart from the knower and that knowing always happens in
context,” i.e., the phenomenological approach that Sleeter takes (p. 223). According to
Sleeter, this approach to research in teacher education is “concerned with the ways in
which people experience and interpret courses, programs, and other specific
interventions. What actually occurs in a class or program? What does it look like from
the points of view of various participants?” (p. 223). This study addressed these
questions and is motivated by what Sleeter describes as understanding how teacher

candidates interpret experiences within their teacher preparation program.

49

Given this purpose, this dissertation study is an example of teacher research, as I
focused on my former students’ experiences in a course where I served as their instructor.
Situating this study as teacher researchs

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) describe five major trends that they see as
contributing to the development of the teacher research movement: 1) the prominence of
teacher research in teacher education, professional development, and school reform; 2)
the development of conceptual frameworks for teacher research; 3) the dissemination of
teacher research at and beyond the local level; 4) critiques of the teacher research
movement; and 5) the transforrnative possibilities of teacher research on university
culture. These trends are prominent because of the work of K-12 teachers who are
researching their own practice (Akin, 2001; Barbieri, 1995; Gallas, 1995), university
researchers who teach and research their own practice in K-12 classrooms (Ball, 1993,
1999; Baumann, 1996; Lensmire, 1993; Levine-Rose, 1999; Pardales, 2001; Theule-
Lubienski, 1997), and a growing body of teacher educators who study their own college
classroom teaching (Cochran-Smith, 1995, 2000; Cockrell, Placier, Cockrell, &
Middleton, 1999; Featherstone, 2003; Loughran & Russell, 2002; McVee, 1999;
Rosenberg, 1997).

Despite this heightened attention to teacher research, the work of teacher
researchers is not without its critiques (Baumann, 1996; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990,
1993, 1999; Lampert, 2000; Zeichner, 1999). Some of these include concerns about
generalizability and theoretical frameworks. Given that teacher researchers’ questions

are highly reflective, immediate, and referenced to particular students and classroom

50

contexts, the research criterion of generalizability has been used to discount teacher
research. In response, teacher-researchers note that clinging to traditional conceptions of
generalizability makes little sense. Rather than emphasizing claims about applicability
across contexts, teacher researchers are more concerned with enacting and understanding
changes in individual classrooms. Moreover, Cochran-Smith and Lytle add that although
teacher researchers may not be motivated by the criterion of generalizability, this does
not mean that their work cannot “in fact be relevant to a wide variety of contexts” (1990,
p. 6). For example, teacher researchers, as with interpretive researchers in general, argue
that understanding one classroom may indeed help understand other classrooms
(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990). This notion of generalizability can be situated in well-
developed traditions in the fields of law, medicine, and clinical psychology of “case-to-
case transfer,” or using what is learned from one case for understanding another case
(Firestone, 1993).

Another critique of teacher research is that it is insufficiently grounded in theory.
Responding to this critique, Cochran-Smith and Lytle note that although teacher-
researchers’ questions “are not framed in the language of educational theory, they are
indeed about discrepancies between theory and practice” (1990, p. 6). They add that
teacher researchers argue that traditional university-based definitions of theory are
limiting, and that teachers’ theories can be understood as interrelated conceptual
frameworks that are grounded in classroom practice.

Teacher research also faces critiques regarding its methodological rigor

(Baumann, 1996; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, 1993, 1999; Lampert, 2000; Zeichner,

 

5 It is not my intention to offer an historical overview of the U.S. teacher research movement, i.e., a detailed
analysis of why teacher research can be considered a movement and not just a fad. Others have taken up

51

1999). Although teacher researchers may use standard forms of interpretive research
(e.g., classroom documents, interviews, audiotapes, journals), some have questioned the
ability of teacher researchers to engage in the demands of rigorous documentation and
analysis because of constraints on their time. In addition, teacher researchers may be
criticized for not being as “objective” as outsiders due to the personal stakes in making
claims about their own students’ learning. To address these critiques, teacher researchers
have provided standards of rigor, systematicity, and intentionality (Cochran-Smith &
Lytle, 1993; Hubbard & Power, 1999).

Part of enacting these standards requires that teacher researchers attend to and
negotiate the complexities of becoming observant participants in their own classrooms.
Erickson characterized a teacher researcher’s role as “not that of the participant observer
who comes from the outside world to visit, but that of an unusually observant participant
who deliberates inside the scene of action” (as cited in Baumann & Duffy-Hester, 2000,
p. 93). Teacher researchers offer a particular perspective on classroom practice because
they explore their own practice and make sense of the classroom worlds as “‘full-time

’3’

inhabitants of those settings rather than episodic visitors (citing Shulman, Baumann &
Duffy-Hester, 2000, p. 21). Baumann & Duffy-Hester note, “The insider role of teacher
researcher brings with it a unique combination: the power associated with first-person
insight, the limitation of a participant perspective, and perhaps a bit of tension involved in
trying to simultaneously teach and study one’s teaching environment. It is this unique

combination of qualities. . .that gives teacher research its individuality and status as a new

research genre” (2000, p. 93).

 

this formidable task (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Loughran & Russell, 2002; Zeichner, 1999).

52

In the rest of this chapter, I demonstrate how this dissertation exemplifies
“systematic and intentional inquiry about teaching, learning, and schooling” as I engaged
in teacher research in my own university classroom setting (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,
1993, p. 27). Systematic primarily refers to the ways in which I gathered and recorded
information, documenting experiences inside my classroom and making some kind of
written record. Intentional refers to my work as strategically planned rather than
spontaneous (p. 3). Moreover, the aim of this dissertation study, as in teacher research
more generally, is to “provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather than confirm and settle”
ideas about practices of teaching and learning (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001).

Collecting data as a teacher researcher

As a teacher researcher, I documented my responses to the question, “What are
you puzzled by in your classroom?” (Hubbard & Power, 1993, p. 6). My journal writing
addressed emerging questions and ideas, including personal experiences, classroom
discussions, individual and collective learning about issues of diversity, what counts as an
“answer,” and my role as the teacher. Some of the questions that appeared repeatedly in
my teacher research notes were: how do the students and I conceptualize the role of our
personal experiences in learning? When and why do students share personal experiences
in discussions? How does this sharing of personal experiences affect others in the class?
How do students conceive of “answers” in learning about diversity? How do I decide
when to engage students in specific topics and how do I avoid talking about particular
issues? In general, my journal framed two broad and interconnected questions: how do

preservice teachers make sense of their learning about issues of diversity? And, what is

53

the role of preservice teachers’ own experiences and the experiences of their colleagues
in their learning about issues of diversity?

As a teacher researcher, I had access to multiple sources of data, including the
informal, yet meaningful sources (e. g., stories students share with me before and after
class, students’ e-mails to me, etc.) to which “outside” researchers may not have had
access. These multiple data sources offered me important information about the students’
backgrounds and the difficulties and questions that students raised. I had access to all
formal and informal exchanges I had with students, which included the questions I asked
them and the subtle ways in which we encouraged each other to consider multiple ideas.

Specifically, tape recording classes was a natural and consistent part of my
practice and professional development. I catalogued the topics of each class discussion
(see Appendix A for an example), outlining the contents of each recording immediately
after each class and selectively transcribing pieces of discussions that I found significant.
I used this to make intentional pedagogical choices in planning the next class. I used the
audiotapes of our class discussions to reflect on the students’ contributions to discussions,
the direction of the discussions, my moves as the teacher, the students’ questions, and the
tensions within students’ ideas, and to both plan for each successive class and discuss
issues with other instructors teaching the same course. As the teacher, I was always
engaged in a kind of data analysis as I made instructional decisions. My instructional
responsibility ensured that I was engaged in an ongoing analysis of students’ learning
(e. g., class contact twice-weekly with students, grading all students’ work, etc.).

Baumann notes, “The process of debriefing myself about classroom events and reviewing

54

those recordings provided me an effective means to reflect on, evaluate, and modify my
planning and instruction on a daily basis” (1996, p. 31).

It is important to acknowledge two challenges that I faced as both teacher and
researcher. First, doing research during the semester was a tiring process. I often had to
find additional energy to re-listen to tapes after each class, take notes, and catalogue the
topics of discussions. Bauman (1996) also describes this issue of time and energy as a
central tension that he experienced as a teacher researcher. He explains, “No matter how
organic research becomes, it must be conducted within an already hectic schedule of
teaching and supervisory responsibilities” (p. 33). However, just as Baumann had time to
engage in intensive data analysis and writing after the school year had finished, I was also
fortunate to have time after the semester to continue data analysis. A second challenge
was that my former role as teacher educator of the participants in this study did not
guarantee that I always had insider status with respect to things such as classroom
dynamics and students’ relationships, especially given my evaluative role as a teacher.
Diminishing the likelihood that students thought that they needed to please me as their
teacher educator motivated my decision to collect additional data from my students post-
semester in the form of interviews and listening sessions.

Before describing this additional data collection, I more fully describe the
research setting. This includes the context of the course, the students of the class, and my
role as teacher educator.

The research setting

Overview of the course

55

The course is designed to foster students’ critical reflection on their ideas and
beliefs about these issues, ideas and beliefs that have been developed over their many
years in schools and as members of a race and class based society. The professor who
coordinates the course explained that a central purpose of the course is to help teacher
candidates understand the intersection of issues of diversity with power, opportunity, and
inequality as they pertain to people’s experiences in schools and in society more broadly.
The course presents various perspectives on school achievement and social reproduction,
and draws on particular concepts such as racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism,
ableism, social and cultural capital, and the achievement ideology. Although teacher
educators may address issues of diversity within other courses of the teacher preparation
program in which this course is situated, the program does not maintain explicit and
coherent attention to issues such as race, class, and gender, and treatment of these issues
differs across teacher educators.

I was required to use Jay MacLeod’s (1995) Ain ’t no makin’ it: Aspirations &
attainment in a low-income neighborhood as a central text of the course. This text
alternates between ethnographic and theoretical chapters that describe the lives of two
groups of young men, the Hallway Hangers (mostly White young men) and the Brothers
(mostly African American young men) and their cycle of social immobility. A few of the
other readings that I selected for the course were also used by most instructors. These
included Vivian Paley’s (1989) White teacher, Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) “White
privilege and male privilege,” Peggy Orenstein’s (1995) School girls, and Jonathan
Kozol’s (1991) Savage inequalities. For a catalogue of all of the assigned readings that I

selected, see Appendix B.

56

As a new instructor, I was provided with copies of syllabi that other instructors
had developed. Based on the syllabi that I received, I developed an initial overview and
central questions for my syllabus that represented my understanding of the purpose of the
course. In Table 1, I offer an excerpt from my syllabus that describes the overview of the
course as well as questions that the students and I explored during the semester.

Table I .' Excerpt from my syllabus (Overview and central questions of the course)

 

 

In this course, we will spend our time together exploring how power and opportunity are
differentially distributed to different people both within our schools and in society. Our
analyses will yield us a better understanding of the significant connections between

society, schooling, and social inequality. Some of the questions we will explore include:

0 What are the institutional mechanisms that convert differences into hierarchies of
privilege and domination?

0 What is the role that schools play in this process? What is the relationship
between schools and differences in class, race, gender, language, disabilities,
sexual orientation, etc.?

o How does inequality work its way into schools? What effect does it have on
school processes? In what ways do schools exacerbate / mitigate social
inequality?

0 What characteristics of school knowledge and the ways in which it is transmitted
make learning easier for some than others?

0 What responsibilities do we have as teachers regarding these issues?

Our explorations will help us understand the relationship between schools and their
purposes, e. g., promoting social mobility, contributing to social reproduction, etc.

We will see that teachers, through classroom practices, influence the distribution of
educational and social opportunity, whether or not they intend this, and whether or not
they realize it.

 

It bears noting that my own syllabus differed from other syllabi used in five principal
ways. First, while others’ syllabi were framed by weekly themes (e. g., race, class, school
funding), I organized the syllabus using questions. For example, the questions that

helped frame the first week of classes included:

0 What do we think the purposes of education are?

57

 

0 How are some purposes in conflict with others?
0 What do we think schools / teaching / learning should be about?
0 (How) does culture play a role in education?
I encouraged students to use these questions as entry points to their weekly readings and
writings and our class discussions. See Appendix C for a full list of the questions that
framed each week of the semester. A second way in which I adapted the course was to
start the semester with autobiographical texts (e. g., texts by Maya Angelou and Richard
Rodriguez) rather than with theoretical pieces or definitions of particular concepts (e.g.,
race, privilege, institutional racism).6 Third, I utilized popular culture artifacts (e. g.,
comic strips, MTV videos, advertisements, contemporary music lyrics, newspaper
articles) throughout the semester as a way to make connections between course content
and students’ experiences, and I asked students to take notice of, bring to class, and write
about the popular culture that was central to their experiences. Fourth, I added issues of
language and linguistic diversity to the themes that students studied during the semester,
including the topics of dialectal variation, Black English, and Standard English. Finally,
the class divided into small groups around specific texts and facilitated one class
discussion using popular culture artifacts that connected with the ideas of the text that
they had read. Each group was responsible for one of the following texts:
1. Kissen, R. (1996). The last closet: The real lives of lesbian and gay teachers.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
2. Kohl, H. (1994). I won ’t learn from you and other thoughts on creative
maladjustment. New York: The New Press.
3. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America ’s schools. New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

4. Orenstein, P. (1995). School girls: Young women, self-esteem, and the confidence
gap. New York: Doubleday.

 

6 My colleagues who taught sections of this same course assigned a set of initial readings that were
relatively more theoretical in nature.

58

5. Paley, V. (1989). White teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. Shannon, P. (1995). text, lies, & videotape. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

These adaptations show how I employed a wide range of pedagogical tools and
practices throughout the semester. In addition to these adaptations, I also engaged
students in simulations (on tracking, inequities in school funding, and a second language
experience)7, whole class and small group discussions, partner sharing, analysis of
relevant films and documentaries, e-mail exchanges, small group facilitations, and
handouts designed to guide students in reading or discussing particular texts (e. g., Nieto’s
description of theories of school achievement, MacLeod’s description of social
reproduction theories, and Smitherman’s description of the historical development of
Black English). I further explicate relevant pedagogical choices in each data chapter.

It is important to note that service learning, or what G. Smith (1998) describes as
experiential learning, was a required component of the course. This component was
intended to provide “educational experiences that require teacher education candidates to
explore interracial and intercultural interactions with people different from themselves”
(Smith, 1998, p. 91). For 1-2 hours each week, students worked with one or two learners
who were different from them in some way, and as a culminating project, used our formal
coursework to make sense of their experiences. Some of our class discussion time was
dedicated to students’ sense-making of these service learning experiences. I also
dedicated a large number of hours to meeting with students outside of regular class time
to provide what I perceived as necessary mentoring during their service learning

experiences.

 

7 For a look at other teachers’ use of simulations, see Bigelow (1996) and Moss (2001).

59

Given the range of pedagogical practices that students experienced during the
course, I conducted open-ended interviews with eight focal students post-semester to find
out more about their perceptions of the course. Although I drew upon a repertoire of
teaching ideas as outlined here, during the interviews, the focal students foregrounded the
importance of class discussions. Before I further describe these interviews, I consider the
students in the class and myself as a teacher educator.

Describing the students in the class and myself as teacher educator

In this study, the eight participants were students who completed my section of a
foundations course during one semester of my teaching at Midwestern University, a large
state university. These eight students were members of a class of 31 students - 10 men
and 21 women. Twelve students were in their first year of university study, eight were
second year students, eight were third year students, one was a fourth year student, and
two students were enrolled as life-long learners because they had already completed an
undergraduate degree. The majority of the class (28 of the 31 students) had entered the
university immediately after high school graduation; three students, including the two
life-long learners, were older than the other students, and one was a single mother.

In the class, 29 of the 31 students were White. Only one White student talked
extensively in our class discussions about his identity as a second generation Italian
American; all other White students did not talk about their ethnicities. One female
student identified as African American and another female student identified as Mexican
American. Although some students explained their church’s philosophy regarding sexual
orientation in our class discussions and one student explored her sexual orientation in

writings that only I read, no students openly identified as gay or lesbian. During class

60

discussions, several students discussed their experience as the first member of their
families to enter college; others talked about having parents who had attended college,
and one student noted that he was a fourth generation student at our university. While the
students represented some range of high school experiences, including public and private
schools in rural, suburban, and urban areas, most did not attend schools located in the
main urban areas of the state.

Students were pursuing various fields of study in their coursework. At the time of
our class, four students had declared a major in mathematics, five in English, and six in
science fields (including chemistry, biology, and an integrated program of science study).
Six had indicated education as their field of pursuit without declaring a specific major8
and at least five students were undecided about entering the field of education. Of those
who had decided that they wanted to pursue teaching, 10 students indicated their interest
in the elementary level and 15 in the secondary level. At the time of the course, some
students had been accepted into the college of education, some were waiting to hear, and
a few were deciding if they would apply. For a summary of these characteristics of the
students in the class, see Table 2.

Table 2: Characteristics of the whole class (31 students)

 

 

 

 

 

Gender 21 women
10 men
Year of study 12 first year students
8 second year students
8 third year students
1 fourth year student
2 life-long learners
Age 28 entering college immediately after high school
2 returning for post—BA degree in education
1 single mother starting college after working for

 

 

8 These six students had not chosen major fields of study at the time of our class but they had indicated to
the university that they wanted to pursue certification in education.

61

 

 

several years

 

Race 29 White
1 African American
1 Mexican American

 

Familial experience in college From at least a few first year college students to at
least one fourth generation college student

 

No preference (6 definitely pursuing education)
Sciences

English

Math

History

Theatre

Social Relations

Journalism

Academic major I

--Auioxw

 

 

Education as a field of study 25 Yes (10 Elementary & 15 Secondary)
6 Not sure

 

 

The 2000-2001 year was my first year teaching this course and my first year as a
teacher educator at this large Midwestern university. It was my second year as a doctoral
student in the Teacher Education program. This study was based on the second time that
I taught the course. I am a White woman from a middle-class family and I have an
undergraduate and master’s degree in Spanish language and literature from two well-
respected institutions of higher education. Before entering this doctoral program, I taught
Spanish language and literature to diverse students in two high schools in New Jersey.
Designing the study

In this section, I explain how the eight focal students were selected. Then I
describe an initial pilot study that provided a foundation for designing the interviews and
listening sessions of this study. This sets the stage for a description about how I set up
the interviews and listening sessions with focal students.

Focal students
In making choices about focal students, I wanted students whose demographics

would parallel the demographics of most of our nation’s teachers in terms of race and

62

 

gender. In addition, I wanted to select students who represented a range of subject matter
interests and who wanted to work in elementary and secondary schools.

Thus, seven of the focal students are White women and one is a White man. All
were undergraduate students. They represent a range of work experiences and differ in
terms of their families’ experiences with college. One student talked explicitly about
being upper-middle class, compared with one student who described coming from a
family of farmers and having to work many jobs to support herself through college.
Another focal student talked about working in a factory for five years and another
discussed what it was like being the first person from her family to study in college. The
focal students were pursuing English or Language Arts, sciences, and mathematics as
fields of study. One focal student was a first-year student, six were second-year students,
and one was a third-year student. Five wanted to teach at the secondary level, two at the
elementary level, and one student was not sure about entering teaching. For a summary
of these characteristics, see Table 3.

Table 3: Characteristics of the eight focal students

 

 

 

Gender 7 women
1 man
Race 8 White
Year of study 1 first-year student

6 second-year students
1 third-year student

 

Age All undergraduates attending college immediately
after high school

 

Familial experience in college First generation to (at least) second generation
college students

 

Academic major 4 English or Language Arts

3 Sciences (Chemistry, Biology, Integrated
Science program)

1 Mathematics

 

 

Education as a field of study 7 Yes (2 Elementary & 5 Secondary)
1 Not sure

 

 

 

63

Below, table 4 offers more specific portraits of the eight focal students. Three of
the eight focal students, Alyssa, Leigh, and Reenie, had already been accepted into the
college of education at the time of our course. Alyssa, a second-year undergraduate, was
majoring in English and wanted to teach high school. Leigh, also a second-year
undergraduate, was majoring in mathematics and hoped to teach high school. Reenie, a
second-year undergraduate, studied in a program of integrated sciences and wanted to
teach at the elementary level. While Leigh’s and Reenie’s familial experiences with
college were unknown, Alyssa identified herself as a first-generation college student and
Reenie talked extensively about the jobs outside of school that she held in order to pay
for her college experiences.

At the time of our course, Amanda, Jen, and Lisa were planning on applying to
the college of education. Amanda, a second-year undergraduate, was majoring in
chemistry and hoped to teach high school. Jen, also a second-year undergraduate, was
studying English and wanted to teach high school. Lisa was a first-year student pursuing
a Language Arts major and hoping to teach elementary school.

Jessie was the only student who was not sure about pursuing a teaching career.
She was a third-year undergraduate majoring in biology and she worked as a sexual
health advocate for the university. Due to her experiences teaching in this advocate role
as well as encouragement from her mother who was a teacher, Jessie decided to take a
course in education. She was at least a second-generation college student and she
described her experiences working in a factory for five consecutive summers in order to

make money for college.

At the time of our course, the only male focal student, Stan, was pursuing a
degree in English and considering sociology and history as additional majors. He was a
second-year undergraduate and identified himself as coming from an upper-middle class
family. Stan wanted to teach high school.

Table 4: Specific portraits of the eight focal students

 

Alyssa White woman

Second-year undergraduate

First-generation college student

English major — wants to teach high school
Accepted into the teacher preparation program

 

Amanda White woman

Second-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown
Chemistry major -— wants to teach high school
Will apply to the teacher preparation program

 

Jen White woman

Second-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown
English major — wants to teach high school
Will apply to the teacher preparation program

 

Jessie White woman

Third-year undergraduate

At least second generation college student; has worked at a factory for five
summers

Biology major

Not sure whether she wants to pursue teaching as a career

 

Leigh White woman

Second-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown
Mathematics major — wants to teach high school
Accepted into the teacher preparation program

 

Lisa White woman

First-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown

Language Arts major - wants to teach elementary school
Will apply to the teacher preparation program

 

 

Reenie White woman

Second-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown; described her parents’ work as
farmers

Integrated science major - wants to teach elementary school

 

 

65

 

 

Accepted into the teacher preparation program

 

 

Stan White man

Second-year undergraduate

Familial experience with college unknown; self-identified as coming from an
upper-middle class family

English major; thinking of adding sociology or history - wants to teach high
school

Will apply to the teacher preparation program

 

 

The design of this dissertation study stemmed in part from an initial pilot study
that I conducted with a different group of my former students who had completed the
same course the preceding semester. I now describe several aspects of the pilot study that
helped lay the conceptual groundwork for the design of this dissertation study.

Pilot study ggound work

In a series of pilot study interviews with six students from my first semester of
teaching the course, I used an open-ended interview protocol (see Appendix D) to ask
students about their perceptions of the course immediately after the semester ended. In
these open-ended interviews, my central question was: What was our course about for
you? Although I listed questions in my initial protocol to elicit students’ ideas about
particular pieces of the course (e. g., assignments, readings, discussions) and about what
the students thought that they were “supposed to learn,” I followed the students’ lead
during these initial interviews, and I prompted with questions like, “Can you say more
about that?” and “Is there anything else you would like to share?”

The pilot study interviews shaped the design of this dissertation study in two
principal ways. First, all of the students focused on whole class discussions when
describing their learning about diversity. Although they may have mentioned other
course experiences (e. g., course writings, service learning experiences), the students

focused on the role of whole class discussions in their learning. Second, my analysis of

66

 

these interviews indicated that three interconnected themes helped synthesize the
students’ reflections on the role of discussion in their learning. The first theme
synthesized that the students shared that the lived experiences of their classmates served
as critical sources of legitimate knowledge about issues of diversity in our class
discussions. The second theme highlighted how the students viewed an array of
understandings across individuals as a natural consequence of class discussions where
students offered their own understandings of how issues of diversity intersect with the
unique contexts of their lives. And the third theme explained that, according to these
students, learning about issues of diversity in our class involved a process of
understanding, articulating, and possibly defending one’s individual interpretations about
how those issues play out in one’s own experiences. These themes lay a foundation for
creating post-semester interviews and listening sessions with the focal students of this

dissertation study.

Building from the pilot study to desigp three phases of research

 

Data collection and analysis for this dissertation occurred in three phases. The
first phase of the data collection took place during the normal course of instruction.
Wilson (1995) notes that good teaching requires a teacher to understand what sense
students are making. Toward this end, I photocopied artifacts of normal classroom
instruction, including all students’ weekly writings, mid-term and final papers, self and
community assessments, and service learning papers. I audio recorded 26 of the 31

semester class sessions.9 I transcribed pieces of all whole class discussions and

 

9 Only five of the class discussions were not available through audio-recordings. I did not audio record the
first class of the semester because I wanted to discuss the reasons for audio recording with students. The
audiotapes of the other four classes are fraught with technical difficulties, rendering the actual discussions
unavailable on tape. However, I recorded notes in my teacher journal for all five of these classes.

67

catalogued these transcripts. I also kept a journal in which I noted my observations and
thoughts on class discussions. Both my choices for transcription and my journal entries
served as post-semester data sources that I examined for analysis of my struggles and
insights.

The second phase of this study involved interviewing the eight focal students
when the semester concluded. An analysis of the pilot interviews informed my revisions
to the interview protocol (see Appendix E for revised protocol). While I began my
interviews with the focal students using a general question about the students’
perceptions, I refined the other general questions that originally appeared in my protocol.
Although I wanted to follow the same general principle of following the students’ lead, I
was listening for more specific ideas that included: 1) the role of students’ personal
experiences in the course, 2) students’ perceptions of a multiplicity of ideas and answers
in the course, 3) the role of discussion, and 4) my role as the teacher. From my pilot
study analysis, I also realized that there was a need to anchor my research work in asking
students to examine what actually happened during specific whole class discussions.
Thus, the interviews led me to design the third phase of this dissertation study: listening
sessions with the focal students.

Listening sessions

As a window into the students’ sense-making of the course, the post-semester
interviews indicated that whole class discussions were significant to students’
experiences. All of the focal students stressed the centrality of discussions in their
learning about issues of diversity. Moreover, these interviews indicated the need to

ground research work in the focal students’ perceptions of specific whole class

68

discussions. Thus, analyzing the interviews led me to design listening sessions in which
the focal students and I re-visited what happened in three particular whole class
discussions. In designing these listening sessions, I adapted what Erickson and Shultz
(1977; 1982) developed and described as “viewing sessions” in their research on
counselor and students interactions. After cataloguing and selecting representative
segments of video footage, Erickson and Shultz asked participants to view segments and
stop the recordings “as often as they sense something new is happening” (1977, p. 154).
This allowed them to elicit participants’ characterization of the recorded events, i.e., to
“get a sense of participants’ emic construction” (p. 154). Similarly, for this study, I used
audio recordings and transcripts of each discussion. I asked students to listen to
audiotapes and elaborate on their perceptions of what was happening during those
discussions. This allowed for emic identification of significant places in class
discussions.

However, this study’s listening sessions also differed methodologically from what
Erickson and Shultz constructed. While Erickson and Shultz did not report or use what
was elicited from the counselor with the student or from the student with the counselor, I
nominated a third discussion excerpt and played this for all focal students. As the
students’ former teacher, I had insights about what I viewed as significant talk during
class discussions. I used my own status as insider to select an excerpt. I then added this
to what the students identified, and asked students to respond to all three discussions.
Thus, each of the eight focal students re-visited a compilation of our emically identified

discussions: two that they nominated and one that I selected.

69

The interviews with the focal students guided the specific selection of the
discussions used during the listening sessions. All of the focal students referred to or
described at length two particular whole class discussions. The first discussion that all
students mentioned was a discussion about the personal experience of one classmate,
Reenie, in making it to college. The second discussion focused on a Barbie
advertisement. These were the only two discussions specifically identified by focal
students during their interviews. Out of the 31 class sessions during the semester, the
discussion about personal experience occurred during the 7th session on January 30’“.
The Barbie advertisement discussion took place on February 22nd and was the 14th class
session.

After a systematic examination of the catalogues of whole class discussions and
my teacher research journal, I selected a third discussion to the design of the listening
sessions. This discussion centered on the topic of Black English and occurred on March
15’“, the 18’h class session of the semester. During their interviews, no students referred
to this third discussion and only one student (Jen) referred to this topic. However, as a
participant in the classroom, i.e., the teacher making pedagogical choices within class
discussions, I identified the large degree of teacher talk during the discussion about Black
English as critical, especially when juxtaposed with other class discussions of the
semester (including the one on personal experiences and the one on the Barbie
advertisement). At the time of the discussion, I wondered about students’ perceptions of
the amount of teacher talk. In addition, from my catalogue of recordings and my teacher
research journal, I found that while the two discussions identified by the students

represented particular facets of my pedagogy (i.e., the use of students’ personal

70

experiences and the use of popular culture artifacts in discussions), the discussion about
Black English was a necessary addition because it represented a third facet of my
pedagogy - the use of handouts to discuss the ideas of a text. See Table 5 for a summary
of the three discussions selected for listening sessions.

Table 5: Locating discussions within the semester”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discussion Date Class session (out of 31 classes)
#1: Personal experience J anan 30’“ 7
#2: Barbie advertisement February 22nd 14
#3: Black English March 15‘h 18

 

In addition to identifying specific discussions for the listening sessions, I made
choices about which segments of each discussion the students re-visited. Several criteria
guided my choices. First, each class session contained small group work, partner sharing,
individual student writing time, and whole class discussion. My choice was narrowed to
the particular parts of audio recordings that captured whole class discussion. Second, my
selection of segments was informed by an analysis of the post-semester interviews. Some
focal students identified particular students that contributed to the two whole class
discussions. In addition, specific themes from students’ interviews guided my selection
of segments (see Appendix F for a list of these themes).

For the first segment, four focal students, Alyssa, Jessie, Jen, and Amanda,
described Reenie’s personal experience of making it to college during their interviews.
The other three focal students, Stan, Reenie, Leigh, and Lisa, referred to Reenie more
generally in our class discussions. All eight of the focal students talked about the role of

their own personal experiences in learning from this discussion. Finally, all students

 

’0 To view the discussions in a catalogue of what we actually discussed during each class, see Appendix A.
To locate these three discussions within the assigned course readings of the semester, see Appendix B. To
see these discussions situated within the guiding questions on the course syllabus, see Appendix C.

71

described Alyssa in class discussions. Thus, I selected the only segment of this session
where Reenie entered the whole class discussion, where the discussion revolved around
personal experiences, and where Alyssa contributed.

With the second discussion, all students identified talking about Barbie as
significant, yet they did not point to a specific moment in this discussion during their
interviews. Thus, I worked from the analytical themes that I discerned from students’
interviews to select a segment. Because all students described the multiplicity of ideas
and perspectives as significant and because all students referred to Amanda and Stan in
class discussions, the segment represents diverse views in discussion and contains
contributions from Amanda and Stan. The selection from the third discussion reflected
my intention to re-visit a segment where I assumed a dominant role in the discussion.
Because I found the amount of my talk critical to the discussion, I selected a segment that
reflected this.

For these listening sessions, I created an additional interview protocol (see
Appendix G). This protocol included general questions about all three discussion
segments and specific questions for each discussion segment. During the listening
sessions, my instructions were as follows:

What I am hoping is that you can help me think about what was happening during
these discussion segments at the time they were occurring.

What were you thinking?

What did you think was going on in our class?
How did the discussion feel to you?

How did you think the discussion went?

I gave participants a copy of the transcript and a writing utensil and told them that if they

wanted, they could mark any places directly on the transcript that they would like to

72

discuss after listening to the recording. I told them that this was optional, and that they
did not have to mark anything, but that the pen was there if they wanted to note any
particular pieces of the discussion. After listening to one discussion segment, students
then had the opportunity to elaborate on what they perceived to be happening. If they
marked particular places, I asked for elaboration on what they had marked. If they had
not marked any places, I asked open-ended questions such as “What did you think was
going on in our class during this segment? What were you thinking? How did you think
the discussion went?”
Reconstructing the semester at the listening sessions

I engaged in a series of actions that set up the listening sessions. I had available
and spread out on the table: the full length syllabus, a one page synopsis of the syllabus,
all of the course texts, and the coursepack (a collection of photocopied articles and book
chapters). I briefly presented the materials to the students, and most students flipped
through the books and the syllabus. Because my syllabus was 14 pages long, I
synthesized the course into a one page handout (see Appendix H) that outlined a general
overview about the readings, the assignments of the course, and a sketch of the 31
discussions of the semester. I reviewed this one page outline in order to briefly describe
course readings, writing assignments, simulations, discussions about Barbie and Timothy
Thomas,ll service learning, book group assignments, and use of artifacts.

To offer context for each discussion segment, I displayed specific materials. For
each segment, I had written transcripts. At the top of each segment’s transcript, I listed

both the date of the discussion and the number of the class (e. g., Barbie discussion on

73

February 22'”, Class session #14 of 31 classes). For the first segment, I showed students
the specific chapters that we were reading from the MacLeod book. For the second
segment, I showed students the article that the class had read for that session and the
Barbie advertisement. For the third segment, I displayed Smitherman’s chapters and the
handout that I created. I acknowledge one methodological caveat regarding my
structuring of the listening sessions. The order of the segments may have primed
students to describe the segments in particular ways (e.g., the third segment was not an

example of discussion compared with the other two).

Acknowledging a temporal challenge

 

Although I included questions on this protocol that asked students to differentiate
between remembering how they were experiencing the discussion at the time of the
discussion and reflecting on the discussion from their current vantage point, I ended up
focusing on what students were thinking at the time of the discussion. Despite the
limitations of self-report and time lapse, I found that the participants seemed to easily
comment on the recordings when something struck a chord with them (e. g., students
responded to the segments with, “I remember when...”). Time constraints of the listening
sessions also shaped my choice to focus on students’ perceptions at the time of the class
sessions.

I also recognize the time lapse between the course and the interviews, and
between the course and the listening sessions. As such, the interviews and listening
sessions represent retrospective reports rather than attempts to capture the focal students’

thoughts. However, I did not believe that this time lapse was problematic because I

 

” In April 2001, White police officer, Steven Roach, shot and killed Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old
African American man, in Cincinnati. He was the fourth African American man killed by local police in

74

believe that students’ perceptions after the semester always represent retrospective
accounts. In addition, I triangulated my analysis by comparing the ideas that the students
articulated in interviews and listening sessions with what they stated during the
audiotaped discussions of the semester and their writing assignments during the course.
Moving to critical moments

As this study evolved, the presence of critical moments during class discussions
became apparent. This study consisted of three phases. In the first phase of this study, I
collected data during the course of the semester, including audio recordings of whole
class discussions. In the second phase, I conducted post-semester interviews with eight
focal students, and in the third phase, I designed and conducted listening sessions with
the focal students. Table 6 highlights the three phases of the data collection of this study.

Table 6: Summary of data sources collected

 

Event Type of Data Dates collected

 

 

Phase 1: Course assignments: January —- May 2001

The course 0 Weekly critical writings

0 2 short papers on course readings

0 Mid-term writing assignment on MacLeod’s
text

0 3 assessments on self and community
participation
Small group facilitation of class discussion
Written response to book using artifact
Paper on service learning experiences using
themes of course as lenses
Final paper on self and themes of course
In-class writing on the title of the course

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audiotapes of class sessions January — May 2001
Transcripts of parts of class sessions January — May 2001
Researcher field notes after each class (Teacher January — May 2001
researcher journal)

Catalogues of recordings January — May 2001

 

 

 

five months. Thomas’ shooting sparked demonstrations in the city.

75

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phase II: Audiotapes and transcripts May - September 2001
Post- Analytic memos May 2001 — March 2002
semester Visual representations May 2001 - March 2002
interviews Methodology journal May 2001 — March 2002
Phase IH: Audiotapes and transcripts March - April 2002
Post- Analytic memos March 2002 — June 2003
semester Visual representations March 2002 - June 2003
listening Methodology journal March 2002 — June 2003
sessrons

 

 

 

Throughout all phases of data collection and analysis, I framed and tested
tentative working hypotheses to explain what I was noticing, and I revised or rejected
hypotheses, as well as framed others. Using this approach, I noted patterns, themes, and
questions based on the data for each student individually, and I tried out analytic
categories and theories. Based on constructing codes for each individual student’s
listening session, I then analyzed across students, collapsing codes or keeping individual
codes for particular students, depending on the fit of each student’s data with a particular
code. I constructed a network of topics for individual and collective portraits of the focal
students.

As a means of furthering the analysis, and acknowledging that any data are
incomplete and partial versions of the social context, I triangulated the data using the
audiotapes, my teaching journal, students’ work across the semester, interviews, and
listening sessions. To find key linkages and generate assertions, I engaged in what
Erickson describes as “searching the data corpus — reviewing the full set of field notes,
interview notes, or audiotapes, site documents, and audiovisual recordings,” seeking
confirming as well as disconfirming evidence for the assertions that I was testing (1986,
p. 146). This process involved making multiple copies of fieldnotes and transcripts,

coding with colored pencils and fonts, cutting up copies of notes and piecing together

76

 

instances of larger ideas, and alternating between reading through the actual notes or
interviews holistically and reading through the ways in which I sorted pieces of those
notes. Because data analysis is a recursive process, my analysis work often led me back
to parts I had visited already.

Because the ensuing analysis in each data chapter focuses on phase three of my
data collection, I highlight some of my analytical work on this data. I especially made
use of displaying the listening session data in different ways, including memos, charts,
continua, and coding schemes (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Miles & Huberrnan, 1984). For
example, I constructed continua and placed data along them in order to visually represent
similarities and differences across discussion segments. These continua included the
amount of student talk and teacher talk, students’ perceptions and my own perceptions of
the amount of experiences or knowledge that they had (related to topic of discussion for
that class session), students’ perceptions of whether the segment counted as a discussion,
the degree to which this discussion followed my plans as a teacher, and the identification
of critical moments within a segment.

I also created multiple drafts of what I called a “chart memo” that enabled me to
work on an analysis of each discussion segment along various dimensions and juxtapose
the segments’ dimensions using columns. The dimensions that I used to examine and
compare the segments included:

0 my intentions as a teacher with the text for each class session,
a closer look at the kind of texts used in each segment,
what students focused on during the listening session for each segment and
thus, what I named as my analytical foci for each segment,
students’ perceptions of their experiences with the topic of each segment,
my own perceptions as a teacher of students’ experiences and knowledge, and
themes within and across the segments.

77

These drafts of my chart memo allowed me to document themes from my analysis,
including the use of personal stories in discussion, the notions of consensus and
multiplicity, and students’ perceptions of my role.

I found that all eight students identified the same two moments in the first
discussion segment as critical: Al’s question and Alyssa’s commentary. In addition, all
students pointed to Amanda’s comment about Barbie as critical in the second discussion
segment. Finally, the students did not identify any critical moments during the third
discussion segment. See Table 7 for a summary of these critical moments.

Table 7: Students’ identification of critical moments

 

Discussion Segment #1 2 critical moments Identified by all 8 focal students
0 Al’s question
0 Alyssa’s commentary

 

 

 

Discussion Segment #2 1 critical moment Identified by all 8 focal students
0 Amanda’s comment
Discussion Segment #3 0 critical moments Students did not identify any

 

 

critical moments

 

Summary

This chapter described the methods and design for the study, including a rationale
for whole class discussions as a site of study and an interpretive approach to collecting
and analyzing data. Erickson notes that interpretive methods are appropriate when
looking at the “the meaning-perspectives of the particular actors in the particular events,”
and the “specific structure of occurrences,” (1986, p. 121). Chapters Four, Five, and Six
take the reader inside the “meaning-perspectives” of the focal students during the three

particular class discussions.

78

 

Chapter 4

MAKING IT TO COLLEGE: EXPLORING STUDENTS’ PERSONAL
EXPERIENCES IN LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY

This is the first of three chapters that presents students’ perceptions of particular
moments of whole class talk. The moments in this chapter come from a discussion about
“making it” in life, using the students’ own personal experiences and the lived
experiences of two groups of young men in the book, Ain ’t no makin’ it (MacLeod,
1995). In discussing the notion of “making it,” the students explored key ideas of the
course, including the role of hard work, differential access to opportunity, and other
factors that account for the social class structure of our country. They signaled two
moments of this class discussion about “making it” as critical. The first moment
occurred when one student, Reenie, discussed how she “made it” to college. The second
moment occurred later in the class discussion when another student, Alyssa, commented
on how the class was engaging in the discussion. As my analysis suggests, an emphasis
on these two critical moments yields two central findings: 1) how the focal students
viewed the process of using personal experiences, and 2) the role of assumptions in class
discussions.

Overview of two critical moments: Personalizing course content and meta-
processing class talk

The two critical moments were part of the seventh class discussion of the
semester (1/30/01), when students discussed a few of the major themes of the course:
meritocracy, the achievement ideology, tensions between individual choices and access to
opportunities, and the job structure of society. In the beginning of the discussion,

students wrestled with the question of how certain people “ended up” as “garbage men”

79

and “lunch servers” while others seemingly “made it” to college, better jobs, and more
money. The first critical moment occurred when the class discussion of this course
content turned personal, and the question of “making it” focused on the experiences of
one student in our own class “making it” to college. One student, Al, asked another
student, Reenie, the direct question, “How did you get here [to college]?” (1/30/01).
This was the first occurrence of what I am calling a moment of personalization of the
course themes in our class discussions, when the students examined key concepts such as
agency, institutions, social class, and school achievement in the context of one student’s
own life. Although students had written about their personal experiences in weekly
course writings that they shared with me, this was the first time that students talked about
a student’s experiences during a whole class discussion.

Soon after Reenie, Al, and other students talked about how they accounted for
who makes it to college, another student, Alyssa, entered the discussion to offer her
observations of our class talk. Alyssa noted, “I think it’s very counterproductive if we
make assumptions about people in the room...” (1/30/01). All focal students
identified this as the second critical moment of this class discussion. Although as a class
we had talked about rules for class discussions during a series of community building
activities, this was the first time that a student offered this type of observation about the
class talk, or what I am calling a moment of meta-commentary. The focal students
suggested that this moment was connected with the first critical moment because their
talk about “making it,” using a student’s own lived experiences, compelled them to
consider the role of assumptions in our talk. Thus, this chapter focuses on the focal

students’ perceptions of two themes: 1) students’ lived experiences and 2) assumptions

80

in whole class discussions when learning about issues of diversity. This surfaces a
tension between using one’s own personal experiences to explore course content and

helping classmates’ examine their experiences in particular ways.

To explore fully these themes and this tension, this chapter is divided into four
sections. In the first section, Contextual framing: Connecting course content to
students’ personal experiences, I provide key contextual information that frames the
analysis of the two critical moments. In the second section, Critical moment #1:
Examining the role of personal experiences in learning, I offer a three part analysis of
the first critical moment, Al’s question to Reenie, “How did you get here?” This analysis
foregrounds how focal students used the moment as an opportunity to reflect on their own
stories of making it to college, focal students’ perceptions of the use of personal
experiences in class discussions, and Reenie’s story of making it.

In the third section of this'chapter, Critical moment #2: Examining the role of
assumptions in learning, I present an analysis of the focal students who believed that Al
was making an assumption about Reenie and those who did not believe that Al was
making any assumptions about Reenie. I also analyze the perceptions of two focal
students who talked about the possible consequences of Alyssa’s meta—commentary. In
the final section of this chapter, Implications of personalization and meta-
commentary for learning about diversity, I explore key implications that stem from the
preceding analyses. These implications include questions about how to tap into students’
stories of “making it,” critical ways of understanding what counts as context when
articulating personal experiences, and distinctions between primary and secondary

Discourses (Gee, 1992) in learning about diversity.

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Contextual framing: Connecting course content to students’ personal experiences

In this section, I present contextual information that frames the analysis of the two
critical moments. First, I describe my reasons for selecting initial course readings that
foreground lived experiences rather than sociological theory, and I briefly describe a
central text of the course, Ain ’t no makin’ it (MacLeod, 1995), which followed the initial
course readings. Next, I offer an overview of the kinds of community building activities
in which we participated to show how I aimed to integrate the students’ experiences in
the course. This leads to a brief examination of my own reflections as a teacher educator
about what students brought to their learning, which I then situate in a larger theoretical
view of students in and out of school. Finally, I examine my plans for this particular
class discussion on “making it,” which did not include plans for either of the moments
that students identified as critical. I also consider the actual class discussion leading up to
the first critical moment where A] asked Reenie how she ended up in college.

Choosing texts: Course concepts through lived experiences

“’I ain’t goin’ to college. Who wants to go to college? I’d just end up gettin’ a shitty job
anyway.’” —-“Freddie” in Ain’t no makin’ it (MacLeod, 1995, p. 3).

The text in which Freddie appears served as one of the main texts for providing
students opportunities to read and discuss key content of the course. This text alternates
between ethnographic and theoretical chapters that describe the cycle of social
immobility in the lives of two groups of young men, the Hallway Hangers (mostly White
young men) and the Brothers (mostly African American young men). MacLeod uses
both stories and sociological theory to explore the lives of these two groups of young
men and he examines the complex relationships among poverty, the service economy,

cocaine capitalism, tracking, the achievement ideology, cultural capital, and racism.

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These relationships reflected ideas that were central to the course: social reproduction
theories, social (im)mobility, and (the myth of) meritocracy.

In planning for the start of the semester, I wrote,

I do not want to start immediately with MacLeod, because I want the students to

read completely narrative types of text as they enter the ideas of the semester. I

hope that this is a more engaging way to start, rather than starting with terms or

some of the discourse of MacLeod’s denser chapters on social reproduction

theory. (Lesson Plan, 1/11/01)
For our initial readings, I selected excerpts from autobiographical texts written by Sandra
Cisneros (1984), Maya Angelou (1969), and Richard Rodriguez (1982) as well as a letter
written by a Native American father, Medicine Grizzlybear, to his son’s teacher (1993).
All of these texts focus on schooling experiences. In my plans I noted that my goal was
for the class to “look across the stories that we first read, and begin to compare them with
each other and with the stories we tell of our own schooling experiences,” in preparation
for the stories and theory of MacLeod’s book (Lesson Plan, 1/11/01). I indicated that I
wanted to immerse students in others’ stories and each other’s stories in order to talk
about our understandings of school achievement and ‘making it’ before using any
particular terms. I believed that the course concepts were embedded in the
autobiographical stories that I chose. These texts generated initial class discussions of the
semester around the purposes of education, the differential costs and benefits of
schooling across individuals and groups, and ideas about what explains school
achievement and social class. I was hoping to “set the stage for entering both the

ethnographic portions of MacLeod’s text and the discourse that MacLeod provides in his

theoretical chapters” (Lesson Plan, 1/11/01).

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After initial discussions around the autobiographical texts, we dedicated six
classes to MacLeod’s text, one-fifth of our semester together, and during the third class
on this text, the two critical moments that frame this chapter occurred. In the second of
these six classes, discussion centered on MacLeod’s explanations of social reproduction
theories.12 The students encountered central concepts of the course such as social
reproduction, cultural capital, habitus, linguistic capital, agency, and resistance. For the
third class, students read three chapters of MacLeod’s text that are critical pieces about
the stories of the young men. In these chapters, “Teenagers in Clarendon Heights: The
Hallway Hangers and the Brothers,” “The influence of the family,” and “The world of
work: Aspirations of the Hangers and Brothers,” MacLeod uses the young men’s voices
to describe their lives, families, and work situations. Because these three chapters are
written as narratives, several students commented that they were “easier to read”
compared with the previous theoretical chapter on social reproduction.

In alignment with a focus on lived experiences, I planned community building
activities throughout the course and especially during the first several weeks to support
student sharing of personal experiences. During these activities, the students also
discussed guidelines for their participation in small group work and whole class
discussions.

Sharing personal experiences: Community building exercises and discussion guidelines

 

’2 MacLeod synthesizes reproduction theories to outline the range of possible explanations for how status
or class position continues generation after generation, and to discuss the role of schools in reinforcing
social inequality. Moving from the work of Bowles & Gintis, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Shirley
Brice Heath to the work of Paul Willis and Henry Giroux, MacLeod describes a continuum of theories from
more deterministic models of social reproduction to theories that articulate some agency or cultural
innovation on the part of individuals. In the end, MacLeod uses these theories to show that although the
two groups of young men respond differently to the educational and economic structures within which they
operate, neither group fares well in terms of social advancement.

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During each of the first six classes of the semester, we engaged in at least one
community building activity. Some of these activities were clearly designated as
community building in my lesson plans; I identified others when I analyzed my plans and
class sessions after the semester. My goals with these activities centered upon “building
relationships, knowing each other in some way, providing a foundation for risk-taking
that would encourage students to share their personal experiences with the class
throughout the semester” (Lesson Plan, 1/18/01). The community building exercises
included writing and sharing letters of introduction, presenting ourselves through stories
about our names, and describing unique experiences we have had. Our community
building work reflected the heterogeneity of our class. For example, we learned that one
student in our class was a fourth generation student at our university and five students
were first generation college students, two students had extensive experience working at
McDonalds and three had no experiences in part-time jobs outside of school, one student
graduated high school in a class of fifty students while several students graduated from
much larger schools. We also learned that while students in our class reflected a range of
experiences across rural, urban, and suburban areas of the state, most did not grow up in
urban areas. Throughout the first six classes of the semester, I also asked students to
refer to other students’ ideas by using their classmates’ names and by addressing each
other directly.

I also planned time for students to create guidelines for supporting our small
group and whole class talk. The students developed a set of four key principles that
included “respecting others’ ideas,” being “open-minded,” having a “sense of humor,”

and “taking responsibility for one’s part of the work.” Upon further reflection, the

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students also nominated two key tensions that they saw as embedded in their ideas about
participation (1/16/01). During the discussion, I used the students’ own words from class
discussion to record what they were saying, and I asked for refinement until the class
agreed upon the following:

1. We have different participation across students in our class. We don’t all talk the
same amount. Is that ok? Should we talk more equally? Are some people just
more talkers or listeners?

2. If we want to help each other think more deeply about different issues, how do we
remain open-minded and then also disagree and help each other examine our
opinions and beliefs?

In my teacher journal and lesson plans, I similarly reflected on the use of
students’ personal experiences and what I saw as a central tension with using students’

experiences.

Teacher reflections: Using students’ personal experiences

Looking at others’ lives and our own lives was a central part of the semester. In
my teacher journal and lesson plans, I explored the relationship between students’
personal experiences and course content in learning about diversity. In my teacher
journal, I articulated, particularly throughout the first few weeks of the semester, that
learning about diversity involved drawing upon students’ experiences as resources, so
that they can articulate how they are making sense of those experiences (e. g., Teacher
Journal, 1/18/01; 1/25/01; 1/30/01). I also described the process of bringing students’
experiences into the classroom as one that involved “examining our sense-making,
especially through a process of juxtaposing our sense-making with the sense-making of
others” (Lesson Plan, 1/18/01). I encouraged students to “juxtapose their stories with the
stories of their classmates, of the authors of the text we read, and of characters or real

people in the texts that we read together” (Lesson Plan, 1/25/01).

86

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In most of my lesson plans throughout the semester, I wrestled with a tension
between what I continually framed as “helping students share their personal experiences”
and “teaching students the actual concepts that they were ‘supposed to learn’ during their
time in this course” (Lesson Plan, 1/18/01). I often listed key terms at the top of my
plans for class sessions and asked myself questions like, “How can I use students’ own
experiences to teach these key concepts so that the terms don’t feel imposed or
disembodied, coming from without rather than from within students’ own lives?” (e. g.,
Lesson Plans, 1/18/01; 1/25/01). Since teaching the course within this dissertation study,
several researchers and teacher educators continue to shape my thinking about the role of
students’ experiences in their learning.

Mobilizing insights about students: Authorizing lived expariences as course content

As already suggested in chapter two, perspectives on breaking down the child /
curriculum binary can help conceptualize preservice teachers as learners. In wrestling
with a core dilemma about teaching and learning, Dewey (1902) worked to erase the
notion that there is some kind of chasm between the child’s experience and subject
matter. He viewed the relationship between curriculum and child as symbiotic,
conceptualizing disciplinary knowledge within the experiences of the child. According to
Dewey, it follows then that what needs to concern teachers are the ways in which a
subject or course content can become a part of students’ experience, or what there is in
the child’s experience that can be organized with reference to a field of study.

The child / curriculum binary is also reflected in what has traditionally been seen
as a division between in and out of school learning (Resnick, 1987). Resnick notes, “The

process of schooling seems to encourage the idea that the ‘game of school’ is to learn

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symbolic rules of various kinds, that there is not supposed to be much continuity between
what one knows outside school and what one learns in school” (p. 15). One way of
understanding this process of bifurcating in school and out of school knowledge is
through Barrera’s notion of “culturalectomy,” where “students’ nonschool lives and
associations are ‘checked at the door,’ as schools focus fervently on academic learning
and attainment of American political values as if these were independent of ethnic,
linguistic, or social identity” (as cited in Florio-Ruane, 2001, p. 23). Florio-Ruane adds,
“Culturalectomy limits all students’ learning about themselves and others, a condition
that enables the tacit imposition of whitestream culture on successive generations of all of
our citizens” (p. 24). Similarly, Landsman writes about the logic of individualism, or
how schools and society strip White people of their stories, noting that Whites have “lost
our connection to the communal aspects of our life,” knowing very little of our ancestors’
stories (2001, pp. 150-151).

To counter this process of culturalectomy, Florio-Ruane advocates that the study
of culture “needs to be made personal.” She elaborates,

Without experiencing culture as a social process in which I participate, it is

difficult for me to understand it as part of my inheritance and formation.

Moreover, it is difficult, absent this understanding, for me to awaken to my

participation in this process as a teacher and a citizen. (2001, p. 6)
Thus, teachers reactivate aspects of their own experiences of culture, especially those that
influence their own work as educators, through the use of their personal experiences in
their own education. Bigelow describes this process more generally in education as
teachers helping students to “search for social meaning in individual experience — to push

students to use their stories as windows not only on their lives, but on society” (1996, p.

295).

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It is also critical to note that the child / curriculum binary for multicultural teacher
education exists not only with this general in and out of school distinction. The binary
also persists between preservice teachers’ own lived experiences and what
Mukhopadhyay and Henze call the “discipline” of diversity issues, describing diversity as
something that can be approached “academically” (2003, p. 677). In other words,
learning about issues of diversity “academically” in classrooms is often severed from
students’ personal experiences. This chapter can be viewed as an exploration of breaking
down the binary, and seeing how the academic subject matter of the course (e. g., social
class, access to educational opportunities) can be intimately entwined with students’
personal experiences. Connecting curriculum and students’ lives in this way is crucial for
dehomogenizing White teacher candidates and for tapping into the array of nuanced
experiences that they bring to their learning.

Setting up for critical moments: Unexpected student explorations

The two critical moments occurred in the seventh whole class discussion of 31
classes, during the fourth week out of a 16 week semester. Perhaps what is most striking
about my planning notes is that I did not plan for nor did I expect either of the critical
moments to occur. My plans for the discussion began with asking students to look
around our class and notice the names of classmates once more through focusing on faces
and name cards. Then, I planned for students to examine MacLeod’s use of the context
of capitalism in exploring the aspirations of the two groups of young men in his book.
Because MacLeod also surfaced the larger context of the job structure of society, one of
my goals was for students to continue talking through their ideas about larger contexts for

understanding individuals’ choices and opportunities. I believed that students had

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already been engaged in this during the pervious class session, evidenced by comments
such as “we’ll always need garbage men and lunch servers.” In my teacher journal, I
wrote, “I am hoping students talk more about their ideas of ‘need’” since I was confused
about what this meant (1/25/01).
Leading up to the first critical moment: Class tafitabout individual choice and jobs

Class discussion generally revolved around the issue of how do we account for
who ends up “making it” in terms of getting a good job. I began class with three ways of
re-engaging students in the content of our recent discussions about making it. First, I
briefly described and circulated a recent newspaper article from a local paper that
described Wal-Mart as our nation’s largest employer. Second, I asked students to
consider the relationship between MacLeod’s ideas about capitalism as “a race by many
for relatively few positions of wealth and prestige” and his description of the aspirations
of the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers (1995, p. 74). Finally, I summarized our
previous class discussions about MacLeod’s work, sharing what I considered to be the
two major ideas across students’ contributions:

1. the presence of different jobs in society (a hierarchical job structure), and
2. explanations for how people end up with particular jobs (e.g., due to their own

efforts, intelligences, aspirations, familial privilege, etc.) (Lesson plans, 1/30/01)

One student, Linda, started off our whole class discussion, noting the challenge of
imagining what life would feel like from the standpoint of someone who had not gained
access to a college education. She then described her ideas regarding how she made
sense of the job structure of our society, including the role of the individual and access to

educational and job opportunities. Although Linda emphasized “making good choices”

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in “gaining access to opportunities,” she also pointed to a larger picture of a “job
hierarchy.” In this larger picture, she said that all of us as citizens have responsibility for
creating this job hierarchy because of “what we perceive we need.” Linda concluded
with her idea that “our society works because not everybody goes to college.”

Another student, Joyce, entered the discussion next, building on what she
described as “Linda’s idea about needing each one in society to play their part.” Joyce
wondered whether some people are “forced” into their “job choices” and introduced the
idea of fairness for examining the distribution of Opportunities in society. She suggested,
“People should not have to take jobs that they do not want to take.” Linda then
responded to Joyce’s ideas, acknowledging Joyce’s contribution and offering her own
views. Linda said that she struggled because she felt that some people could get better
jobs or get ahead if they “really truly wanted to” and yet for some people, no matter how
much they want to get ahead or how hard they work, “they end up in jobs which are not
great because of how society works.” Linda labeled her second point “cynical,” and
suggested that “we should do a better job of putting out the opportunities,” because
currently we are not offering the opportunities to all people “in fair ways.”

A] then entered the discussion and suggested that the context of “capitalism”
translates into inevitable “consequences” that include “sprawling urban areas” and
“ghettoes and projects.” He then brought education into the discussion, describing what
be “ideally would like to believe” — that education can provide a “way out of the ghetto
or out of poverty.” He suggested that education does not work in these ways, noting that
often one has to work rather than go to school in order to “survive economically.” Alexa

then responded to her three classmates’ ideas by stressing the power of “individual

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choices and responsibilities.” However, she also hedged her belief about the ability of
anyone to “get ahead” by noting that the “opportunities” for some individuals “aren’t as
good as [for] other people” and that there are “smaller chances” for some folks when
compared with the “chances” of others.

The student talk throughout the initial part of this discussion focused on the
relationship among a few major ideas of the course: individual choice, responsibility,
access, education, and job structure. The discussion next moved from general talk about
“making it” to the specific experiences of how one student made it to college.

Critical moment #1: Examining the role of personal experiences in learning

In this section, Ibegin by Situating the first critical moment, Al’s question to
Reenie, in the larger exchange between A1 and Reenie. This critical moment, identified
by focal students, moved class discussion from the general question of “making it” to the
specific question of how Reenie made it to college. In the first part of analysis that
follows, focal students suggested that this moment allowed them an opportunity to reflect
on their own stories of making it to college compared with Reenie’s story. In the second
part of analysis, focal students offered their perceptions of the use of personal
experiences in class discussions. Finally, I present an analysis of the students’
perspectives on Reenie’s story of making it. Did her story make sense? Was she “right?”

Moving from a general question of “mating it” to how students in our class m_ade it to
college

To help contextualize the analysis that follows, the first critical moment is
situated in the exchange that took place between A1 and Reenie. Al transitioned class
discussion from the economic or job structure of society to making it to college. He also

transitioned from talking more generally to talking directly with another student about her

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experiences. His use of “you” in Line 1 reflected a 3rd person universal or generic “you,”
and in Line 3, he directed his use of “you” to Reenie.

1 Al: I mean, how can you go to college when your family can’t pay their rent?

2 Reenie: Why does it take a family to go to college? To send them to college?

3 Al: It doesn’t. But I mean you rely on your family. I mean, how did you get here?

4 Reenie: I worked. I worked full time, every semester.

5 Al: I mean, I worked, too.

6 Reenie: And I worked 100 hours a week in the summer just to pay for it [college].

7 I’ve never had a dime from my parents.

8 Al: Well, how did you get to be able to actually go to school, where, you actually had
9 the opportunity to go to college? That’s your parents...

10 Reenie: I graduated with 49 students. It wasn’t your big school, that everybody was
11 going to go to college. A lot of them were farmers. Because that’s what they chose to
12 do. I mean my school was...

13 Al: That’s fine. I understand. Even though like a lot of people, the Brothers [group
14 of young men in MacLeod’s text], would have liked to go to college, that opportunity
15 was just not there.

16 Reenie: Why isn’t it?

All focal students pointed to Al’s question in line 3 (“how did you get here?”) as a
critical moment of the discussion. This was the first time in whole class talk that the
students turned to their own lived experiences as they explored the content of the course.
This is why I am labeling it a moment of personalization. This moment of looking at

another student’s story led to some of the focal students telling their own stories of

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“making it” to college. In addition, all focal students reflected on their perceptions of the

role of personal experiences in learning about diversity.

 

From “How did you get here?” to “How did I make it to college?”

Five of the focal students, Jen, Leigh, Lisa, Alyssa, and Jessie, described how
Al’s question about a classmate’s story encouraged them to articulate how they made
sense of their own experiences of “making it” to college. Two of these students, Jen and
Lisa, made additional connections to the economic situations of their peers or roommates
who were also in college.
Difi‘erent than Reenie: Jen, Leigh, and Lisa’s reflections on their own economic support

Three focal students, Jen, Leigh, and Lisa, noted that Al’s question and Reenie’s
response encouraged them to see that their own stories of making it to college differed
from what Reenie had to do. Jen talked about reflecting on her own economic privilege
as well as her family’s knowledge about the process of loans. She shared that she was
“changed by Reenie’s story” because “during those moments of Al and Reenie” she saw
that Reenie “needed to work so much in order to be in college.” Jen explained that this
was not her experience nor was it the experience of her friends “because our parents are
paying for most [of college] and then taking out necessary loans.” She shared that during
those moments of the exchange, she felt “ashamed” about her lack of knowledge
regarding how things like the loan system works for borrowing money to go to college.
She noted, “I really don’t know [how the loan system works]. I mean my parents pretty
much took care of that [financial aid].” She said, “Reenie’s story helped me reflect on
how I did not know how financial aid works for someone that doesn’t have support from

others, like parents, to be able to figure out the loan system.” Jen talked about how this

94

moment was “critical” because she “noticed differences across the experiences of those in
our class.” She also stressed that “Reenie was coming from a farming community”
compared with Jen and others in the class who were from “city-like areas, which may
have had to do with the kind of good schools some of us had but Reenie did not.” Thus,
in addition to serving as an example of economic diversity for Jen, Reenie also seemed to
be an example of differential access to schooling opportunities. Jen synthesized, “it [this
critical moment] helped me see that not everyone has parents that pay for them to go
through college and not everyone has the same kind of school.”

Similarly, Leigh and Lisa reflected on their own economic privilege when
listening to Al’s question and the exchange between A1 and Reenie. Leigh talked about
Al’s question as “an opportunity to reflect on her own family financial support.” She
shared that she had been thinking about how her own parents were paying for her
education and she noted, “I could not imagine how I would pay for my education all by
myself, as it sounded like Reenie has done.” Like Jen’s expression of feeling “ashamed,”
Leigh described how Reenie’s story made her feel “sheepish” because she explained, “I
did not raise my own money to put myself through college.” Lisa extended her reflection
to her roommates’ situation. She shared, “Al’s question made me think about how my
two roommates are like Reenie” because “they are paying for totally everything in
college.” Lisa shared how “amazed” she was and explained, “I could never do what
Reenie and my roommates are doing.” In drawing a parallel between Reenie’s story and
her roommates’ situations, Lisa suggested that her own situation was different because

she does not have to work like Reenie or her roommates. She noted, “I receive financial

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support from my parents for college.” Just as Jen described her peer groups’ experiences,
Lisa noted the experiences of her roommates.
Similar to Reenie: Alyssa and Jessie ’s reflections on hard work

Both Alyssa and Jessie noted that Al’s question was critical because it prompted
them to reflect on their family’s hard work or their own hard work, which they believed
made them different from others in our class. In addition, these two students also
suggested that the hard work of families or individuals was not apparent simply by
looking at the students in our class.

Alyssa explained that Al’s question encouraged her to notice how she, like
Reenie, differed from others in the class. She noted that “Reenie’s hard work” paralleled
her “position as the first person” from her family to go to college. She explained, “With

,9

my family’s hard work, especially my father’s, she was able to attend college. She also

emphasized how others in the class could not know about her situation and Reenie’s
situation just by looking at them. She noted that “Reenie’s hard work is not something
we can see.” She elaborated,

In that moment of Al’s question, I began to really realize that that [being a first
generation college student] was different from other people in our class. . .Like
people would talk about their families and I would get really defensive about my
family and be like, you don’t know about my family. You might see me here with
these nice clothes, and whatever, but it’s like you don’t know what my father did
to be able to make me here at this university and you don’t know where my
brothers and sisters are, and where my aunt and uncle and all my little cousins are.
It’s like, you don’t know! I never really thought about it before that moment of
Al and Reenie’s response, like that that was really different from other

people. . .So I think that Al’s question helped people realize things about
themselves in their lives [Interview, 8/30/01].

Alyssa began to see how her own economic and educational story differed from the

economic and educational stories of some of the other students in the class. Moreover,

96

she stressed that even though she and her classmates were all “here,” i.e., in college, they
could not assume that all had experienced the same or an easy journey to get here just by
looking at each other.

Similarly, Jessie noted that other students in our class did not know how she had
to work to support herself to get to college and to put herself through college, as Reenie
did. She noted, “Al’s question made me think about my own factory work experiences
working the third shift from eleven at night until seven in the morning seven nights a
week for five consecutive summers” and she added, “I thought about how this was
similar to Reenie.” Although she identified with Reenie’s hard work, Jessie also thought
that Reenie was “trying to give a tough girl account” so that “others would know that she
did not have as much of a privileged life,” making it clear that “she’s very independent.”
Jessie added, “For me, it’s enough to know that I did it, and occasionally want to say I’m
a tough girl, I will throw it out there.” Jessie suggested that the hard work that both she
and Reenie had done in order to “make it” in college was “not common in our class” and
“not something” that she “usually shared with others.”

The moment of personalization led to self-reflection and even new understandings
regarding the differences in experiences across classmates for five of the focal students.
For all of the focal students, what it meant to learn from and understand personal
experiences when learning about issues of diversity surfaced from this critical moment.
Making sense of personal experiences: Learning from students’ stories

All eight focal students reflected on the critical moment in terms of their views of
the role of personal experiences in class discussions. However, they differed in terms of

how they understood this role. Six students believed that no students’ stories about their

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experiences were “right or wrong” and that stories reflected the kinds of experiences that
they and their classmates had lived. Two students viewed experiences or stories in terms
of “correcting” their classmates’ misunderstandings.

Stories are never “right” or “wrong”: Seeing connections between experiences and
stories

Six of the eight focal students, Jen, Leigh, Alyssa, Jessie, Lisa, and Amanda,
focused on the importance of noticing the stories that they told about their experiences as
well as the importance of seeing how their own stories and their classmates’ stories
logically reflected the experiences they had. In explaining the work of using personal
experiences to learn about diversity, these students reflected on what Jen named as “the
connections between experiences and stories.” Alyssa’s description was typical when she
explained that the stories that each of us told were “shaped by our experiences and that
our job was to reflect on why we thought what we thought about our experiences.” Leigh
noted, “We learned to see how our stories reflected our experiences.” Similarly, Jessie
described each classmate’s story as a “little window into the person’s soul. . .You could
tell what kinds of experiences they had by the way they said things or the stories they
shared.” Lisa and Amanda talked at length about placing classmates’ stories within their
personal experiences for the purpose of what Amanda described as “seeing how they
came to believe what they believed.” All six students suggested that we worked on
seeing how our own and others’ personal experiences shaped the stories that we told.

In addition, these six students talked about the need to steer from language of
“right” and “wrong.” Jen exemplified this idea when she shared, “Opinions or stories
about experiences were not right or wrong, but multiple and different.” Leigh

commented, “Our job was to not to judge others’ stories as right or wrong but rather to

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focus on placing them in their life experiences to try to see what led them to tell the
stories that they told in class.” Both Alyssa and Jessie talked about “the need to embrace
others’ stories in our class.” Lisa also emphasized that “stories were not right or wrong,”
suggesting that learning involved placing classmates’ sharing within the context of their
lives or what Amanda described as “seeing people’s stories as logical.”

Moreover, these six students placed understanding stories about experiences
within a larger goal of having whole class discussion. Jen’s framing was typical; she
noted that “We used stories about our experiences in order to have a discussion with the
whole class.” Leigh explained that learning from stories about our experiences happened
in discussion because “discussion was the point, not telling people whether they were
right or wrong with their stories.” Alyssa explicitly mentioned that “discussion involved
increasing awareness of the multiplicity of stories or viewpoints in our class, and
wronging others’ stories would not get us toward this.” Similarly, Lisa shared, “I thought
the whole point of the class was to have a discussion, not to shoot other people down and
not to say, ‘This is right, you are wrong. Or my story is better than yours,’ or stuff like
that.”

While these six focal students believed in not making judgments about the
“correctness” of the stories of their classmates, Stan and Reenie talked about the use of
stories or personal experiences for “correction” of classmates’ “misunderstandings or
misconceptions.” However, Stan and Reenie differed regarding how they understood this
process of “correction.”

Personal experiences or stories as right or wrong: Correcting others’ misunderstandings

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Both Stan and Reenie described the role of sharing personal experiences as a
process of correcting mistaken understandings. Stan saw our job as to “share honestly
our stories” so that we could “have our misconceptions corrected.” For Stan, this process
of correction involved a process of having students tell “stories about their experiences,
and through talking about their stories, they could find out where they were wrong.” He
added that he “always liked hearing others’ stories. . .because if I disagreed with them, it
gave me a way to think about why did I disagree with them.” While Stan distinguished
between experiences and stories about those experiences, Reenie believed that
experiences themselves proved “truths” to students. She described “learning about
diversity” as “finding answers that come from the truth” of experiences. Synthesizing her
view, she noted, “First hand experiences like mine were valuable because they were true
and they could teach us correct conceptions.” Reenie stressed, “I valued first-hand
experiences in our class because these are true.”

The focal students’ ideas about the role of personal experiences in learning are
evident in the ways in which they interpreted Reenie’s response to Al’s question, “how
did you get here?” The six focal students who did not evaluate personal experiences as
right or wrong situated Reenie’s story or hard work within what they viewed as other
factors that contributed to her “making it” to college. Stan saw the need to correct
Reenie’s story about making it because he believed that she did not understand the many
factors that must have shaped her choices. Finally, Reenie believed that her experience
offered truths to her classmates about the role of hard work in making it to college.

Perspectives on Reenie ’s story: Knowing some of her story, correcting her story, and her
experience as truth

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The six focal students (Jen, Leigh, Alyssa, Jessie, Lisa, and Amanda) who
articulated that personal stories were not “right” or “wrong” acknowledged that Reenie
had worked hard and that other factors probably contributed to her “making it” to college.
They did not view the story that Reenie shared in class as either “right” or “wrong,” but
rather suggested that they did not know a lot about Reenie or could have found out more
information about her. Jessie recognized that “Reenie worked extremely hard,” and also
noted that “she [Reenie] was still coming from racially defined privilege because she is a
White female.” Jessie also added, “She [Reenie] doesn’t have gender identity issues that
she has to deal with on top of everything. She doesn’t have questions about sexuality as
much as someone else.” Similarly, Jen suggested that Reenie was “able to make it in part
because she worked so hard and in part because she was not in a situation with really
low-wage jobs or drugs.” Amanda commented on the fact that “hard work definitely had
something to do with Reenie making it,” and added that Reenie “made it probably
because she had gone to school every day for her entire life until she was a senior in high
school.” According to Amanda, hard work and other factors shaped how Reenie “ended
up in college.” Lisa believed that “Reenie’s story showed that hard work really did
matter in her case.” And, she also noted, “I remember that I wanted to know more about
Reenie in that moment, how she got here, on top of her hard work.” Alyssa and Leigh
both suggested that we did not know enough about Reenie to know how she got to
college. Alyssa described “not knowing much about Reenie’s background” and Leigh
commented, “We didn’t know the whole story here.” While none of these six focal
students wronged Reenie for her story about her experiences, they also did not suggest

that hard work was the only factor that mattered in Reenie’s making it to college.

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Stan was the only focal student who stated that he disagreed with Reenie’s story
and believed that Reenie needed to add particular understandings to her story, explicitly
describing Reenie as “not recognizing her privilege” during her exchange with Al. Stan
noted, “I remember listening to Reenie and thinking that choice is a more complex matter
than what she described.” He said that “it was not right to say that she chose to come to
college while the other 48 students of her school chose to become farmers,” and he
distinguished between what he called “the truth of Reenie’s experiences,” which he saw
as “the truth of her working every semester to put herself through school,” compared to
what he called “some of her story about those experiences.” In other words, Stan
differentiated between “agreeing with Reenie’s personal experience” and “disagreeing
with the thoughts that were coming out of it.” He explained, “In terms of Reenie saying,
‘I worked full-time every semester,’ that is her personal knowledge. You can’t deny
it. ...but I think her story was ‘A lot of them were farmers because that’s what they chose
to do.’ I would say that would be an opinion. . .someone could come in and look at why
the farmers stayed farmers, and Reenie came out into the education institution.”

Reenie seemed to differ from all of the other focal students given her view of
personal experiences as what she called “proof” that individuals did not need economic
support from parents to make it to college. Reenie described herself as having served as
“a counter example to the ways in which Al saw the world.” She thought that her “direct
answering of questions corrected Al” because she thought that her “lifestyle is proof that
it doesn’t take a family [to make it to college].” She stressed,

I didn’t get any federal funding. I did work for everything that I have,

without any assistance from government, parents. I mean, my parents,

yes, I do have their support of going to college. They aren’t saying,
‘Yeah, you need to drop out to get a job.’ But they aren’t offering

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thousand dollar checks either, saying, ‘Your tuition was $9,000 this
year, so let us pay for it.’

She said that she “liked the questions” that Al offered, “because that’s how you learn.”
She elaborated, “You have to ask these questions, because. . .maybe your knowledge does
have room for improvement. Unfortunately, he picked an experience that I’ve lived for
22 years, that probably is pretty full-proof by now.” She added, “Al obviously felt very
strongly that it takes a family to raise a child. . .Where I know different because it
happened. . .Your life doesn’t go as smoothly as what other people do. Truth comes from
my experience.” Reenie believed that her experiences helped “correct views held by Al
and possibly others in our class.”
Summary

All of the focal students characterized their sharing of personal experiences or
stories as an important part of class discussion, yet they differed regarding whether or not
students’ stories should be assessed as “right” or “wrong.” Six focal students noted that
their classmates’ stories logically reflected their experiences, and therefore, offered
legitimate ways of understanding who their classmates were. While these six students
described the need to avoid judging classmates’ stories as right or wrong, Stan and
Reenie perceived a need to correct misunderstandings through sharing personal
experiences or stories. Stan saw a need for classmates to share stories in order to have
their own stories corrected. Reenie suggested that by sharing her own story she was able
to correct misperceptions that some of her classmates may have had. The differences
across the focal students’ perceptions demonstrate how this group of White teacher

candidates brought complex ideas about the role of personal experiences to their learning.

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The focal students identified a second critical moment in this discussion that
further demonstrated the complexities of sharing experiences. This critical moment
foregrounded the role of assumptions in talking about personal experiences. The focal
students mobilized this second critical moment to describe further the first critical
moment in terms of whether Al was making an assumption (or not) and whether Al’s
ideas fostered or impeded class discussion.

Critical moment #2: Examining the role of assumptions in learning

In this section, I begin by Situating the second critical moment, Alyssa’s meta-
commentary about assumptions in our class talk, within the whole class discussion.
Because the focal students used Alyssa’s meta-commentary to reflect further upon the
exchange between A1 and Reenie, in the analysis that follows, I first explore the ideas of
those who believed that Al was making an assumption about Reenie, including whether
they believed that assumptions were productive for class discussions. Next, I explore the
perceptions of the focal students who did not believe that Al was making any
assumptions about Reenie. Finally, I also highlight the perceptions of two focal students
who talked about the possible consequences of Alyssa’s meta-commentary.

_B_ack to the whole class discussion: The moment of meta-commentary

After Al’s question (“How did you get here?”), Reenie immediately answered, “I
worked. I worked full time, every semester.” In the exchange between A1 and Reenie,
Al suggested that family is one factor in shaping one’s choices. He noted, “But I mean
you rely on your family.” He also attributed Reenie’s opportunity to go to college to

parents, stating, “Well, how did you get to be able to actually go to school, where, you

actually had the opportunity to go to college? That’s your parents.” Reenie then

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questioned, “Why does it take a family to go to college? To send them to college?”
After the exchange between A1 and Reenie, other students joined in the discussion and
focused on the question of whether all students in our country had the opportunity to
attend college. Many students entered the discussion and began talking before a
classmate had finished talking; some students suggested that all individuals with the
desire could enter college and other students disagreed. For a few minutes, students’ side
conversations with classmates seated near them took precedence over the whole class
discussion until Jay raised his voice over the talk of all small group discussions, starting
the whole class discussion again. He shared his view that opportunities are available to all
students if they want them. Others disagreed with him, suggesting that all students do not
have access to the same kinds of academic opportunities.

After students voiced their ideas for several minutes, Alyssa entered the
discussion.
1 First of all, I just want to say I really enjoy our class discussions. And, I think
2 it’s very counterproductive if we make assumptions about people in the room
3 because we barely know each other’s names, let alone our backgrounds or
4 family structures or class structures. Maybe you judge me by the clothes I wear,
5 the jewelry, or whatever, but we don’t want that. So just to lay that out there,
6 that try not to make assumptions so that we can better class discussions, or
7 improve the class discussions.
Alyssa acknowledged her enjoyment of class discussions (Line 1) before offering
commentary about the role of assumptions in our class discussions (Line 2). All of the

focal students linked Alyssa’s commentary on assumptions to Al’s question (the first

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critical moment), focusing their assessment on whether or not Al was making an
assumption about Reenie. Moreover, the focal students suggested that this moment was
critical because it helped them reflect further on whether Al’s responses were productive
for class discussion.
Al’s assumption about financial support

Five of the eight focal students, Alyssa, Lisa, Amanda, Jessie, and Jen, believed
that Al was making the assumption that Reenie was receiving financial support from her
parents for college. Alyssa questioned, “Who knows?” and thought that “it was possible
that Reenie was a very independent person who paid for her own schooling and was able
to support herself.” Lisa and Amanda added that Al’s assumption extended to all
students in the class. Lisa noted, “Al was assuming financial support from parents not
only about Reenie, but about all of the students in our class.” Amanda stated, “Al was
making the assumption that Reenie’s parents helped her out financially. . .And he was
making the assumption that we all got money from our parents to come to school.”
Similarly, Jessie believed that “Al assumed she [Reenie] got money from her parents,”
and Jen added that “this was not necessarily the case.” Of these five students, Alyssa and
Lisa thought that Al’s assumptions in this exchange were counterproductive to our class
discussion. The other three students, Jessie, Jen, and Amanda, believed that his
assumptions were productive for learning.
Assumptions as counterproductive to whole class discussion

Both Alyssa and Lisa felt that Al’s assumption impeded productive class
discussion and Alyssa added that it did not help foster what she called “community.”

Alyssa believed that Al “attacked Reenie with his assumption,” and that this was “hurtful

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and probably silenced others who wanted to speak.” She explained, “I got so
mad...when Al was making an assumption about Reenie, which is why I had to say
something.” Alyssa believed that “We barely knew each other at this point in the
semester” and because of this, “We had to be careful about making assumptions about
others in our class.” According to Alyssa, “Al’s assumption did not help discussion.”
She elaborated, “To really make the class, for ways to create a community where we
could have discussion in a fast time in the classroom because we only met twice a week,
but it was important to really learn about the others in the class, we needed to invest time
into creating community in the first classes.” This work of what Alyssa named as
“creating a safe environment for discussion” involved “not making assumptions like Al
did.”

Similarly, Lisa felt that “Al and all of us needed to work on keeping our
assumptions in check” because, as in this exchange, “Al’s assumption hurt our class
discussion.” Lisa shared that “the goal of conversation was not to see who agreed with
me, but to make a point, to share my thinking, where Reenie got cut off.” She stressed
that the point of conversation was “listening to others’ ideas that were different from
yours, because otherwise, we would all have been self-centered, and just have known our
own ideas.” She articulated that we needed to “keep our assumptions in check” because
they impeded reaching our goal with class discussions, which was to “share our
thinking.”

Assumptions as progress in learning
In contrast to Alyssa and Lisa, the other three students who viewed A1 as making

an assumption characterized assumptions as helpful in fostering productive discussion.

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Amanda, Jessie, and Jen believed that, as Jessie noted, “We were making progress
because we were examining Al’s assumption which was helping for learning.” Jessie
stressed, “Al’s honesty in putting his assumptions out there did not interfere with class
discussions,” but rather made the class “more like a real life setting” where students
could “talk through and own their stories.” Jen also shared that putting out assumptions
was a “helpful part of creating discussions” because this allowed Al “to examine his ways
of seeing the class and the world.” Similarly, Amanda noted “progress in class
discussions” as putting out and examining one’s assumptions. She shared, “But if he [A1]
didn’t ever make those assumptions, we would never have found out about how hard
some people in our class had to work compared to others.” Amanda added, “You needed
to make assumptions to make progress in discussion, in learning. If you didn’t make
assumptions, you just were going to take everyone for what they said and figure that’s
why it was, and not get to the point of what was important.” For Amanda, what was
important in this discussion was “trying to figure out how people ended up in college.”
No assumptions being made: Al’s moves as helpful for lear_nir_rg

The final three focal students, Stan, Reenie, and Leigh, did not believe that Al was
making assumptions about Reenie or the class. Stan shared that he “definitely
remembered Alyssa’s comment” about assumptions because he did not agree with Alyssa
that Al was making assumptions about Reenie in the discussion. He characterized both
Al and Reenie as “passionate about their ideas,” and believed that Al was “asking for
clarification about Reenie’s story” because he was “looking for the bigger picture.” In

reflecting on class talk in this segment, Stan elaborated,

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...if you ever get into an argument, not even an argument, a discussion, and it
goes back and forth, you know, people equated it with assumptions or something
bad. But I mean, it was not really not bad. . .You just needed to work it out...I
think it came down to passion, rather than just assuming. Because I didn’t see
any assumptions here.
Stan believed that “Al was probing Reenie’s thought process” which “helped the
discussion flow.”

Like Stan, Reenie and Leigh did not believe that Al was making an assumption
and viewed his question and ideas as helpful for class discussion. Reenie shared that her
exchange with Al was “productive” because “his putting out questions” allowed learning
to occur. Reenie did not experience Al’s comment as negatively as Alyssa thought,
explaining, “[A1] offered me a chance to really clarify what I was trying to say. When
you are talking, you don’t necessarily know what the listener is thinking, and it was great
that he asked. . .I think he was just trying to better understand what I meant, not assume
that he knew. Because it was so opposite of him.” She added, “Through his questions,
he and others could learn more about my experience.” Similarly, Leigh noted that “Al
helped engage in the process of discussion” because he “modeled the process of putting
out different points of view because of their different backgrounds.”

Regardless of whether the focal students believed that Al was making an
assumption or not, the majority described the exchange between A1 and Reenie as
productive. In other words, six of the eight students (Amanda, Jen, Jessie, Stan, Reenie,
and Leigh) described this exchange as a learning opportunity regardless of whether they
labeled Al’s question and ideas as making an assumption. The other two students, Alyssa

and Lisa, believed that Al’s assumption was counterproductive to discussion.

Additional note about Alyssa’s meta-commentm on assumptions

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Two focal students, Jessie and Reenie, discussed Alyssa’s comment in terms of its
impact on class discussion. Jessie wondered about the possible consequences on the
discussion of this class session, and Reenie situated Alyssa’s comment in the semester of
discussions. Jessie questioned whether Alyssa’s comments (not Al’s) “hurt class
discussion that day” because she thought that students might have been “second—guessin g
how they had stated things prior to Alyssa’s comment.” She wondered, “As a result of
Alyssa’s comment, were students questioning [themselves], had they made assumptions
about others in the room? Should they steer clear of talking about things on a more
personal level?” Reenie also speculated about what she termed, “the impact of Alyssa’s
comment” on the class discussion, characterizing Alyssa as “over-sensitive in this
discussion” and in “most of her reactions” to our class discussions. Reenie added that she
believed that she had to monitor her talk throughout the rest of the semester so as not to
offend Alyssa.

Implications of personalization and meta-commentary for teaching and learning
about diversity

The two critical moments suggest that teacher educators can reconceptualize
students as not having experiences with “issues of diversity.” Students brought rich,
complex and varied stories of how they “made it” to college to this discussion. These
stories indicate that White preservice teachers cannot be homogenized into a monolithic
category. The stories show that this group of students did not enter the class as blank
slates, devoid of experiences and ideas around core course content. The first critical
moment demonstrated how tapping into these stories can make the discussion of abstract
ideas of the course content (e. g., social reproduction) personally meaningful for students.

As a result of this moment, some students reflected on their own journeys to college. In

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other words, looking at each other’s stories led students to new insights regarding their
own stories. This was at least partially attributable to the social class differences in terms
of the need to hold a job and the journey to college within our own class of 31 students.
The variation across students contributes to a more complex picture of White preservice
teachers as a group. In acknowledging the variation in our class, the second critical
moment raised questions about what assumptions students were making about others’
experiences and more generally, the role of assumptions in learning during discussions.
Taken together, these critical moments raise questions about the role of sharing stories,
what counts as context, and the role of discourse in learning about diversity.

_W_hat does it mean to share stories?

The focal students’ perceptions raise questions about the role of sharing stories
when learning about issues of diversity. What does it mean to share stories? How do
students and teacher educators view the role of stories in learning? The tension between
telling and examining one’ story was noted and discussed during an initial activity of
creating rules of engagement. The focal students seemed to explore this tension
individually and collectively through the two critical moments of this class discussion.
The variance among students’ reactions to Reenie and Al’s exchange and Alyssa’s meta-
commentary can be understood as different ideas for enacting a space for sharing and
critique. The tension also seemed to reflect the question of whether all of us needed to
process Reenie’s story in the same ways or whether we could have multiple
interpretations of her story. It also raises the question of what we think we need to know

first about any one student who shares her story.

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Another key question that emerges from the preceding analysis focuses upon
whether or not there are particular ways in which stories need to be told. Are some
stories “better” than others? How might this depend on the context in which a student’s
story is situated?

What counts as context?

At least two critical ways of understanding what counts as context emerge from
the analysis of the critical moments. Reenie’s work could be conceived of as
dehomogenizing the local context of our class because students within our class did not
share the same experiences. Some students, like Reenie, had less economic support to
make it to college, while others gained access to college more easily. Although it is not
clear if Reenie was insisting that what she did is what anyone can do when lacking
“privilege,” she may have been challenging Al for overgeneralizing within the local
context of our class. On the other hand, Stan and Al’s ideas point to another
understanding of context. Although there were differences in terms of how students
made it, Stan and Al seemed to stress the fact that all students in our class had gained
access to college. They seemed to push for an examination of the larger context of who
we were as a class (i.e., we were mostly White) and how we made it “here” (to college)
in relationship to others who had not made it in a larger societal context.

Put another way, the students’ insights indicate that we were always learning in at
least two sets of relationships or two contexts: our relationship with one another as a
class and our relationship with a larger context of others who were not present. The

students may have been processing their experiences differently depending on whether

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they were contextualizing themselves in relationship to their classmates or in relationship
to a larger societal context.

A critical question remains. What role does the discourse or course content play
in helping students tell and examine their stories? And how does this discourse help
students examine their stories in relationship to multiple contexts?

mm the role of discourse?

This chapter was framed in part by considering learning through a binary between
child and curriculum. Gee’s (1992) interrelated distinctions between primary and
secondary Discourses and between acquisition and learning are helpful for extending this
framing, i.e., for using students’ lived experiences to learn about issues of diversity. The
experiences that students brought to their learning can be characterized as what Gee
defines as Discourse, or “ways of displaying (through words, actions, values, and beliefs)
membership in a particular social group or social network” (1992, p. 107). This primary
Discourse of lived experience, or Discourses that are home-based and part of our primary
socialization, can be distinguished from the what Gee calls secondary Discourses to
which individuals are apprenticed, “within various local, state, and national groups, and
institutions outside early home and peer group socialization” (pp. 108-109). In this case,
the discipline of diversity (Mukhopadhyay & Henze, 2003, p. 677) can be considered a
secondary Discourse. In other words, learning about diversity might be defined as
learning a secondary discourse of terms such as social reproduction, the achievement
ideology, privilege, social class, cultural capital, and other ideas deemed central to the

course CODICDI.

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Gee elaborates that primary Discourses are acquired through subconscious
exposure to models in natural and meaningful settings, differing from secondary
Discourses which are learned and involve a process of conscious knowledge gained
through some process of teaching or reflection that requires explanation and analysis. In
describing the relationship between the two kinds of Discourses, Gee notes that learning
cannot facilitate entry into a Discourse unless acquisition has already begun. In other
words, as Discourses are being mastered through acquisition, learning can facilitate meta-
knowledge. Gee describes the role of schools in this process:

Schools must supply rich, interactive apprenticeships in Discourses to all children,

and they must have teachers who know where and how to say, ‘Look at that’ . . .at

the right time and place. But it does no good to tell people to look at what they
cannot see. And we can see only what has already been opened up for our view
by an apprenticeship within some Discourse that renders such things ‘visible’ in

the first place. (p. 137)

These distinctions help frame the nature of participation during the whole class
discussion and a tension that I faced as a teacher throughout the semester. I encouraged
discussion of the course content or secondary discourse of diversity through the
experiences of the groups of young men in the text we were reading and through
discussion of students’ lived experiences. My focus was not on teaching explicit
terminology, the secondary Discourse, but rather on giving students space to discuss the
content using their own language. Although students did not necessarily use the
discourse, the ideas were embedded within their stories. This raises the question of when
a teacher educator might enter whole class discussions to name what students are
describing, using the secondary Discourse of diversity.

I preferred that students had freedom to explore the course concepts in their

everyday language and viewed my job as teacher educator as listening for the concepts

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within their stories. I did not want to teach the discourse explicitly divorced from
students’ lives. I wanted students to see how these concepts play themselves out within
their own lives. I also recognized that this discourse offers lenses for understanding and
organizing experience in relationship to multiple contexts, to talk collectively about what
we had discussed, and to build shared understandings in a learning community. With
respect to this study, tapping into students’ experiences may be an essential piece of
viewing White teacher candidates as capable of learning about issues of diversity.

In the next chapter, focal students share their perceptions of another critical
moment in a discussion that also tapped into students’ personal experiences. This
discussion involved learning about diversity through popular culture, and specifically
foregrounds how students’ prior experiences and understandings of a cultural artifact,

Barbie, served as a catalyst for learning about issues of diversity.

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Chapter 5

BARBIE IS (NOT) THE PROBLEM: CONSIDERING CONSENSUS AND
MULTIPLICITY IN LEARNING ABOUT DIVERSITY

While the last chapter foregrounded the use of students’ experiences of making it
to college when learning about issues of diversity, the use of Barbie as an artifact of
popular culture frames the critical moment of this chapter.

A critical moment: “I think that they’re really pretty.”

On February 22””, our 14”1 class session of the semester, I started class by asking
students to describe what they saw in an advertisement featuring three Barbies (Barbie,
Christie, and Teresa) that I brought to class. In my lesson plans, I noted that I wanted
students to look first at “the details of the images of the ad, without talking first about
‘what it all means’” (Lesson Plan, 2/22/01). Throughout the initial part of the discussion,
students offered rich descriptions of the three dolls in the advertisement. These
descriptions included commentary on the number of dolls in the ad, the skin tone and race
of each doll, hair color, height, clothes, hair texture, hair length, and observations of
whether or not each doll was holding a sign with her name on it (Barbie does not have a
sign; Christie and Teresa hold signs). After this initial conversation about the
advertisement, Amanda stated, “I think that they’re really pretty,” and the class erupted in
laughter. Because all focal students described this comment as “critical” or “pivotal”
within the class discussion and their learning, Amanda’s statement, “I think that they’re
really pretty,” frames this chapter.

To engage in an exploration of the significance of this moment, including the
importance of artifacts and the complexities of students’ perceptions of consensus and

multiplicity in class discussion, this chapter is divided into four sections. In the first

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section, Contextual framing for “I think that they’re really pretty,” I set the stage for
the key analytical work that follows. The second section, Overview of three key parts
to students’ sense-making: Opening or closing the door to divergence?, entails a
deeper analysis of students’ perceptions of Amanda’s comment; this analysis is organized
into three principal parts. In the first part, I examine focal students’ perceptions of how
Amanda’s comment allowed for divergent ideas to enter whole class discussion. In the
second part, I examine the variance regarding what the focal students considered as the
issue worthy of discussion. And in the third part, I situate students’ perceptions of the
Barbie discussion in their ideas about the role of consensus and multiplicity in learning.

Because students’ sense-making of the critical moment did not end with the class
discussion around Barbie, in the third section of this chapter, The power of Barbie: A
web of exploration, I detail how the students’ exploration and sense-making of Barbie
persisted throughout the semester in e-mail exchanges, course writings, and class
discussions. To conclude the chapter, the fourth section, Implications for teaching and
learning about diversity, points to possibilities and limitations of using artifacts and the
broader implications of both the web of exploration and the entire analysis for teaching
and learning about issues of diversity.

Contextual framing for the critical moment: “I think that they’re really pretty.”

In this section, Idescribe my initial curiosities with Barbie and an after-class
discussion with a small group of students that led to my pedagogical choice to plan
Barbie into a whole class discussion. I then offer a synthesis of the actual whole class
discussion leading up to and immediately following the moment of Amanda’s critical

comment. Next, I provide a framework for a pedagogy of artifacts, drawing upon work

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in cultural studies to describe the way in which artifacts were used throughout the course.
This surfaces a research gap concerning the implementation of artifacts in teacher
education classrooms. I then situate Barbie in a fuller description of a semester of artifact
use.

Wtalysts for ngie: Mfiv curiosities and an after-class discussion

On February 18’”, the Sunday before the Tuesday session of class (#13), I came
across a Barbie advertisement in a local newspaper. Although I sometimes played with
Barbie as a young girl, I specifically wondered what my students’ experiences with
Barbie had been, especially given that they were more than a decade younger than I. In
my own experiences, I remembered becoming bored with Barbie because the only thing
that she was able to do was change clothes. Although I was not very interested in Barbie
and her clothes, as an adult, I viewed Barbie as just one of many childhood artifacts that
shaped the messages that I received as a young girl about the intersection of gender, race,
class, heterosexuality, and beauty. As a teacher, I wondered how Barbie offered
opportunities for dialogue about these issues and how we could make sense of her. In my
lesson plans I indicated that “I have not thought of Barbie in a long time, and am curious
to know students’ reactions to both the advertisement as a text and Barbie as a text,
especially in terms of gender and race” (Lesson Plan, 2/22/01).

So on February 20’h (Class #13), I distributed the advertisement at the start of
class, but I did not talk about it. At the end of this class discussion, Jessie asked me to
talk about why I brought in the ad. Rather than answer her question, I raised the
possibility of talking about the ad during our next class. When the class (#13) ended, a

small group of students (Alyssa, Stan, Meg, and Jay) returned ten minutes later to find me

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organizing papers and rearranging the room. The ad had sparked a discussion among the
four of them and they indicated a desire to share some of their thinking with me. They
had begun to notice some of the details in the ad: the length and texture of the hair of the
three Barbies, the clothes that the dolls were wearing, and the similar body type for all
three dolls. Alyssa even imagined how the Barbies might walk in the clothes that they
were wearing, clothes which seemed to bind the dolls down to their ankles. She offered
us a demonstration of how they might walk by shuffling across the classroom.

After the five of us talked for 20 minutes, I decided to plan discussion time
around the ad during our next class. I shared this decision with the small group of
students before they left class for the second time that day. That night, I outlined the idea
of “doing a close reading of the details of the advertisement (e. g., Barbies’ clothes,
figure, hair, race, etc.)” as the main goal in my lesson plan for the first part of our next
class. I would begin this class discussion with the question, “What do you notice?”
(Lesson Plan, 2/24/01). In addition, I noted that I wanted students to “delve into what
Barbie represents for them” and how we might use this “everyday text to think about
issues of gender, race, and sexuality.” It bears noting that heading into class #14, I did
not think that we would talk about Barbie for the entire class. In my original lesson plan,
I devoted an initial 10-15 minutes for discussion of the ad.

In order to situate further Amanda’s comment, “I think that they’re really pretty,”
I describe the actual class conversation leading up to this critical moment.

The class conversation leading up to Amanda’s statement: Describing the details of the
Barbie ad

 

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Stan was the first to respond to my question, “What do you notice?” He noticed
that the ad featured not only Barbie, but two other dolls: Christie and Teresa. He also
foregrounded Barbie’s race and hair color, describing Barbie as “a White, blonde
female.” When he added, “Christie and Teresa are unable to be what Barbie is” in
reference to Barbie’s race and hair color, several students laughed. Kathy participated
next, saying that Stan is “right” because Barbie is also depicted as taller than the other
two dolls. Alyssa then highlighted the nature of the dolls’ clothes, offering the class a
demonstration of what it might be like to attempt to walk in the kind of dress these dolls
were wearing. Just as she had done after our previous class session, Alyssa waddled into
the middle of our circle,l3 stating that “the dolls cannot bend their knees in this dress.”
Several students laughed when Alyssa offered her demonstration, and when Alyssa
wondered aloud how Teresa, who was sitting in the ad, would even get up, more students
laughed. Next, Stan commented on Barbie’s hair texture and race, characterizing
Barbie’s hair as “flowing” and “straight” and noting that “this kind of hair cannot happen
naturally for African American women.” Lisa added that she noticed the length of the
dolls’ hair because each doll had long hair extending below the shoulders. She then
described the three dolls as “only White and African American.” Brett entered the
discussion to ask what race Teresa was “supposed to be,” seeming to differentiate her

from the two possibilities that Lisa mentioned.l4 A few students stated that Teresa might

 

’3 We always sat in a circle for class sessions. Before every class, I arrived early to transform the rows of
individual desks into a large circle. I sat at a desk among the students in the circle.

’4 Part of the difficulty of seeing the skin tone of the dolls in the ad could have been attributed to the rather
poor black and white photocopies that the students had. I copied the original ad from a newspaper circular
that was printed in color. Although the original ad circulated throughout the class twice, each student was
working from a black and white photocopy. During this part of the discussion, Brett explicitly commented
on the difficulty of talking about the dolls’ supposed race from the photocopy. Brett and several other
students talked about race as something visual and observable. For an anthropological perspective on

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be Asian, and others responded that she “does not look Asian.” Alyssa offered the
possibility that “maybe Teresa is Hispanic or Latina.” Several students then discussed
whether Teresa was just tan and brunette or whether her skin tone was darker. Kathy
offered the last description during this part of the discussion, noticing that Barbie was not
holding a sign, and that Teresa and Christie were holding signs with their names written
on them.

Throughout this part of the discussion, several students also situated their
responses to this ad within larger themes including a societal standard of beauty, the
consequences of Barbie on self-esteem, the advertisers’ target audiences, and the
intentions of Barbies’ creators. For example, in Stan’s first comment, he named race and
hair color within what he called “the bigger picture” or “the standard of beauty in
society.” When Alyssa discussed the dolls’ clothing, she also wondered aloud about
what she labeled as “the possible consequences” of presenting these dolls to “younger
girls, women, and all citizens in our society.” When Stan and Jay spoke about the dolls’
race, they framed race in terms of having one doll for Whites, one for African Americans,
and one who fits what Jay described as “all the mixtures in between.” When students
began to frame the details in larger themes, I encouraged them to continue re-examining
the ad for additional details. In an effort to do this, I entered the conversation three times
to prompt the class to return to the ad and read it for additional concrete details. After I
entered the discussion a third time to ask students what they noticed about the

advertisement, Amanda entered with her critical comment.

Amanda’s comment followed by an etflange with Stan: Is pretty a problem?

 

 

disentangling biological and sociological concepts of race, see the work of Mukhopadhyay and Henze
(2003).

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Amanda stated in a voice just loud enough for all of us to hear, “I think that
they’re really pretty.” Although some members of the class laughed at various points
during the first part of the discussion, almost the entire class erupted into laughter after
Amanda’s comment. Amanda and Stan exchanged eleven conversational turns. Because
the focal students commented upon the significance of this exchange and the relationship
between Amanda and Stan, the exchange is shown below.

1 Amanda: I think that they’re really pretty. [Eruption of class laughter]

2 Stan: There is a problem here — that this is what’s pretty.

3 Amanda: No, no. There’s no problem here. They’re gorgeous. They’re dolls. It’s
4 not a big deal.

5 Stan: No, this is a big problem because

6 Amanda: There is nothing wrong...

7 Stan: No no no no no.

8 Amanda: ...with admitting that there are gorgeous beings in the world and that they’re
9 pretty and

10 Stan: Let’s take this outside, Ok? No, I’m just kidding.

11 Amanda: You and I are going to fight.

12 Stan: We always do.

13 Amanda: Just kidding. They’re pretty.

During the first three turns of their exchange, Amanda and Stan disagreed about
whether the Barbies’ beauty was problematic or not. Next, in a series of more rapid
turns, Amanda reiterated her idea that it is perfectly acceptable to acknowledge “that

there are gorgeous beings in the world and that they’re pretty.” During their last two

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turns, Amanda and Stan’s exchange became a kind of processing of their disagreement
within their relationship in class discussions more generally, initiated by Stan’s playful
invitation to “take this outside.” Here, Stan and Alyssa focused on their relationship in
the class, noting that they have often found themselves in disagreement over issues in
class discussions during the semester. In Amanda’s last turn, she returned to their
disagreement and reiterated her stance about the dolls’ prettiness. After this, other
students entered the discussion.

In order to understand more deeply how the critical moment and this discussion
came about, I provide a pedagogical framework for the use of artifacts like the Barbie ad.
I then describe how artifacts were used during the semester. It is important to note that
this framework emerged after I taught the course. Although I discovered others’ ideas
about the use of popular culture after teaching the course, the ideas presented here help
situate my goals and moves as a teacher educator using popular culture in the classroom.
A framework for a pedagogy of artifacts: Turning to cultural studies

The importance of artifacts during the course hinged on connections to students’
everyday experiences and on the pedagogical premise that we could read artifacts as texts
for ideas about issues of diversity (e. g., race, class, gender, language, sexuality, etc.). In
Embracing contraries, Elbow (1986) points to the importance of blurring the distinction
between what is personal and what is academic, what is considered everyday and what is
considered scholarly curriculum. Using artifacts of popular culture to cultivate learning
opportunities moves in this direction. While some curriculum theorists, teachers, and

teacher educators have highlighted the need to draw upon popular cultural artifacts in

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classrooms, the use of popular culture in teaching and learning remains largely
uninvestigated, especially in the field of multicultural teacher education.

Mobilizing cultural studies and media literacy: Tapping into students’ knowledge,
experiences, and commitments

The use of artifacts can be situated in the field of cultural studies, a field described
by Heilman as:

a critical tradition that draws from the fields of anthropology, communications,

history, literary criticism, political theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis in order

to critique both texts and cultural practices. The cultural studies

movement. . .encourages the study of mass culture and popular forms in addition
to elite genres and canonical works. (2003, p. 2)

(6‘

As an interdisciplinary field, cultural studies operates at the frontiers of intellectual life,

9”

pushing for new questions, new models, and new ways of study and “is an intellectual.
even a theoretical practice driven. . .by its engagement with, its attempts to respond to the
demands of a world outside of the academy” (Hall, as cited in Grossberg, 1994, p.1). In
addition, Grossberg notes that leading figures of cultural studies (e. g., Stuart Hall, John
Fiske, Raymond Williams) have sought to embrace students’ knowledge pedagogically,
operating from the principle that students have “a very real desire to discuss what they
read ‘in a context to which they br[ing] their own situation, their own experience’” (p. 3).
Similarly, Giroux and Simon (1988) write about popular culture as having an important
place in the lives of students, and they nominate popular cultural studies as pedagogically
powerful.

Although educators and researchers have noted the benefits of using cultural
artifacts, these artifacts often remain excluded from classrooms (Applebaum, 2003;

Skulnick & Goodman, 2003). Educators tend to separate themselves from childhood or

adolescent experiences of popular culture, often seeing their job as maintaining a

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hierarchical distinction between high status culture and popular culture. Maintaining this
distinction prevents teachers from knowing students’ most immediate and rich
experiences as well as the knowledge and ideas students have about themselves and their
relationship with the world. As Appelbaum notes,
Popular and mass media raise the status of school knowledge when teachers keep
them outside of school. But children are intimately caught up in popular media,
and they use mass media resources in play, in social relationships, in imagining
possibilities. When teachers preserve the in-school versus outside-of-school
boundaries, they cut themselves off from relationships with children directly
connected with the most pressing issues of self, identity, morality, power, and
knowledge. (2003, p. 30)
Similarly, Skulnick and Goodman write, “As teachers, we often pass up wonderful
opportunities to use particular artifacts of popular culture as catalysts for thoughtful
social inquiry and self-reflection” (2003, p. 261). They note that some children’s popular
culture is studied by curriculum scholars, but that most of it is “not considered
appropriate material for study in elementary or high schools” (p. 261).
Yet it is precisely the use of popular culture that can open what Bell describes as
“a more critical discourse in primary and secondary classrooms” (2001, p. 230). Giroux
and Simon argue that popular cultural studies can “extend our critical pedagogical
activity into the realm of students’ own subjectivities. They allow us to build bridges to
their moral and political practices as they come into the school world” (1988, p. 232). In
other words, the use of popular culture can help educators understand how their students
are morally and politically involved in their everyday lives. As Appelbaum notes, “It is
especially important to learn from people how they ‘use’ popular culture resources to

make sense of their lives, their culture, and their fears and fantasies, and through such

mediation, to construct new modes of meaning” (2003, p. 26).

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Using popular culture artifacts with students resonates deeply with educators who
are invested in media literacy (Cortes, 1991; Potter, 1998). Using the Barbie
advertisement fostered student talk about what Brunner and Tally describe as “shaping
meaning out of their experiences” (1999, p. 2). Media literate students “have some basic
understanding of how media are constructed, how they are distributed, who owns them,
and how they express the values and the perspective of their authors in the way they are
made as well as in what they cover” (p. 10). Yet, media literacy is not just having the
ability to interpret the meanings found in media messages. Tumer-Vorbeck notes,
“Media literacy, in a broad sense, refers to the ability of individuals both to reflect upon
and to analyze their own consumption of media” (2003, p. 23).

Calling for the pedagogical use of popular culture in K -I 2 classrooms

A number of educators call for the use of popular culture in K- 12 classrooms.
Briley (1990) argues for the use of film in teaching U.S. history. Cooper (1979), Litevich
(1982), and Mills (1987) offer a rationale for using music in teaching social studies. Hise
(1972) urges English teachers to draw upon students’ knowledge of popular culture and
several teachers specifically call for the use of popular culture in the composition
classroom (Daughdrill, 2000; Miller, 1990). Aiex (1988) writes more generally about the
possibilities of film for all disciplines of study and Taylor and Overrnier (1996)
encourage school libraries to keep popular culture resources. All of these educators
suggest that popular culture draws on students’ backgrounds and motivates students, and
that popular culture can be used to teach students critical thinking or to pursue other
academic goals. However, it is important to note that these ideas for the use of popular

culture are not research-based. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2000) serve as one notable

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exception to this lack of research, examining the use of hip-hop in teaching canonical
literary texts to urban high school students.
Need for research on popular culture in teacher education classrooms

There are also few teacher educators who have documented and studied the use of
popular culture artifacts in teacher education classrooms. Those who have conducted
research focus on the influence of film or TV on preservice teachers’ ideas about teaching
and schooling. Trier (2000, 2001) has studied his pedagogy of popular film, asking
preservice teachers to examine the images of teachers that shape their ideas about
teachers and students in schools. Similarly, Brunner (1991) has examined the ways in
which film and TV have influenced preservice teachers’ ideas about teaching and
schooling. Both Paul (2001) and Grant (2002) have examined the influence of
Hollywood films on preservice teachers’ perceptions of urban schools and students.
Despite these examples, there a need to examine the use of other kinds of popular culture
artifacts in teacher education classrooms; the use of these artifacts in courses that
foreground issues of diversity remains untapped and unstudied.

Given this initial overview of the pedagogical possibilities of popular culture, I
now more fully describe the use of Barbie within a semester of artifact use.
Barbie as an immediately recognizable text

Of all of the popular cultural artifacts that students and I examined throughout the
semester, Barbie was unquestionably a compelling one. Unsolicited by me, all of the
focal students referred to the Barbie discussion in some way during their initial
interviews, and five of the eight students (Jessie, Amanda, Alyssa, Jen, Stan) talked about

it at length. Jessie’s response was typical. She commented, “the Barbie conversation

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was an example of a class discussion that was one of the most impressionable I have

experienced in a long time” (9/10/01). She explained,

With Barbie, it is one of those things that we grew up with. So we know more
about it. And we definitely, everybody knows Barbie is problematic. And it’s
something, even though it is problematic, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking
about it, but it’s something we can talk more about because we can relate to more.
We have played with Barbie. We have touched her. We have cut her hair. We
know Barbie. (4/13/02)

Similarly, Alyssa noted, “I think that the Barbie conversation was huge.” She elaborated:
It was the first time that everyone really got fired up about something, and
everybody really had something to say. Finally we found an issue we all wanted
to talk about. Clearly, Barbie was something so big in our society, and this issue
was something so huge in our society that we could talk about it for an hour an a
half. I was really excited to go to this class and talk about it. In the car on the
way, we were like, ‘We are going to talk about Barbie today,’ and we were like,
‘Yeah!’ Me, Stan, Meg, and Jay. (Interview, 8/31/01)

Situating Barbie in a semester of artifact use
In order to create or make tangible and meaningful connections between our class

discussions, the written texts (books and articles) of the class, and the “outside world,”

artifacts were a significant part of the course. These artifacts included songs,
advertisements, magazine articles, poems, newspaper articles, op/ed pieces, cartoons,
music videos, film segments, video games, and even my Nike boots. In my lesson plans,

I often wrote about my hope that these artifacts could “deepen our discussions about

issues of diversity in real world ways” (e. g., Lesson Plans 1/18/01, 1/23/01, 1/25/01,

1/30/01), “giving more life to / illuminating the ideas from our course readings that we

talked about in class.” I wondered in my plans how artifacts might “make the abstract

more real for students,” and offer concrete, everyday contexts for seeing the theoretical

ideas of our course texts. In other words, I continued to wrestle with a key question in

my plans - “How did students’ experiences with popular media such as music,

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magazines, and movies shape their thinking about the intersection of issues such as race,
class, gender, sexual orientation, language and power, opportunity, and success?” The
artifacts represented my continual push across the semester to have students “read their
worlds” in critical ways — i.e., the broad goal of this kind of critical reading was for
students to notice how issues of diversity and power shaped their own lives, beyond the
walls of our classroom (e. g., Lesson Plan, 1/18/01). One of my goals was for students to
see diversity in their lives and not as something separate from them.

During class discussions, the students and I typically distributed artifacts around
our circle. Early in the semester, I intentionally modeled connections between my world
of music and the texts we were reading together for class. For example, during our third
class session (1/16/01), in order to help scaffold students’ understanding of the social
reproduction theories of our text (Jay MacLeod’s Ain ’t no makin’ it), I dedicated a
significant portion of class to exploring the connections between a Pink Floyd song
(Another brick in the wall), a Billy Bragg song (To have and have not), and MacLeod’s
theoretical syntheses.

This example highlights how I modeled ways of seeing and reading through
music. I then asked students to engage in the same kind of seeing and reading for a key
course assignment. We dedicated significant time on artifacts that the students brought in
for this assignment during book club class facilitations (Class #12 (2/15/01); Class #16
(3/1/01); Class #22 (3/29/01); Class #26 (4/12/01); Class #29 (4/24/01)). For these
facilitations, students were asked to read an entire book with a small group of classmates,
and while reading the book, engage as a group in reading their worlds for connections

between the text and other texts of their lives. Students brought examples of their

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knowledge and wealth of experiences with movies, TV shows, music, magazines, and
newspapers to these class discussions. One student brought in her make-up bag and
perfumes as texts for class discussion. Many students also voluntarily chose to bring in
artifacts to class discussions throughout the semester, as they made connections between
class texts and their lives. The first example of this occurred when Leigh brought a
cartoon about the achievement ideology from the college’s student-run newspaper (Class
#4, 1/18/01).

During the course of the book club facilitations, we dedicated two other entire
class sessions to discussions of artifacts. The Barbie discussion was the first, and this
discussion was the 14’h class of the 31 discussions of the semester. The second occurred
when we spent significant class time exploring the juxtaposition of various newspaper
articles on the shooting of Timothy Thomas, an African American teenager, by White
police officers in Cincinnati (Class #27, 4/17/01). Like the Barbie discussion, this class
discussion serves as an example where we did not discuss the assigned readings.

During their interviews, the focal students noted the significance of artifact use
over the semester, yet they pointed to the Barbie discussion as perhaps the most
significant. Although they agreed that the Barbie discussion and Amanda’s statement, “I
think that they’re really pretty,” were especially important in opening up class discussion
to a multiplicity of ideas, they differed significantly in how they made sense of what
counted as the issue worthy of discussion and the role of multiple perspectives in their
learning.

Overview of three key parts to students’ sense-making: Opening or closing the door
to divergence

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Below, I offer a three part analysis of the focal students’ different perceptions of
the significance of Amanda’s remark. In the first part, I describe the focal students’ ideas
about why Amanda introduced different ideas into the class discussion. In the next part, I
analyze the different ideas that focal students had about what counted as the issue
embedded in Amanda’s comment. And in the third part, I situate students’ perceptions of
the critical moment in their ideas about learning, focusing on their understandings of the
role of consensus and multiplicity.

Part 1 - “I thinlgthat they’re really pretty”: Opening the door to divergence

All focal students noted how Amanda’s statement was critical because it
functioned to “open up” the whole class discussion. This “opening up” was described as
pioneering new directions and clarifying students’ stances. In addition, focal students
suggested that Amanda’s remark can be situated in knowing Amanda as a strong woman
and in knowing her collegial relationship with Stan.

Opening up the discussion: Amanda pioneering new directions

All eight focal students suggested that Amanda’s comment allowed for different
ideas to enter the whole class discussion. Jessie noted that Amanda’s statement served to
“spice things up a little,” allowing for the conversation to “take a different turn.” She
described Amanda’s “desire to take another view” and characterized Amanda’s remark as
“pivotal because other ideas entered the discussion.” Similarly, Lisa felt that Amanda’s
comment “opened up the discussion,” because Amanda contributed “what others were
thinking and not saying to our class discussion.” Jen also thought that Amanda “broke us
away from the initial conversation,” allowing members of the class to pursue “the

alternative ideas” that Amanda contributed. Leigh reflected on Amanda’s “willingness to

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share new ideas” and she added, “I don’t think anyone was expecting it.” For Leigh, the
unexpected nature of Amanda’s comment revolved around “putting out a different view
to open up discussion.” Stan echoed Leigh’s characterization of Amanda’s comment as
exemplifying a willingness to share her ideas. He noted that “this moment reflected how
Amanda was open to sharing different ideas,” which he said that be “absolutely loved.”

Although all students seemed to agree that Amanda both contributed different
ideas from those that had previously been offered in the whole class discussion and that
she created a space for other students to enter the discussion and explore these ideas,
students differed in terms of the ways in which they explained this critical moment. Stan
and Alyssa seemed to interpret Amanda’s comment literally, perceiving her as offering
her view that Barbie is pretty and not a problem. According to Stan and Alyssa,
Amanda’s comment then served to clarify other students’ stances on the issue. What
seemed to matter most to the other six focal students was Amanda’s willingness to enter
the discussion and take an alternative point of view. In addition, four of the focal
students suggested that Amanda’s ability to take an opposing viewpoint and maintain that
Barbie is beautiful related to Amanda’s own strength and confidence as a woman.
Finally, all of the students suggested that Amanda’s remark could be situated within the
larger picture of relationship between Amanda and Stan.
The consequences of Amanda ’s comment: Clarifying students’ stances

For Stan and Alyssa, Amanda’s comment served to clarify students’ particular
stances on the issues being discussed. Both described how Amanda’s statement served to
show the presence of what both termed as “two sides in our class.” Alyssa described

Amanda’s entrance into the conversation as a “pivotal moment” because her comment

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“opened up discussion” so that classmates “took sides on whether or not Barbie is
problematic.” She believed that after Amanda spoke, what became apparent was a
division in the class between “those who thought that there was an issue here and those
who did not.” Stan also indicated that “two sides became apparent as a result of
Amanda’s share.” In addition, Stan noted that he “did not believe that Amanda was
playing the role of devil’s advocate,” Situating this exchange within the context of their
relationship over time. In coming to know Amanda over the semester, he noted, “we just
disagreed about a lot of things.” As we shall see in Part 2, Alyssa and Stan thought that
Amanda did not “get it” because she believed that Barbie is pretty.

An explanation for Amanda ’3 entrance into discussion: Taking an opposite viewpoint

The other six focal students, including Amanda, stressed that Amanda sought to
offer a viewpoint that differed from the one offered by Stan and Alyssa. Several
characterized Amanda’s comment as “playing devil’s advocate,” and others thought that
Amanda was speaking for those who did not have the courage to speak up. Several also
placed Amanda’s statement within the context of relationships in our class.

Amanda herself stressed that she wanted to play the role of “devil’s advocate” in
the discussion. She noted, “Everyone [who spoke] took the same stance. I think
sometimes I tried to play somewhat of a devil’s advocate, and just be like, ‘they’re
pretty.”’ Similarly, Jen saw Amanda’s comment in the context of the dynamics of our
class. She specifically located Amanda’s statement in relationship with Stan and
Alyssa’s collegial relationship and explained,

Amanda would get so mad when Stan would say something, because him and

Alyssa would always gang up together and have these same ideas. So it was kind

of a stronger force than everybody else in the class, because everyone else would
just put an idea out there, but they [Stan and Alyssa] would always have each

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other to back them up. Amanda always wanted to break that down and show
other ideas.

Jen seemed to suggest that Amanda sought to counteract what she perceived as
the power of Stan and Alyssa supporting each other’s ideas in our class. Reenie also
suggested that Amanda “may have been playing devil’s advocate” because she felt that
“Stan and Amanda just took the opposite sides no matter what.” Reenie stressed that
what mattered was that Amanda’s comment “helped the conversation, as far as bringing
in different perspectives.” Lisa, like Reenie, also connected Amanda’s comment as
speaking for others who may not have been willing to speak. She noted, “Even if she
didn’t believe this wholeheartedly, she did bring up a point of view that others did not
have the courage to bring up.”

Holding her own (view): Amanda as a strong woman

Jen, Leigh, Jessie, and Lisa all agreed that Amanda was able to believe that
Barbie was beautiful because she was a confident woman or a woman who liked who she
is. These four students characterized Amanda as a “strong woman” and linked this with
her ability to claim that Barbie is pretty and not have it affect her self-esteem. For
example, Jen talked about how she sat next to Amanda sometimes and often took note of
what she perceived as Amanda’s “strength and self-confidence” in offering her own
opinions and ideas. She explained, “That is why Barbie as beautiful could fit for
Amanda, because Amanda did not read into Barbie or have Barbie affect her self-esteem,
compared with other women in the class.” Jen thought that Amanda probably believed

that Barbie was beautiful because Amanda was a strong, self—confident woman. Jen

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seemed to suggest that the correctness of Amanda’s response can be understood in terms
of knowing Amanda as a self-confident woman.l5

Leigh, Jessie, and Lisa articulated similar ideas. Leigh noted,

Maybe because, among a lot of girls my age, there is sometimes some resentment

toward really beautiful people. . .For some people to come out and admit that

someone is really pretty, I think that takes something, some confidence. To be

able to admit it, instead of just being resentful. Amanda was more accepting of it.
Jessie commented, “Amanda is not Barbie. She does not strive to be Barbie. Amanda is
Amanda, and I think she likes who she is.” She added, “But really, I know Amanda got
the point, because the way she said it, she wasn’t even sure if she should say it.”
Although Jessie felt that “Amanda knows there is a problem here,” she believed that
Amanda was not engaging in what she labeled as “internalizing anything from Barbie.”
Similarly, Lisa also noted that “Amanda was strong, and Barbie as beautiful did not affect
her view of herself.”

In addition to several students noting Amanda’s self-confidence as a woman, the
focal students also situated the critical moment in terms of Amanda’s relationship with
Stan.

Knowing Amanda and Stan by this point in the semester: A light-hearted exchange

In contrast to the previous chapter, where class relationships were still beginning
to form, six focal students, Leigh, Jessie, Lisa, Amanda, Stan, and Reenie, noted that the
exchange between Amanda and Stan was healthy and fun. These students also connected

this exchange to the relationship building that had occurred over the semester. For

example, Leigh noted, “They [Amanda and Stan] were talking pretty jokingly. I think it

 

’5 Jen described Amanda as playing devil’s advocate and she noted that Amanda believed that Barbie is
beautiful. Although these may appear to be contradictory stances, the latter does not necessarily exclude
the former.

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was pretty light-hearted.” Jessie noted, “I remember that by this class, we saw that both
of them spoke up. Both of them wanted their points to be heard and could do this with
their relationship.” Jessie also described Stan and Amanda’s exchange “as healthy, as
fun.” Lisa noted that the interaction between Amanda and Stan was “a friendly
exchange.” She added that “by this point in the semester, we knew them well enough to
see that they both had very strong personalities. And because of that, they both were
trying to express their thinking.” She added that “their relationship allowed them to
express what they thought, too.” Similarly, Reenie noted that in this exchange, “there
was no tension between those two [Amanda and Stan].” She commented, “The
conversation this day seemed lighter to me.” In addition, Reenie exemplified what all six
noted when she discussed her observation that Amanda and Stan had developed a
collegial relationship. She stated, “They spoke after class a lot. They formed a pretty
unique relationship, maybe not as friends, but as at least colleagues, that they could
bounce ideas off of each other, and get an opposite point of view.”

Amanda and Stan also situated their exchange within their relationship. Amanda
noted, “Stan and I had a good relationship anyways. I think he made me think more than
anybody else in that class because he is a very intelligent person.” Stan noted,

We [Amanda and I] always talked after class about what we argued about in class.

She lived in [name of residence hall], the building where we had class, so we just

walked and talked before I got into the car. At this point in the semester [i.e., at

the time of the Barbie discussion], we were comfortable enough for me to say,

‘you want to take this outside.’ It was very joking, light-hearted. That’s through

relationship building. And that helped within the group discussion.

He viewed their interaction as playful, and as a symbol of their relationship that had been

building inside and outside of the class.

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The students seemed to suggest that both the kinds of people that Stan and
Amanda were and their relationship within our community allowed for Amanda to
surface a divergence of ideas. As a class, we were familiar enough with Stan and
Amanda to know that they would express their different ideas in conversation. All
students cemented on how Stan and Amanda knew each other pretty well by this time
of the semester, and that more of a sense of knowing each other had been built in our
class.

Given that students believed that Amanda’s statement opened up possibilities or
clarified ideas, due in part to Amanda’s strength as a woman and Amanda and Stan’s
relationship in our class, I now turn to an analysis of how students made sense of the
actual issues being discussed.

Part 2 - “I think that the ’re reall rett ”: Different ideas about what counted as the
issue, if there even was one

 

All focal students agreed that Amanda’s response entailed content that differed
from the content of the whole class discussion that preceded her statement. However, the
ways in which the students named what counted as the issue differed and several students
wondered whether there was an issue to be discussed at all.

The issue: Barbie as a problematic construction of beauty

Alyssa, Stan, Jen, and Jessie, defined “the issue” as the problematic cultural
construction of beauty as exemplified by Barbie. For example, Alyssa named the issue in
terms of “seeing Barbie as a construction of beauty” and viewing that construction as “a
problem.” Similarly, Jessie described “the issue of Barbie” as “our making of this

unhealthy model of beauty” and Jen named the issue as “the problem that we created

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beauty in this way.” Stan shared this view, identifying “the issue of Barbie and beauty as
a social construction.”

In explaining her view of the issue, Alyssa described Amanda as representative of
classmates who viewed Barbie as “just a doll,” and thus as “not wanting to deal with the
issue” compared with “those who were really trying to talk about what mattered.” She
further explained, “So half of it [the class discussion], we were not even doing anything
because we were dealing with the people that didn’t want to talk about it, and just wanted
to ignore it.” She noted, “I think that it was valuable if we got those people that don’t
want to talk about it to talk about it in order to realize that maybe there is something more
to this. There was definitely a barrier that we went through.” Stan, like Alyssa, viewed
Amanda in terms of “not getting the issue.” He noted, “She probably thought that they
were genuinely pretty. She probably had never thought about the issue of Barbie as a
social construction, or even farther than Barbie is just a doll. Barbie is a doll, you play
with the doll, that’s it.” He viewed Amanda as “defending Barbie” because “she wasn’t
very aware of the issue of Barbie as a problematic construction.” Thus, Stan and Alyssa
framed the issue by describing what they considered as the presence of two sides: those
who believed that Barbie (as a standard of beauty) was a problematic social construction
and those who did not.

While Jen and Jessie agreed with Alyssa and Stan about what counted as the
issue, they differed in terms of their perception of Amanda’s stance. According to Jessie,
there was more consensus across students in this class discussion than Amanda’s
comment seemingly suggested. Jessie believed that “we all knew that Barbie was a

problem, even Amanda.” She explained, “Amanda knew that there is a problem here

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with Barbie. She saw what was wrong with it. She agreed with Stan more than what she
wanted to say.” And, while Jessie suggested that Amanda’s statement did not equate
with Amanda owning the view that Barbie was not problematic, Jen thought that “maybe
Amanda could have thought that Barbie was pretty because of her strength as a woman.”
The issue(s): What can we do about this and a lack of expectations for girls

Amanda felt that she and Stan were not talking about the same issue. She
explained,

He and a few others were talking about one issue, and I was talking about another.

Stan was talking about there is a problem that they are pretty because we have

created pretty. And I am saying, no, that is not a problem. That is what pretty is.

Unavoidable. Sorry, she is pretty. The other girl is ugly, we all know that. And I

think that I was trying to get to the point, ‘80, Ok. Accept it. Let’s move to the

what do we do now.’
Amanda suggested that Stan as well as some other classmates were arguing for consensus
over the notion that Barbie is problematic while she wanted to foreground what she
named as “the real issue” or what we might do about it. Discussing whether Barbie’s
beauty is culturally constructed or innate did not seem valuable to Amanda. Noting that
Barbie was not the issue did not mean that for Amanda there was no issue with Barbie.
Amanda believed that given the existence of Barbie, we needed to talk about “what do we
do now.”

Amanda seemed to link the “what do we do now” with another issue that she
found significant. Drawing upon her own experiences, “Barbie is not the problem. . .The
problem is that little girls are not given the same expectations as boys. I was [given the
same expectations], I think, in a lot of ways. But that’s also because my father made me

successful from the first instant that I tried something.” Amanda repeated several times

that “we didn’t talk about the issue,” and articulated that “the issue for class discussion

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should have been looking into why this happens.” She noted, “There is nothing wrong
with being beautiful. The problem is, I would have loved to go into how beauty is so
much a goal in little girls’ lives, and how does that become a problem at times. And what
other goals could there be for little girls.” Amanda focused on wanting to foreground the
goals that others have for girls and that girls have for themselves, and how having beauty
as the main goal is a problem. She described her desire to replace this goal with other
goals that would include athletic and intellectual aims. She questioned, “What are some
girls lacking that their life revolved around being a beautiful person?” Amanda said that
she did not view Barbie as the problem, noting that Barbie is “a doll” and “not real,” and
did not cause her problems as a young girl because she “had other goals in her life.”

The issue: Is there really an issue here?

Leigh, Lisa, and Reenie shared the perspective that perhaps Barbie is really not a
significant problem. For example, Leigh noted, “I thought Amanda’s point of view was
interesting. I felt like her. It is not a big deal. They are dolls. There is no issue here.”
Similarly, Reenie suggested that “perhaps Barbie is really no big deal,” and Lisa declared
that in our discussion, “we might have gone over the top.” Lisa explained that “Amanda
did not see Barbie as an issue,” and added, “I totally agreed with Amanda. I didn’t have
a problem with her saying that whatsoever because she was absolutely right. There is no
issue because Barbie is just a doll.”

Although these three students doubted whether Barbie indicated the presence of
some issue, they also hedged their doubt, suggesting that perhaps they needed to pay
more attention to what was being discussed. For example, although Leigh said that she

found herself “agreeing with Amanda in this dialogue,” in characterizing “Barbies as just

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dolls,” she also hedged her belief and wondered, “Maybe that’s bad that I think why
make such a big deal about it. Maybe that’s just because I am so used to this. This is
something that is in our culture, ingrained.” Although Leigh stated that she felt as if the
conversation dragged on, she also noted that perhaps there were issues to be discussed.
She explained,

I remember feeling, ‘Let’s stop talking about Barbie!’ Like this conversation

drove me a little crazy. . .The conversation was so annoying because people were

really picking this apart. It just didn’t seem that big of a deal to me. But I don’t
know, then again, maybe the problem is that there are underlying things. It
doesn’t seem like a big deal but maybe there is an issue here.
Leigh talked about how we “picked apart” Barbie in her description of the discussion,
and although she did not think that Barbie seemed like “a big deal,” she then wondered if
“there is an issue here.”

Similarly, Lisa distinguished between particular details that she felt “were a bit
too much, like Barbie’s height and the signs the dolls hold” and “other ideas [that] were
important to consider, like her figure and her hair.” While she claimed that our analysis
was “a bit over the top” because we “read too much into the advertisement,” Lisa also
commented, “I did wonder whether the overall message about Barbie as problematic was
significant.” In the same way, Reenie hedged her question, “Were we were making a big
deal out of Barbie?” by saying, “Maybe I need to examine the subject more closely.”
Reenie noted that she did not notice the details of the ad as others in the class did. She
said, “They noticed hair and height. I never would have noticed those things. Like I
have said before, maybe my head was stuck in the sand. Maybe these things really are

important. Maybe we really need to address these types of things. Maybe if we did

change the looks of Barbie, the next generation of boys wouldn’t expect us to look like

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this.” However, Reenie continued to wonder “whether we were reading too much into
the a .”

It is important to note that although these three students wavered on whether or
not Barbie was “the issue,” they seemed to parallel Amanda’s belief that there are issues
around women and our cultural standard of beauty that need to be examined. Perhaps the
most powerful example of this was Reenie’s disclosure of suffering from an eating
disorder since she was in middle school. Reenie described how she played with Barbies
as a young girl and stressed that she did not view this as part of what caused her eating
disorder.

This part of the analysis has shown that students varied regarding how they
named the issue and whether they even believed that there was an issue worth discussing.
The first and second parts of this analysis set the stage for a deeper look at how students
conceptualized the process of learning about diversity. The third part of this analysis
foregrounds how focal students thought about the relationship between consensus and a

multiplicity of ideas in learning about diversity.

Part 3 - Situating students’ mrceptions of the Barbie discussion in their ideas about
learning: Consensus and multiplicity

 

The focal students varied regarding their perception of the role of multiple ideas
in learning. While Alyssa and Stan believed that these multiple ideas needed to be
reshaped into a consensus by naming the issue and taking a particular stance, Amanda
Jen, Lisa, and Reenie believed that learning must involve maintaining multiple ideas and
resisting consensus. Leaming for these four students centered upon sharing different
ideas and thus being exposed to a multiplicity of ideas. However, Jessie suggested that

Amanda and others did not really believe their alternative ideas because all students

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really reflected a consensus about the issue. She felt that learning occurred in sorting
through the divergence of ideas over solutions or how to take action. Finally, Leigh felt
that the learning goal was not about reaching a collective consensus but rather taking the
discussion into one’s own life. She suggested that the work of learning depended on the
nuanced experiences that each student lived outside of class.

Alyssa and Stan: Moving from false consensus to multiplicity to consensus again

Alyssa and Stan believed that the discussion around the critical moment of
Amanda’s comment reflected a three part learning process. First, Amanda’s statement
uncovered a false consensus that had been present in the class discussion. Second,
Alyssa and Stan viewed Amanda’s comment as allowing the multiplicity of classmates’
ideas to surface in discussion. And finally, the need for achieving a class consensus
about Barbie became apparent.

Alyssa described that this process involved “getting the differing ideas in our
class out on the table, to not squelch differences,” and “then help the one side see that
Barbie is a cultural idea about beauty that is a problem.” She talked about those viewing
“Barbie as just a doll” as “not wanting to deal with the issue” compared with those “who
were really trying to talk about it.” She explained, “So half of it [the class discussion],
we were dealing with the people that didn’t want to talk about it, and just wanted to
ignore it.” Alyssa described what she saw as the central goal: “I think that it is most
valuable if we get those people that don’t want to talk about it to talk about it to realize
that maybe there is something more than just a Barbie. There was definitely a barrier that
we went through to get to a needed agreement.” In breaking through “a barrier” of some

classmates ignoring the important issue, Alyssa felt that the purpose was to reach the

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particular point upon which the class needed to agree. Alyssa felt that ultimately,
“everyone needed to see that Barbie as a symbol of beauty is a problem, as something our
culture has created.”

Similarly, Stan explained that “Amanda’s comment revealed the presence of other
ideas in the class” and “these ideas needed to come out” so that we could “name the issue
at hand for students to get.” He noted that through this process we could then focus on
reaching an agreement about what counted as the issue or problem. Stan suggested that
this naming of the issue would allow for what he called, “base grounding,” or “providing
of a structure” so that students could agree that “this is the issue.” Stan characterized
“naming the issue” as “a learning experience.” Specifically, Stan suggested that in
talking through ideas, “you are apt to say something wrong and be able to be corrected.”
He stated that class discussion was a way to “say something wrong and be able to be
corrected.” In reaching a communal consensus, Stan saw us as sorting through multiple
ideas from students until students agreed on the right issue.

Stan and Alyssa seemed to suggest that an initial consensus in needed to create a
space where the multiplicity of ideas present in the class could surface. Then, through a
process of what Alyssa called, “breaking through the barrier,” or what Stan named as
being able to “correct” students’ ideas, a new consensus could form around the issue.
Amanda, Jen, Lisa, and Reenie: Moving from false consensus to multiplicity

Just as Stan and Alyssa suggested, four other focal students (Amanda, Jen, Lisa,
and Reenie) also believed that there was a sense of false consensus in our class discussion
leading up to the critical moment of Amanda’s comment. These students also suggested

that uncovering multiple perspectives was essential. However, unlike Stan and Alyssa,

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this group of students thought that maintaining this multiplicity was critical to their
learning.

For example, Amanda noted that we needed to acknowledge the differences
within our class that were present during the initial part of the Barbie conversation. In
reflecting on this moment, Amanda talked about the presence of too much consensus in
our class and the need to have a divergence of ideas. Amanda observed, “When there
was a point like Barbie where everyone was agreeing about something, we should have
brought stuff up why some might not agree with it, and that would have brought the
conversation to a better, I think, point.” Amanda explained, “I learned a lot from other
people’s perceptions, like, ‘Wow, that’s something I never thought about.’ So I think
that’s what discussions are for, to learn about new, other ideas.” She learned through
what she described as “knowing other people’s perspectives in discussions.” Amanda
wanted to create space for a multiplicity of ideas because she saw multiple ideas as an
integral part of engendering richer class discussions. Amanda noted how much she
enjoyed conversing with students like Stan and Jason, because they continually disagreed
with her explicitly in offering different ideas. She explained, “I wanted to hear what
others would say in response, which was fine ifI was in a small group with Jason and
Stan, because they told me what they, about what I was saying, mostly disagreed with
me, so it worked out well if I was in a group with those people.” When engaging in small
group work, she preferred to be with students who vocalized their ideas, especially those
who held different ideas.

Like Amanda, Jen felt that the purpose of discussion was to tap into the presence

of multiple perspectives. She also saw a false consensus in the initial part of the Barbie

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discussion, which indicated to her that the class had not tapped into students’ divergent
ideas. For Jen, Amanda’s move helped enact the ultimate goal, which was to learn about
the presence of different ideas, not to eradicate different views of Barbie. She shared,
“The goal was for students to be exposed to different ideas about Barbie and Amanda
helped achieve this. This was not happening in the discussion until Amanda spoke and
after Amanda.” Specifically, Jen observed rich differences in class discussion over
whether to locate the problem with Barbie (the doll), with those who raise children, or
with other sources as important for the class to consider. She shared,
Well, I think there were important differences to learn about because there were
people in our class that said that Barbie was the problem because of the ideal or
kind of perfection that she represents that girls would want to achieve, and there
were others who felt that you can’t blame it all on Barbies. It is more about the
people who raised them. And there were others who talked about other issues that
go into girls’ development.
Jen also noted that there could never be complete agreement about what to do. She
suggested, “You can’t reach one yes or no answer, right or wrong answer on that kind of
issue.” Jen saw multiple ways of defining the issues and solutions for the issues. Jen
believed that we could never reach a consensus about Barbie; the goal of this discussion
was to see the multiplicity of ideas present in our class.
Lisa seemed to waver as to whether there should have been a consensus that
Barbie is generally problematic in some way. Although she suggested that that it was
important to characterize Barbie as a problematic figure of beauty, she was primarily
concerned that a push for consensus of ideas seemed to shut down discussion. She
explained that “squelching differences was not the point of discussion, nor would it help

create discussion.” She added that for her, class discussions were “not about rights and

wrongs.” In examining the Barbie discussion, Lisa was the only focal student to talk

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about “feeling kind of dumb” after contributing to a whole class discussion. She
attributed this to responses from other classmates who she perceived as wanting to be
“right” and thus, find her wrong. Lisa noted, “I guess I just kind of thought the whole
point of the class was to consider different ideas and have a discussion, not to shoot other
people down and not to say, ‘This is right, this is wrong. Or my opinion is better than

9”

yours,’ or stuff like that. Lisa seemed to link a push toward consensus felt as if the
class was engaging in righting and wronging each other, rather than “learning from the
different ideas of everyone in our class.”

Reenie characterized the Barbie conversation as “more open, because more
students were offering their points of view” and she saw this as “important for our
learning.” She noted that “it was important to hear different ideas, like whether we
thought that the girls that play with Barbie wanted to be just like her, or there were some
people in our class that didn’t feel that way because they thought Barbie was just a toy.”
Reenie talked about the “need for more different ideas to come out of our class
discussions for our learning, as they did in the Barbie discussion.” When talking about
the Barbie discussion, she also noted that discussions generally did not feel inclusive of
her voice, saying, “I didn’t want to step on any toes, so I wasn’t real boisterous in our
classroom discussions. Maybe the classroom discussions didn’t allow for everyone to put
their voice forth.” Reenie described the challenge of students offering different ideas in

discussion but noted that this was critical to learning.

Jessie: Consensus about issue and learning about the divergence of solutions

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Jessie was the only student who felt that despite the different views stemming
from Amanda’s comment, underneath the discussion, students really agreed on what the
issue was. She explained,

Everyone was in agreement here about how Barbie is a problem. I guarantee

it. . .We knew who Barbie was. We knew all the statistics, that Barbie would have

to walk on her hands and knees. We knew that stuff, because there are always

those e-mails about ‘Love your body, girls!’ and I think they are great. I got it in
the forwards or I read it somewhere; it wasn’t new news. . .everyone knew there is

a problem with Barbie.

Jessie noted a lack of agreement around what she called “solutions” to the issue. She
believed that learning involved examining the multiple ideas regarding these solutions.
In noting a lack of consensus around “what to do about Barbie,” she stressed that “we
needed to discuss this.” However, she also noted that it would not have been possible to
achieve a consensus around what counted as a solution to the problem of Barbie. She
stated, “We had never really thought about what that [Barbie as disproportionate] would
mean for us to do. . .The only thing we could do at that point was to share our awareness
of the underlying theme because you are not going to have agreement on a solution, like
banning Barbie. Barbie banning will not happen. Ok?” Jessie likened our class’
discussion of ideas about what to do to “the real word” and “the kinds of meetings we
might experience later on, where it is hard to agree on a solution.”

Leigh: Re-seeing our own lives using the issues discussed in class

In describing her process of learning from the Barbie discussion, Leigh noted that
the purpose of discussion in our class differed from the learning she was accustomed to in
her math classes. She explained,

At first, I was kind of thinking, ‘Great. Another wishy-washy TE class, where we

do all this discussing.’ I am used to, I prefer my math classes, where it’s like,
‘Barn, bam, bam, Ok. Let’s get this done. This is how you do this.’ My thing is

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that I always, I would often sit back and look at TE and say, ‘You know, we could
have gotten all that stuff done in 15 minutes, but instead, we sat there, and drew it
out, and talked about it a lot.’ So at first, I was just kind of annoyed with it, just
because we did so much discussing. But after a while, I don’t know, it started to
get interesting. I started to realize that these things were actually happening in my
life. It just got really more interesting to me.
Leigh seemed to suggest that math is easily carved up into pieces and taught to students
in a neat and ordered progression compared with her education classes that are drawn out
with so much discussion. However, she described a “powerful shift” that she
experienced in “seeing discussion in our class as not about getting stuff done” but about
“seeing the issues we were discussing in our course in our own lives.” She noted that
discussion in our class led her to re-see her own life through the lenses of diversity.
Moreover, she noted that “we could never agree in class, but that was ok. The point was
to see these things like Barbie happening in our own lives and see how they played out in
our own life.”

In making sense of the Barbie discussion through Amanda’s critical moment, the
focal students wrestled with the relationship between consensus and multiplicity in their
learning. It is important to note that the students’ sense-making of Barbie continued
throughout the entire semester, as they revisited Barbie through e-mails, course writings,
and additional class discussions.

The power of Barbie: A web of exploration
Tracing the papar trail: Writing about the discussion and extending the discussion

Although no definitive claims can be made about whether and how any of the

students changed their views after the discussion about Barbie, the following examples

show how students’ explorations of Barbie in our initial whole class discussion

reverberated throughout the course. The same day of our Barbie discussion, eight

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students sent out a total of 14 e-mails about the discussion after class ended. Ten e-mail
messages were written and sent to the entire class. A few students e-mailed just me on
this day, and Jessie sent me two e-mails several days later. No other class discussion
sparked this kind of e-mail exchange.”’ During the class after the Barbie discussion, Stan
shared his excitement about the flurry of e-mail talk with me and a small group of
students, adding that this had never happened before in any of his classes.

In addition to the numerous e-mails that students wrote, students used their
required course writings to offer additional insights and responses to our discussion about
the Barbie ad. Several students wrote about the impact of the Barbie discussion and
many students wrote to extend the discussion over a wide range of issues. In their written
responses, a few students commented on the actual whole class discussion as
“interesting” or “impressionable.” In reflecting on the Barbie discussion, Anne
commented in her e-mail that “today’s class was the most interesting yet for me because
of how involved everyone was” (2/23/01). Jessie noted in a critical writing, “That
conversation was one of the most impressionable I’ve experienced in a while,”
expressing her surprise at how willingly her classmates shared (2/28/01). Janet expressed
in her critical writing that she was “amazed at the intensity of class discussion,” and
wondered further about “the purpose of the advertisement” (3/01/01). Although these
students did not elaborate on how they made sense of the multiple perspectives in our
class discussion about Barbie, they emphasized how they were struck by their classmates’

engagement with each other around this topic.

 

’6 I also do not know how many e-mails were sent among students (without being sent to me), especially
since some students invited responses to just them while others invited responses sent to the whole class.

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The students’ e-mails and course writings focused predominantly on extending
the discussion into a wide range of topics. The content of the students’ e-mails ranged
from the connections students made to their experiences with media, advertisements,
entertainment in many forms (including video games, music, movies), and the Internet.
Students specifically commented on the messages young girls receive to be “super
skinny,” the need to see the contradicting messages we give women about being
themselves and demanding that they be thin, the need to recognize that ads and media do
not promote healthy standards or images of women for women and men, the need to
include talk about ads and media that target men, the need to help girls challenge the
definition of beautiful, and the need to look at the construction of men and women within
other forms of entertainment such as video games. Jen made connections to some of her
experiences in a women’s studies class, offering information about the escalating rates of
plastic surgery, especially breast implants. Several students made additional connections
to their own lives. For example, Tom offered an example of a video game that featured
women with larger breast sizes in the production of each sequel and Brett described a
punk song about sex and violence that he wanted to copy for me. Kathy and Brett
conversed over e-mail with me about a movie that they felt directly related to our Barbie
discussion, and Jessie shared that she read on the Internet that Barbie was designed from
a German pornography doll. Multiple students referenced other students’ e-mails and
comments in class, including Jay’s e-mail response to Claudia about the need to focus on
the development of children’s intellect and character and an e-mail conversation about

how men should be included in the conversation.

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Both focal and non-focal students wrote critical writings springing from the
Barbie discussion; here I offer descriptions of three focal students’ writings. Stan
examined an advertisement from Lane Bryant for his paper and situated his thoughts in a
critique of the standard of beauty and a look at the consequences of the standard
(3/01/01). Leigh wrote a response to an article that she read about Barbie and Muslim
women entitled, “New line of Barbie outfits may start modest tradition” (3/13/01).
Alyssa wrote that there were “so many issues” raised during the Barbie conversation,
ranging from “the standard of beauty and gender roles to eating disorders and body image
and the media’s role as a catalyst in portraying something that doesn’t represent the
American public.” She then wrote about how she might address some of these issues in a
curriculum for her own future classroom (3/01/01). For March 15’” (Class #18), Stan
wrote another short paper, referencing our initial class commentary about Barbie and race
and extending these ideas to discuss how the standard of beauty affects racial groups
differently. He described an ad that he found for skin lighteners from an Ebony magazine
and also talked about the rates of plastic surgery for Asian Americans. Several focal and
non-focal students also foregrounded issues from the Barbie discussion in the final papers
that they wrote at the end of the semester.
Re-visiting Barbie in class discussions: Seeing Barbie outside of our class

In actuality, our discussion about Barbie never ended, reappearing in whole class
discussions until the end of our semester together. I highlight three events to demonstrate
this. On March 1” (Class #16), Claudia brought a note attached to a piece of chocolate
that she had received on the way to our class from a group on campus that worked with

women to promote healthy relationships with food. The note asked the recipient to enjoy

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the chocolate without feeling guilty, and as Claudia shared the note with the class, she
explicitly referenced our Barbie conversation. On March 13’h (Class #17), Maria noted
that she had been thinking about how Barbie’s clothes were an integral part of her beauty,
and that by comparison, the kinds of clothes that Maria preferred to wear did not deem
her pretty. A few students made connections to the clothes that Brittney Spears wears
and a ten minute conversation about the power of the fashion industry ensued.

Perhaps one of the most fortuitous coincidences of the semester occurred on
March 15’h (Class #18) when Stan talked with the class about his recent trip to the
National Health and Medicine Museum in Washington, DC. He described how he
stumbled upon a hard-to-find exhibit named, “The Ideal vs. Real” and explained to the
class,

And it was funny because I swear I just saw [name of our course] flashing before

me. Because they had a picture of Barbie pinned up on the wall, next to pictures

of different what they called ‘Real Women.’ And you see they are not really real
women, don’t worry. But they are just all different real shapes and sizes of
women. The experience was just neat, because we were talking about it in class,
and then I saw this on this huge old wall.
Stan also circulated a few of his pictures of this wall throughout our class. In talking with
Stan about his experiences in our whole class discussion, several students noted that the
issues discussed in our class were also being discussed outside of our class.

I have traced key parts of “the web of Barbie,” sketching the multiple ways in
which students responded to Amanda’s critical moment within the initial Barbie
discussion. Students chose to talk with me after class, send e-mails to the entire class,
complete course writing assignments based on this class discussion, and pursue threads of

Barbie in other class discussions. In addition, the entire class revisited Barbie through

Stan’s coincidental trip to a museum with a Barbie exhibit and his photos of the exhibit.

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Alyssa described her sense that the Barbie ad “exploded into a whole week of discussions
and kept going — like people kept going back to that and kept talking about it later”
(8/31/01).

Implications of the Barbie discussion for teaching and learning about diversity

The preceding analyses point to several implications for teaching and learning
about diversity. The analysis also raises some key questions.

Relationships in and outside of class

A central goal of this class session was for students to begin to “see diversity”
within their lives and to have ongoing discussions about these issues in and outside of
class. This analysis indicates that engaging students with artifacts may offer rich
possibilities for enacting this goal. With Barbie as a springboard, learning occurred
beyond the time and space designated as “class,” offering a view of students as
continually making sense of their learning. A related implication is that the discussion
stemming from the critical moment reflected the relationships that students built with
each other across the semester. These relationships seemed to be an integral part of
understanding how Amanda entered the discussion and how focal students understood
Amanda’s role and the discussion more generally. The exchange between Amanda and
Stan also reflected a degree of mutual respect for different ideas.

This analysis points to the complexities for students and teacher educators in
knowing when students are articulating their ideas, when students are playing a role in
order to enact what they feel might help the learning and class discussion, or when
students are engaging in both.

Not predetermining the answers or the qpestions

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The use of the Barbie advertisement did not translate into all of us having or
taking away the same ideas. This suggests that perhaps we need to foreground the notion
that “cultural studies starts where people are but it does not assume that either they [the
students] or we [the teachers] know the answers in advance” (Grossberg, 1994, p. 20).
Brunner and Tally write that it is important to “loosely structure students’ encounter”
with a visual document (1999, p. 53). They describe that the goal is to engage students in
the document so that they generate their own ideas and questions and they also suggest
that “the best approaches tend to be those that allow students leeway in interpreting the
document” (p. 53).

Dilemma of covering material vs. explosion of ta_ll_< around Barbie

Although I did not plan for the web of Barbie, my pedagogical choices parallel
what Reganspan argues is a need to “at least sometimes allow the focus of the whole-
class curriculum to spiral from spontaneously introduced resources” (2002, p. 34).
Allowing a discussion to spiral sits in contrast to more rigidly moving through
predetermined content. I felt this constant tension that Regenspan describes as teaching a
course “that tends to be so packed with texts and ideas we feel compelled to ‘cover”’
which makes it “challenging to pursue the leads introduced by student talk and writing”
(2002, p. 38). However, I want to suggest here that perhaps the need to “cover” stems in
part from the belief that White students really do not have experiences or understandings
of ideas such as gender and race, so we as teacher educators must cover the course
materials rather than pursue and build from what students know. Based on the findings
here, in beginning to reconceptualize our White students as having experiences with

diversity that directly relate to course content, perhaps the pressure to “cover” material

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lessens and “learning about diversity” focuses on engaging students in a process of how
to read their lives and fostering students’ desire to continue seeing and talking about these
ideas.
The role of consensus and multiplicity

This leads to a pedagogical question for teacher educators about what it might
look like to tap into the experiences and cultural knowledge that students already have
using texts such as advertisements. Although teacher educators might believe that
outlining the ideas on which we need consensus when talking about issues such as gender
and race is a straightforward task, this analysis indicates that it is not. What role should
multiple ideas play in class discussions and students’ learning? This analysis shows that
students operated from varying perspectives about the role of consensus and multiplicity
in learning from class discussions. If students operate under different ideas regarding the
relationship between consensus and multiplicity in their learning, perhaps this needs to
become part of the class discussion.

Issues of consensus and multiplicity raise questions about what students should
“get” from a course that foregrounds issues of diversity. The next chapter uses the

context of a class discussion on Black English to explore this issue of getting it.

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Chapter 6
BLACK ENGLISH AS UNFAMILIAR MATERIAL: CONSIDERING A
TEACHER’S PEDAGOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY

In both of the previous chapters, the focal students remembered and described
particular moments from the class discussions as critical. However, this chapter focuses
on a class session about Black English that the majority of students did not discuss during
their interviews.’7 Since I talked with the students about language as fundamental to all
teaching and learning during at least four class sessions, I wondered why the majority of
focal students did not signal any of the class discussions where we explicitly
foregrounded language issues as significant or critical. Thus, I was the one who
identified this particular class session as important. In addition, when I played this
segment for the students during their guided listening sessions, they did not individually
or collectively identify any critical moments within the segment.

Even though students did not identify critical moments in this class session, I
believed that this session was important for three reasons: the significance of the topic
(Black English) for teachers, the amount of my talk as the teacher, and my assumptions
about the relationship between Black English and students’ experiences and knowledge.
First, I believed this session to be significant because issues of linguistic diversity were
key aspects of the course. I noted in my plan for this session on Black English that
“students need to learn this content as part of their foundational knowledge about
language for teaching” (Lesson Plan, 3/15/01). Second, the amount of teacher talk in

which I engaged seemed to reflect a facet of my pedagogy not yet analyzed in this study.

 

’7 Only one focal student, Jen, talked about our coursework and class discussions around Black English;
this may have been in part because she was an English major and future English teacher.

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This session served as an example of class sessions where the quantity of my talk
exceeded the quantity of student talk. This occurred during various parts of the course,
despite my initial pedagogical plans not to dominate class discussions. Finally, in my
plan for this session, I described this content as “new and potentially challenging for
students because of what they are used to hearing [about Black English].” In other
words, I anticipated that there might be a lack of congruity between the course content
and students’ experiences. These three reasons help contextualize the analysis of this
chapter. As I will show, although students seemingly agreed that the purpose of the
classroom talk was to extract meaning from the text, i.e., “to get” what the author had to
communicate, what students ultimately took away varied in significant ways. Analysis
offers compelling evidence that the focal students were not blank slates, but that they had
complex ways of making sense of Black English.

Students’ perceptions of the classroom talk about Black English: What does it
mean to get it?

Situated within a broader need for preservice teachers to examine their attitudes
toward and knowledge about language and dialect diversity, I considered the topic of
Black English a fundamental one for preservice teachers’ learning. Thus, I assigned the
first two chapters from Smitherman’s text (1995), Talkin and testifyin: The language of
Black America, as required reading for this class session. To facilitate class discussion
and students’ comprehension of these chapters, I created and distributed a handout of
questions (see Appendix I) at the beginning of class. My journal notes indicate that my
intentions in creating this handout included “helping students’ navigate and discuss the
ideas of the text as well as their own ideas about Black English” (3/15/01). After

distributing the handout, the class session began with my words, “Let’s talk about what is

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Black English, and where did it come from.” (3/15/01, Class #18). Although my lesson
plan indicated my intention for students to explain Smitherman’s ideas, I ended up
talking for most of this session while the students remained silent. In addition, although I
planned class time for students to explore both Smitherman’s ideas and their own ideas
about Black English, our talk focused on Smitherman’s ideas for the entire class session.

To explore the focal students’ perceptions of the teacher talk and the complexities
of what students took away, this chapter is divided into five sections. In the first section,
Contextual framing: “Let’s talk about what is Black English, and where did it come
from,” I provide key contextual pieces that help situate the analysis. In the second
section, “Getting it”: Exploring student talk, whole class talk, and the nature of the
topic, I divide my analysis into three parts. First, I analyze the focal students’
perceptions of the three students who participated in the segment. The second section
entails an analysis of the focal students’ perceptions of the whole class talk. Finally, the
third part examines how the focal students characterized the nature of the topic, Black
English.

The analysis of the third section, “Getting it”: Exploring teacher talk and what
students ended up “getting,” is divided into four key sections: focal students’
perceptions of my role as a teacher, four focal students’ ideas about the role of their
knowledge in learning about Black English, what students took away from the talk of the
segment, and whether the focal students ultimately evaluated Black English as a language
or not. In the fourth section, A post-class reflection on the reading: Smitherman as
one perspective, I briefly present a perspective on Black English that I discovered after

teaching the students of this study. Finally, in the fifth section, Implications of the

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Black English segment for teaching and learning about diversity, I foreground several
key implications of my post-class reflection and the entire analysis.

Contextual framing: “Let’s talk about what is Black English, and where did it come
from.”

In this section, I provide three key contextual pieces that help situate the analysis.
I begin by briefly tracing my own long term and recent learning experiences around
language. Then, I highlight the overall knowledge base about language for preservice
teachers within which knowledge about Black English is situated. This helps me
examine the ideas about language that I included in the course. Finally, to situate my
directive, “Let’s talk about what is Black English, and where did it come from,” I
describe the handout that I created, my lesson plan for the class session, the talk of the

segment, and my reflections as a teacher immediately after the segment.

My own long-term and recent learning exmriences: Linguistic diversity as a centeypiece

 

My own experiences and curiosities around language serve as a key part of
understanding the knowledge that I brought to teaching this course and to this particular
session on Black English. As a former high school Spanish language and literature
teacher, I have always been fascinated by topics such as language acquisition, the
linguistic, political, and historical relationships among languages, the multiple languages
and dialects of my students (including Black English), and popular ideas about language
and dialect. I have actively sought learning experiences for myself regarding these ideas,
including academic coursework as an undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student,
reading autobiographies of bilingual and bicultural people, tutoring students whose first
language is not English, and traveling to and living in other countries where I do and do

not speak the language.

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This particular semester of teaching was also shaped by my own recent
experiences as a doctoral student in a course about Black English. The semester
immediately prior to teaching the students of this study, I completed an English class
entitled Language in African American Communities, taught by Geneva Smitherman. In
Smitherman’s class, I studied patterns of African American language (e. g., lexicon,
grammar, phonology), ideas about the education of Black youth, hip hop language and
culture, Ebonics and the media, language policies, historical perspectives on African
American language, and pervasive language myths in our country. The following
semester, I entered teaching wanting students to know Smitherman’s ideas, to have
exposure to her work about the historical development of Black English, to read her
research that shows Black English as a legitimate, rule-govemed language, and to know
Black English as reflective of a culture, history, and identity. The chapters that I chose
for my students to read were based on my experiences with this doctoral class and my
belief that most students in my class would not be familiar with Smitherman’s ideas. I
entered the semester hoping students would walk away with an attitude of awe, curiosity,
and respect at the complexities of all languages or dialects, including Black English.

These kinds of goals parallel what other teacher educators have outlined in a
knowledge base about language for preservice teachers. Although teacher educators have
begun to articulate this knowledge base, they may not take into account how this affects
how they pedagogically approach White teacher candidates as learners. In order to
provide a more detailed look at what I chose to include regarding issues of language
within the course and how I included these issues, an exploration of this language

knowledge base and of my pedagogical choices are necessary.

16]

The knowledge base on language: Situatingfthe need to knmbout Black English

Since beginning doctoral study, I have explored issues of language in some depth,
including the rationale for a language knowledge base, ideas about what the language
knowledge base for teachers entails and how teachers’ attitudes about language and
dialect matter, and specific knowledge about Black English that teachers should have.
The rationale for a language knowledge base often includes statements like the following:
given the changing demographics of today’s classrooms, teachers are increasingly being
called upon to teach students from a variety of linguistic backgrounds (Adger, Snow, &
Christian, 2002; Banks, 1995, Chisholm, 1994, Florio-Ruane, 1987, 2001; Nieto, 1999).
Ulanoff writes, “teachers often find themselves teaching students to read and write in a
language they do not yet understand or in a language variety that is different from the
Standard English used in schools nationwide (2003, p. 1). Wong Fillmore and Snow also
note, “Teachers are more and more likely to encounter students with whom they do not
share a first language or dialect” (2000, p. 5). Moreover, it has been noted that teachers
need to know that students enter schools with differing amounts and kinds of experiences
with language and literacy (Heath, 1983, Purcell-Gates, 2002).

Some have delineated what the language knowledge base might entail. G. Smith
(1998) compiles what she calls “a compact knowledge base” about language issues for
“culturally responsible and responsive teacher education programs,” suggesting that this
knowledge base minimally includes a) the theory and research on language acquisition,
particularly of native speakers of languages and dialects other than English, b) both
verbal and nonverbal cultural communication and interaction styles, and c) principles and

strategies for teaching English as a second language to speakers of culturally unique

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English dialects and speakers of first languages other than English. Similarly, Ovando
(2001) divides the territory of knowledge about language diversity and education into
three sections: how children and adults acquire first and second languages, how language
varies in terms of both nonstandard English and non-English-language diversity in the
United States, and how teachers can adapt to meet the needs of language-minority
students. In a recently published book edited by Adger, Snow, and Christian entitled,
What teachers need to know about language (2002), the contributors note that the kinds
of language issues critical for teachers include knowledge about oral language and
written language development, Standard English and vernacular dialects, language in
early childhood programs, and second language learners. In addition, these authors
promote dialogue about the realities of implementing programmatic change regarding
language issues in teacher education programs.

Empirical work on teachers’ attitudes toward language variation and ideas about
building dialect awareness have also played a critical role in informing a language
knowledge base for teachers.18 In the final research report of their Language Knowledge
and Awareness Survey, Smitherman and the College Composition and Communication
Language Policy Committee (2000) urge teacher educators to raise prospective teachers’
consciousness about their acceptance of many of our nation’s myths and
misunderstandings of language, dialects, and linguistic diversity. In their conclusions
they write, “if teachers are to be sensitized to linguistic diversity. . .something more needs
to be done in the preparation and continuing professional development of language arts

teachers” (pp. 2930). Although their report focuses on language arts teachers, the

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findings are applicable for all teachers. Similarly, Wolfram writes about the need for
students to learn what he calls “the truth and fiction about dialects,” including
sociolinguistic premises such as the impossibility of speaking English without speaking
some dialect of the language, the naturalness and neutrality of dialect structures
(linguistically speaking), and the reflection of attitudes about different groups of people
in attitudes about language variation (2000, pp. 20-23). Although he writes about the
need for dialect awareness programs targeting K-12 students, Wolfram’s ideas can help
create educative experiences around language issues for preservice teachers as well.
Similarly, Wong Fillmore and Snow explain that “an understanding of linguistics can
help teachers see that the discourse patterns they value are aspects of their own cultures
and backgrounds” (2000, p.5).

As part of teachers’ attitudes toward and knowledge about language variation,
many researchers and educators have responded to the question, what should preservice
and inservice teachers know about Black English? (Delpit, 1998; Ovando, 2001; Lippi-
Green, 1997; Monteith, 1980; Nieto, 1999; Perry & Delpit, 1998; Rickford, 1998; Shuy,
1972; Smith, E.1998; Smitherman, 1977, 1998; Washington & Miller-Jones, 1989;
Williams, 1977). N ieto articulates that teachers need to know that certain languages or
dialects are not inherently better than others, but rather “carry higher social prestige as
determined by the group with the greatest power,” and she especially argues for this
knowledge about Black English given the “conventional wisdom still common among
teachers...that Black English is simply ‘bad English’” (1999, p. 54). DeStefano also

writes that “linguistically false assumptions and misconceptions about Black English

 

’8 For a more comprehensive review of the research on teachers’ linguistic attitudes, see the Conference on
Composition and Communication Language Policy Committee Language Knowledge and Awareness

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seem to be at least part of the basis for [teachers’] negative attitudes toward Black
English” (1973, p. 167). Generally, educators highlight several specific pieces of
knowledge about Black English as critical, including some historical information on the
linguistic retentions from African languages and the major phonological, morphological,
and syntactic characteristics of Black English as a sociolinguistic system, with particular
attention to the major points of interference with Standard English (Irnhoof, 1970;
Hoffman, 1972; Scales & Brown, 1981; Smith, G. 1998; Smith E., 1998; Smitherman,
1977).
Language sessions within the course

This brief overview of the language knowledge base for teachers helps
contextualize what I decided to include when I created the course. Of the 31 class
sessions, I devoted two weeks or four classes to the general idea of language diversity or
variation. For the first class session, students read a piece by Carlos Ovando, a bilingual
and multicultural education professor, entitled “Language diversity and education”
(2001) that paints a broad landscape of language issues. Ovando provides an overview of
the sociocultural nature of language and language acquisition, language variety in the
United States (which includes a section on Black English), and what teachers might do to
address language needs in the classroom. He points toward the notion that “the home
language cannot be blamed for school failure,” but rather “one cause for language-related
school failure is the educator’s negative attitude toward the home language” (2001, p.
288). During the class discussion on Ovando’s piece, I also disseminated the document,
The students’ right to their own language, adopted by the National Council of Teachers

of English in 1974. This document asserts:

 

Survey (2000).
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The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social

group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for

speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its

diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of

dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training

that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their

own language.

For the second class session, students read two of Smitherman’s chapters on
Black English (1977), which I describe more fully in the next section. Based on my
coursework with Smitherman, an English professor and noted scholar on issues of
language in African American communities, I also incorporated video case studies of
teachers in classrooms enacting practices that honor students’ home language of Black
English, a political cartoon depicting Black English as one variety of language among
dialects of English (Smitherman, 1981, p. 360), and a transcribed conversation between a
teacher and a student that focuses on distinguishing between helping students read and
teaching students pronunciation of Standard English (Smitherman,1977, pp. 217-218).
For the third class, students read Christensen’s article, Whose standard? Teaching
Standard English (1995). Christensen is a high school teacher and in her work, she
stresses the need for teachers to honor the varieties of language that students speak while
teaching students Standard English. Moreover, Christensen emphasizes the need for
teachers to talk with their students about Standard English as the language of power and
to ask critical questions about who makes the rules and who benefits from the rules.

For our third and fourth classes, students read works by Wolfram and Lippi-

Green, two professors in the field of linguistics. For our third class, students read

Wolfram’s piece, Everyone has an accent (2000), where Wolfram advocates teaching

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respect for language variation, focusing on the naturalness and complexities of dialects as
well as how power intersects with dialect variation. Finally, we approached language
diversity through Disney films, with our fourth language class dedicated to Lippi-Green’s
chapter, “Teaching children to discriminate: What we learn from the Big Bad Wolf”
(1997). Given Lippi-Green’s analysis of language in Disney films, I brought in segments
from several films so that the students could examine the representation of characters
(e. g., King Louie in Jungle Book; Scar, Mufasa, and the hyenas in The Lion King, and the
three crows in Dumbo) and how these representations involve patterns that intersect
issues of language with race, class, and gender.
Black English class: Rationale and readings

Although I read G. Smith (1998) after teaching the course, her work helps
describe the content about Black English that I selected for the students to read as well as
a rationale for this content. She writes that it is the research on linguistic retentions from
African beginnings in contemporary African American English that “preservice and
inservice teachers do not have that seems necessary to change their perceptions from
believing that African American English is simply an ‘ignorant perversion of standard
English’ to the more respectful belief that African American English is a ‘full rich
sociolinguistic communication system with consistent rules of phonology, morphology,
and syntax’” (1998, p.41).

I assigned the first two chapters of Smitherman’s (1977) Talkin and testifyin: The
language of Black America for the class session on Black English. The first chapter,
“From Africa to the new world,” presents a brief introduction to the history of the

scholarly study of Black English as well as a more extended linguistic and political

167

history of the origins and development of Black English. To support her historical and
comparative linguistic analysis, Smitherman provides examples of the grammar and
structure rules in West African languages and Black English to show the relationship
between the two. Her reconstructions provide evidence that Black English is not a dialect
of English but rather a language with main structural components that are based on West
African language rules. She explains that this language evolved as African slaves applied
their intuitive knowledge of the rules of their native languages to the acquisition of the
vocabulary of their White slave masters. The language of transaction between slaves and
slave masters that developed was known as a pidgin; over time, this pidgin became
widespread, more fully developed, and passed down through generations to become a
Creole. In the second chapter, “‘It bees dat way sometime,”’ Smitherman presents
pronunciation rules and grammatical structures of Black English, with a focus on the
grammar patterns of be and done, verb conjugations, double subject use, and the use of
two or more negatives. Throughout this chapter, she juxtaposes the structures of what
she labels as “Black English” and “White English” in order to demonstrate the
systematicity and complexity of Black English, as well as the differences between Black
and White English. She even shows that Black English contains grammatical
constructions that communicate nuances of meaning not as easily communicated or
available in the same ways in White English.

Given the content of these readings, I now provide a more detailed look at the
handout that I created, my lesson plan for the class session, and what happened during the

class talk of the segment as a final part of providing context.

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Moving to mv directive. “Let’s talk about mt is Black English, and where did it come
from.”

Handout of guiding questions, my lesson plan for the session, and what actually
happened

I created a handout based on the assigned chapters from Smitherman’s Talkin &
Testifyin. In my lesson plan, I described my beginning goal of “asking students to
imagine how Smitherman would respond to questions about Black English,” and I
wondered how “this kind of exercise might help students then reflect on their own
perspectives.” (Lesson Plan, 3/15/01). I also described this content as “new and
potentially challenging for students because of what they are used to hearing about Black
English” [i.e., that it is a lazy and deficient form of English]. In other words, I believed
that there might be a lack of congruity between the content and students’ own ideas about
Black English. In alignment with these notes, the handout (Appendix 1) begins with
questions that ask students to extract meaning from Smitherman’s text and then moves
into the “questions, issues, concerns” that the students have (Part D).

At the start of the class, I distributed the handout and asked students to “keep this
handout and the two chapters easily available” throughout class discussion. In reviewing
the handout with the class, I talked solely about the first of the five sections. I stated,
“There’s so many interesting things in her piece and what I did was pick out, in part A
where it says, ‘Questions for consideration,’ I picked out three big pieces that I want us to
focus on.” Then, I read through the three questions in section A, asking the students to

“think about how Smitherman would respond.” The three questions from Part A were:

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1. What is Black English, according to Smitherman? How many African Americans
speak Black English? What are the origins of Black English? Where did it come
from, according to Smitherman? (chapter 1)

2. What is the push-pull phenomenon that Smitherman describes? (chapter 1) How

might this affect teachers / students in schools?

3. What overall message do you think Smitherman wants us as readers to take from

her chapter, “It Bees Dat Way Sometimes” (chapter 2)?

As I reviewed these questions, the class remained quiet. I then divided the class into
three groups and assigned one of the three questions from part A to each group. Students
talked about their assigned question within these groups and after a few minutes, I
brought the whole class together and shared my plan of having the students discuss what
they had worked on. In my lesson plan for the day, I intended to dedicate five minutes
for each group to talk about each question, for a total of fifteen minutes on this section of
the handout. However, reviewing each question in Part A ended up consuming the entire
eighty minute class session.

A synthesis of the Black English segment

I began what I hoped would be a whole class discussion by asking the first small
group to share their ideas with the whole group, stating, “Let’s talk about what is Black
English, and where did it come from.” After 15 seconds of silence, Jen responded by
reading directly from Smitherman’s text. She offered, “Well, I put, it says that it’s an
“Africanized form of English, reflecting Black America’s linguistic-cultural African
heritage and the conditions of servitude, oppression and life in America.” She had copied

and read directly from Smitherman’s text (1977, p. 2). I asked Jen to indicate where this

170

passage could be found, and Tara responded with the page number. I then asked the
class, “What does that mean? [five second pause] To us? [nine second pause] To you?
Anyone else want to elaborate a little bit, talk a little more about that?” After another 10
seconds of silence, Mary offered, “I think it just, I mean it’s basically like English, just
with African American overtones, like taking things from their heritage and applying it to
their speech.” A student then said, “Very nice,” in such a quiet voice, that I did not hear
this comment until replaying the recording after class.

Next, Tara entered the class talk to extend Mary’s ideas, elaborating that speakers
of African languages followed the grammatical rules of their native languages and
simultaneously learned new words to communicate with their White masters. She added
that this occurred without the presence of teachers and that this process allowed for this
newly formed language “to have their culture in it.” Tara attempted to re-word
Smitherman’s ideas into her own words, framing a basic outline of Smitherman’s ideas -
i.e., that Africans used both the structures of their languages and their culture along with
the lexicon of their slave masters in creating a rule-govemed communication system.
While she spoke, the rest of the class remained quiet.

My voice filled the final part of this segment, a four minute segment interspersed
with multiple pauses totaling 45 seconds. Within my four minutes of talk, I praised
Tara’s contribution and linked her words back to Smitherman’s ideas. I also asked the
class for information that they wanted to add in response to the first question on the
handout. When no one responded after 20 seconds of silence, I asked the class whether
Smitherman’s use of pidgin and Creole made sense to them. When I posed two

additional questions that were followed by two longer silences, I turned back to the text

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and asked students to follow along with me as I read directly from it. I read and then
commented:

‘African slaves in America initially developed a pidgin, a language of transaction

that was used in communication between themselves and whites. Over the years,

the pidgin gradually became widespread among slaves and evolved into a Creole.

Developed without benefits of any formal instruction (not even a language labl),

this lingo involved substitution of English for West African words, but within the

same basic structure and idiom that characterized West African language
patterns,’ (Smitherman, 1977, p. 5) which is what Tara just told us about. So all
she’s doing is adding, is saying what Tara said with these words, pidgin and

Creole, right?

I linked what I read from Smitherman’s text to Tara’s contribution, noting that
Smitherman added particular terms to describe the phenomenon that Tara explained.
After this, I reworded Smitherman’s ideas, trying to explain her arguments in everyday
language to students. I checked in with students, asking, “Does that make sense?”
several times.

At the very end of the segment, I noted, “They [Smitherman’s ideas] are very
different from an understanding of Black English as slang or lazy, right? You’ve often
sort of heard that, too, and that is still a very popular idea about what is Black English.”
Although students had not yet described their ideas about Black English, I explicitly
compared Smitherman’s ideas with the ideas that I thought students had been exposed to.
The segment that I played for the focal students ended here. Although I acknowledged “a
very popular idea” about Black English at the end of the segment, we did not talk about
this and I maintained focus on the questions from Part A of the handout for the duration

of the class session.

A note post-segment about my concern

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One factor that influenced my rationale for selecting this class discussion was the
amount of teacher talk in which I engaged, when I had planned a student-led discussion
about the ideas in the text. In my teacher journal I wrote, “I feel myself shifting toward
more of an authoritative role during these classes, given my ‘expertise’ on language
issues. I cannot help but want to share with students my insights, but I think it is
interfering with tapping into their understandings of this issue” (3/20/01). I seemed to
wonder if and how this segment might reflect some inconsistency between my
philosophy and my practice. I espoused the notion that I needed to treat students as
coming to class with rich ideas worthy of exploration, yet I questioned whether I acted in
this way during this segment, and during all of our class sessions on language issues.
This class seemed much more a text-driven class, with Smitherman as the expert; at the
beginning of the class, I even described Smitherman as a “noted scholar.”

Although this journal entry helps show what my perceptions of my talk as the
teacher were, key questions about students’ perceptions remain. What did students think
about my talk during this segment? And what did they take away from the whole class
talk about Black English?

“Getting it”: Exploring student talk, whole class talk, and the nature of the topic

This section is divided into three analytical parts. First, I consider the focal
students’ perceptions of the three students who participated in the talk of the segment.
Next, I show that the focal students did not agree as to whether the talk of the segment
exemplified discussion. Finally, the third part of this analysis connects the mixed
reviews about whether this talk counted as discussion with the focal students’ beliefs

about the topic of Black English.

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The three classmates who spoke: A continuum of “getting it”

All of the focal students suggested that the three students who spoke, Jen, Mary,
and Tara, were trying to understand Smitherman’s text. In addition, they compared the
three students in terms of their use of the actual words from Smitherman’s text and used
this as a benchmark for knowing how little or how well the three understood the text.

Because the first student who spoke during the segment, Jen, repeated the author’s
exact words, focal students believed that this indicated Jen’s lack of comprehension. All
of the students, including Jen herself, believed that Jen did not understand what
Smitherman meant. Leigh exemplified the focal students’ perceptions. She stated that
Jen “copied her answer directly from the text because she did not have a clear
understanding of it.” Similarly, Stan noted that “Jen could not put Smitherman into her
own words because she did not understand it.” Jessie noted that Jen “pulled out quotes”
because “this was what Jen was able to do.” Jen described what she did as “easy”
compared with “trying to really understand what she [Smitherman] was saying,” and Lisa
characterized Jen’s response as “sticking to the text when in doubt.” Amanda
characterized Jens response as “the good-girl response,” suggesting that “she was trying,
but she did not get it.”

Since Mary, the second student to speak, used her own words rather than words
from Smitherman’s text, focal students suggested that this indicated that Mary had some
understanding of the author’s intended meanings. The students suggested that Mary “was
explaining Smitherman’s words more because she understood,” as Leigh noted, or as Lisa
suggested, “Mary got it to some extent and could put Smitherman’s words into her own

words.” Similarly, Alyssa viewed Mary as “still sticking more closely to the text but able

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to offer more than Jen” and Leigh viewed Mary as “translating what Jen just read pretty
well.” Amanda characterized Mary as “moving more into her own words and away from
Smitherman’s words in order to show that she got it,” and Lisa viewed Mary as “getting
the author’s ideas in her own words.” However, the students also seemed to state that
Mary had what Reenie characterized as “a basic understanding, but the class still needed
to work out these ideas,” and as Jessie noted, “Mary still did not get exactly what the
author meant.”

Finally, the focal students assessed that Tara, the third student to respond in the
segment, understood the text better than both Jen and Mary because she was able to
synthesize Smitherman “completely in her own words,” as Jessie noted. Alyssa
explained, “Tara was trying to communicate Smitherman’s message to her classmates.
She was trying to explain in a way that our classmates would understand.” Reenie
thought that Tara attempted to “synthesize what Smitherman describes so we could get
it” and Leigh suggested, “Tara used her own words to show she understood what we
read.” Lisa seemed to suggest that Tara was able to “offer her own words on
Smitherman’s views on Black English.” The students suggested, as exemplified in Lisa’s
comment, that “Tara went deeper into the meaning when she used her own words
because she understood it better.”

The focal students collectively suggested that the students who participated in the
talk of the segment were attempting to demonstrate an understanding of the text.
Although the focal students noted a kind of progression with Jen, Mary, and Tara’s
responses in comprehending Smitherman’s ideas, they disagreed about whether this talk

was a discussion.

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Mixed reviews: This class is (not?) a discussion

Unlike the segments of the two previous chapters, which all focal students labeled
unequivocally as discussion, the assessments of this segment were very different. Leigh
was the only one to judge this talk as an example of discussion. She noted, “by having a
discussion, I think we were trying to figure out what Smitherman’s definition of Black
language was, and talking about how it developed.” She stressed, “We were figuring out
what the article meant through discussion.” Three students, Alyssa, Amanda, and
Reenie, rejected this talk as discussion, explicitly stating that they “did not view this as
discussion.” Reenie added, “You [Karen] paused a lot, but no one jumped in to talk.”
Like Reenie, Lisa talked about the difficulty of starting a discussion. She characterized
this talk as “a struggle to get discussion going,” noting how I was.“trying to get
discussion going, but having trouble doing so.” She said I made “multiple attempts to
ask the class” to engage “in discussion about these ideas,” but that “students kind of
wanted to sit back and listen.”

Regarding the other three focal students, both Jessie and Jen said that they could
not determine whether this segment was discussion. Jessie said that she “could not label
this discussion one way or the other” and Jen said that “it was hard to say whether this
was discussion because not many are saying anything.” Stan believed that whether this
was discussion depended on what came afterwards. He elaborated,

I struggled with whether this was discussion. I hate when professors say, ‘Well,

we are going to have a discussion about dot dot dot,’ and then the professor goes

on and talks for the whole hour and a half, without asking questions, just talking.

To me a discussion is at least with 2 people. Professors do that all the time. ‘This

was a great discussion.’ ‘No, that was a great monologue, you speaking to us.’

This was more like discussion, because you were trying to probe, but the probe

was not working, we were not getting it, and so you have to help in another
fashion. . .To consider this discussion, well, it depends on what came after.

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Honestly. Professors do that all the time: ‘Does that make sense? Blah blah blah
blah blah.’

The majority of focal students suggested that the amount of teacher talk and the
lack of other voices in this segment reflected either a struggle to get discussion started or
that this might not be discussion. These students linked the difficulties in labeling this
talk as discussion with their beliefs about the nature of the topic, Black English.
Students’ reflections on the nature of the topic and what they think they (don’t) know

The focal students generally agreed that the nature of this topic was 1) new, 2)
different from their offered view of Black English, 3) taboo, and 4) academic.

Content as “new”

Seven focal students, Alyssa, Jessie, Lisa, Reenie, Amanda, Jen, and Stan linked
the difficulties of discussing Black English with describing the topic as either new or
unfamiliar. Alyssa noted, “This was new stuff for the class, which made it hard to
discuss.” Jessie also stated, “This was totally new content for the class,” elaborating that
“what was going on was no one wanted to talk because no one really knew this because it
was new stuff for us.” She elaborated, “I think that it was hard to discuss because we
were not used to these new ideas. We did not know where Black English came from.”
Although Jessie suggested that “Maybe Stan or Jay had read something, or heard a
professor one time speak about it. . .no one really knew anything.”

Similarly, Lisa described the content as “an unfamiliar topic” and Reenie noted,
“The article was unfamiliar to us.” Reenie added, “This was not a topic I had or any of
us knew a lot of knowledge about. With Black English, we had no idea where this
derived from, so it was hard to discuss.” Amanda suggested that “this was completely

new because probably no one in the class knew about the origins of Black English.” Lisa

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went so far as to admit that she “had never even heard of Black English before this class”
which led her to “sit back and listen rather than participate in discussion.” Jen associated
the “difficulty in discussing this topic” with the newness of the ideas of the text. She
said, “It [Smitherman ’s text] was giving a different, introducing a new idea that was
completely different to what we have been taught our entire lives.”

Several focal students situated this “new” or “unfamiliar” content in either a
general lack of knowledge about Black English across the students in our class or the lack
of a variety of ideas about Black English across the students in our class. Lisa believed
that we struggled to create a discussion because “not many had knowledge or experiences
with these ideas.” Similarly, Jen described what she called her “lack of knowledge about
the origins of Black English” and she extended this to what she perceived as “the class’
general lack of knowledge.” Jessie noted, “I think that the problem with this
conversation was that we all did not have different opinions. . .because we had not been
exposed to other ideas as much.” She stated, “I don’t know if that many people really
had a variety of ideas about this before reading it, ideas about where Black English came
from, and why we have it now.”

Lisa, Jessie, and Stan noted that this topic was new in the sense that it is
infrequently or never discussed. Lisa stated, “With Black English, I don’t think I have
ever talked about it with anyone, much less read anything about it.” Jessie noted, “This
was the first time in my life, as a 20-year-old, that I ever had any kind of dialogue about
Black English. . .and it will probably never come up again. . .They definitely don’t talk
about these things in school.” Similarly, Stan said, “Regardless of whether we thought

that Smitherman is right or not, the theme is not your regular conversation topic.”

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Alyssa was the sole student who did not describe the content as new to her. Prior
to our class, Alyssa had taken a linguistics course where she had studied Black English as
well as the concepts of pidgin and Creole. She compared the knowledge that she had
gained from this course with the “preconceived notions of what Ebonics is that the
students in our class believed,” describing these preconceived notions as “thinking of
Ebonics as not a real language, or they thought of people being lazy or uneducated.”

Like Alyssa, the other focal students compared the newness of this content and
the lack of multiplicity of ideas about Black English in our class to what they perceived
as a class view of Black English as substandard language.

Shared view of Black English as “bad ” or “lazy"

All focal students believed that the students in our class shared a view of Black
English as “bad,” “slang,” or “lazy” English. Amanda noted, “Black English was a bad
form of English, which is pretty much what I thought up until this class, and pretty much
what everyone in our class thought.” Jen noted, “I think that everyone in our class had
the same idea that Black English was not an acceptable form of language.” She stated, “I
don’t know if that people in our class really had other ideas about this before reading it,
ideas about where Black English came from, and why we have it now. I think before we
just associated it with laziness or ungrammatical language.” Jessie noted, “We thought
that Black English was a lazy form of English.”

Jen and Reenie both pointed to how students might have learned to share these
particular ideas, suggesting that the shared view extended beyond the students in our
class. Jen noted that she and her classmates were “actually taught that Black English was

wrong,” indicating that they had received this idea from others. Reenie noted, “I had

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heard on the news and probably others in the class did, too, that Black English should not
be used in schools because it is wrong.”

Leigh and Stan situated their classmates’ ideas in what they saw as the beliefs of
larger groups, including racial groups. Stan suggested that most people, including his
classmates, had a negative view of Black English. He stated, “Most people think of
Ebonics as slang and lazy.” Leigh labeled her own and her classmates’ ideas about Black
English as “what most White people think.” She added, “I think this piece was different
from what most Whites think in general, including those in our class.” Stan also
described the beliefs of several of his African American friends who viewed Black
English as “just slang.”

Content as “taboo”

Four students, Lisa, Jessie, Jen, and Reenie, associated Black English with
discomfort, taboo, or fear, and suggested that these qualities contributed to the challenges
in having discussion during this class session. Lisa described the lack of comfort around
the content, sharing:

Nobody wanted to participate. This was not something a lot of us were

comfortable talking about. . .You were trying to start a conversation. The

conversation was not going well because. . .I don’t think most people were very
comfortable.
Jessie also noted that there was a “general fear held by students, around the topic of
Black English.” She described how the “lack of student talk was connected with our
discomfort.” She added that she was “glad for this information” because regarding this

topic, she noted, “You never would ask. I would never ask.” This could be attributed to

what Jessie described as not knowing the “correct words to use” to talk about Black

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English; she remembered wondering during this class session, “Was it ok to call it Black
English?”

Jen also commented upon this topic as a “taboo issue, which made discussion
difficult.” She added, “I think because people were afraid to talk about it. Because it is a
taboo issue. You don’t want to offend someone.” Similarly, in explaining why she did
not view this session as discussion, Reenie focused on the difficulty in talking about this
topic with Joyce, the only African American student in our class. She explained, “I was
really afraid to offend her. I didn’t know how to put it.” Reenie thought that the rest of
the class also shared her fear. She stated, “I noticed that because we did have an African
American student in our class, Joyce, and we were very careful of what we said because
we didn’t want to offend her. We were afraid to say something wrong that may have
been just a White assumption.”

Content as “academic”

Five students, Jen, Jessie, Stan, Alyssa, and Reenie described Smitherman’s text

’9 66 9’ 66

as “academic, scholarly, carrying more weight,” or based on “research.” Jen viewed
Smitherman’s ideas as “academic” and as “opinion, but as researched opinion, carrying
more weight.” Similarly, Jessie shared, “Because she [Smitherman] has done so much
research and knows so much about this, her opinions carry a little more weight than our
opinions.” Stan talked about the idea that students “tended not to want to talk about
academic articles because it’s academic and scholarly so it has to be right.” He
explained, “She has to be right, because she is a scholar. And that’s how it is. So Black

English has to be a language, because she said it is a language.” Alyssa referred to

Smitherman’s work as “academic” and “scholarly, since she is doing research on this.”

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Reenie commented that because this was an “academic article about the topic of Black
English,” she assumed that “Smitherman has dealt with this issue. This is her research,
so she wrote about it.”

The three analytical pieces of this section, students’ perceptions of their
classmates who participated, whether this talk was discussion, and the nature of the topic,
set the stage for additional analysis. If classmates were attempting to put Smitherman’s
words into their own and if discussion was difficult because of the nature of this topic,
what were focal students’ perceptions of my role as the teacher? And, what did they
believe the process of “getting it” entailed? Finally, what about Black English did
students take away from the course?

“Getting it”: Exploring teacher talk and what students ended up “getting”

The analysis of this section is divided into four key sections. First, I analyze focal
students’ perceptions of my role as a teacher. Next, I foreground four focal students’
ideas about the role of their knowledge in learning about Black English. Then, I offer an
analysis of what students took away from the talk of the segment. This analysis shows
that focal students interpreted Smitherman’s ideas through two important lenses; they
viewed her ideas as pertaining to either the past or the present, and they interpreted her
ideas as either the “facts” or as one perspective. This offers evidence of students
engaging with content of Black English and serves to substantiate my overall argument
that the focal students brought resources to their learning. In the final part of this
analysis, I outline whether the focal students ultimately evaluated Black English as a

language or not.

A teacher’s role: Helping students “get it”

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All focal students agreed that I was providing guidance for their entry into the
material. They agreed that it was my responsibility to check their understanding of
Smitherman because “getting Smitherman’s ideas” was the central purpose of the class.
They characterized me as “having” the knowledge. Reenie exemplified the focal
students’ perceptions of my role. She noted, “You tried to help us out, saying this is what
she meant, and can you re—state it to show you get it?”

Similarly, Alyssa suggested that I was “helping students gain an understanding of
the issue of Black English” and “the class was motivated by the need to answer questions
in order to get the issue.” Lisa described that this was “my talk about the facts regarding
the origins of Black English,” noting that “We were giving answers to these questions
[referring to the handout] which is good because I think we needed to get the origins and
you were helping with this.” Amanda talked about my role in terms of giving students
access to Smitherman’s explanation for the development of Black English. She viewed
me as explaining what she termed as the “historical facts” regarding the origins of Black
English. She offered,

This was ‘this is what it was, and this is where it came from.’ Ok, we understand

that. There was no issue about that. This is how Black English was created. At

least you were giving us, for wherever this was going to go, you were helping us
understand that there is a reason for Black English. You were responsible for
helping us know that it did come from somewhere - ‘oppression in America,’ it
came from slavery.

Jessie talked about the need for me to “give this information so we all knew, so
that all students would have this same information.” She stated, “I think it was important
to understand that this was the language development from slavery. I think that was

important for you to get this across to students.” Jen suggested, “You [Karen] were

giving us knowledge about what those words [pidgin and Creole] in terms of

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understanding what Black English was.” Leigh described our purpose as “seeking an
understanding of Smitherman’s ideas,” and explained, “I think you were helping us figure
out what Smitherman’s definition of Black language was, and we were talking about how
it developed.” Leigh saw the purpose of the conversation as working on understanding
Smitherman’s ideas, noting, “You [Karen] were guiding us to get at how these language
patterns formed.”

Stan accounted for the quantity of my talk by describing how he thought that
students were not “getting it during class.” He explained that students did not talk
because “more likely than not it’s that the class did not understand. The content was just
going over our heads.” Stan noted, “That’s where it became imperative for you as a
facilitator or the teacher or the person who is more knowledgeable than the others to step
in and help guide us through so we could get it regardless if it was rough or not.” He
added,

If the conversation was not flowing or the students were not just getting it

initially, I think it was your goal and responsibility to make sure that we got it.

And if we didn’t get it from us turning to page 5, let’s say, then ok, you needed to

reword it somehow. And I think that’s what you did. ‘Does that make sense?’

You read from the text and then you paraphrased in a different, more layman’s

term, rather than speaking of Smitherman’s words.

In describing what Stan saw as my specific strategies for helping students enter into this
text, he outlined that my purpose was “for students to get content.”
Note to the teacher about students’ ideas: Room for improvement?

Although all focal students saw my role as providing content, several commented

explicitly on whether or not beginning with students’ ideas about Black English would

have been helpful for understanding of Smitherman. Stan and Alyssa believed that I

could have improved the class session by starting with students’ ideas while two other

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students, Leigh and Jen, felt that starting with students’ ideas would not have helped our
class.

According to Stan and Alyssa, I could have done a better job of scaffolding
students’ understandings of Smitherman’s ideas if I had started with students’
experiences. Stan suggested that I could have begun with popular ideas about what Black
English is.’9 Stan believed that toward the end of this segment, I hit upon ideas that
resonated with students. He noted, “Students could relate to what you said about slang
and lazy English. Even if they didn’t understand what you just read [from the text].”
Stan talked about starting with students’ ideas first and I “could have compared what
students thought and what Smitherman writes about,” and he added that “this might have
helped with the discussion.” Similarly, Alyssa stated that I “did not do a good job” in
facilitating students’ understanding of the text. She noted, “This was too dense of a text
to just give to students without building up some prior knowledge on it.” She offered
specific suggestions about how I might have “connected students to Black English
through real life examples such as rap music” because “You needed to find some way to
get this down on everybody else’s level, in a way that they could relate. Because I
thought that this piece was above everyone’s heads.” Alyssa suggested that I should have

made the students’ “misconceptions of the topic known from the start.”

 

’9 My initial analyses of students’ perceptions of this class influenced the pedagogical choices that I made
the following semester. Knowing that students had studied a foreign language in high school, I replaced
the handout with a simulation of a foreign language classroom, using Black English as the language of
study. A few students helped me create this simulation; we left the room in rows for the start of the class,
and asked the students to take a test that required knowledge of verb tenses in Black English and Black
English vocabulary and the ability to translate between English and Black English. This test is printed in
the back of the same book from which the two chapters came (Smitherman, 1977, pp. 248-250). I recently
came across an article written 30 years ago by two teacher educators who actually engaged in this kind of
language simulation. Black English was taught as a standard dialect with a class of elementary education
majors (Isenbarger & Smith, 1973).

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On the other hand, Leigh and Jen stated that starting with students’ ideas would
not have been more helpful. These two focal students believed that because there was no
variety among students’ ideas, no generative conversation could have ensued from
students’ own ideas. They also seemed to suggest that the students’ view of Black
English as lazy or ungrammatical is already widely shared and known. Leigh shared,
“From here, you could go on to have more opinions or thoughts from students.” She also
noted, “Because this was new material, I did not think that we should have started with
students’ ideas.” Leigh felt that “It was fine to start with some history, not just our own
experience with Black English” because of what she perceived as the students’ “lack of
knowledge about this topic.” According to Jen, “Most students would have agreed that it
is not a language, and so having more of a dialogue with students’ ideas would not have
gotten us very far.” Jen stressed that the class “would not have worked well starting with
students, since there would not have been a diversity of ideas.”

The analysis could end here, with the students’ perceiving a need for teacher
guidance in “getting” or comprehending difficult, unfamiliar, or taboo topics and with
their different views about the importance of students’ ideas in exploring Black English.
However, given my role as helping them understand or “get” Smitherman, what did
students think that “getting it” entailed? Considering this question demonstrates how
students were actively making sense of Black English, underneath the teacher talk of this
discussion segment.

Getting Smitherman: Moving between the past &J_3resent and between facts &
pprspective

In terms of what focal students took away from our class session on Black

English, they varied along two important dimensions. First, they viewed the ideas of

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Smitherman’s text as focusing on either the history of Black English or on present day
Black English. Second, they viewed Smitherman as presenting either the facts of Black
English or as offering one perspective among many possible perspectives on Black
English.
Smitherman as one perspective on the past and present

Lisa and Stan both believed that Smitherman offered one perspective of both the
history and current status of Black English. Both of these students situated their
characterization of Smitherman in their idea that any course reading served to bring in
just one perspective on a given topic and that students could offer alternative ideas about
a topic. Lisa characterized Smitherman’s ideas as “opinion about where it [Black
English] came from in the past and what it is today,” and that students could offer
“alternative opinions” as long as they presented evidence. She elaborated, “You had to
have evidence to back up why you thought something, to back up the idea that present
day Black English is or is not slang.” She added that a student could have also “offered a
different perspective [from Smitherman] on where it [Black English] came from.” Lisa
stressed,

Students could have formed their own opinion on Black English, just as

Smitherman did, as long as they back up their opinion with evidence. You needed

to have a reasoning why you chose your idea. You were entitled to your own

opinions. You didn’t have to believe those who published a book about their

opinion. But you had to give evidence, just like authors did in their book.

Stan also situated his understanding of Smitherman as one perspective within his
stance that “scholarly articles offer just one perspective.” He stated, “Smitherman talked

about her perspective on the past and on what is Black English today,” adding that “she is

just one version of Black English.” He did not take Smitherman as necessarily having

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what he called the “right ideas,” even though he said that he had not read other texts
about Black English. He talked about reading texts on other topics with which he
disagrees, offering a few examples. He explained,

Just because I believe that gender is socially constructed, I have read articles that

say it is not. Look at The bell curve. It tells you blatantly that Blacks are inferior

to Whites, that there are different intelligence levels. They have evidence
supposedly to show that. I disagree. If you look at the Human Genome Project, it
shows that DNA shows that there is no biological basis to race.

Smitherman as facts about the past and one perspective about the present

Leigh and Jen believed that Smitherman offered the facts about the history of
Black English but one perspective on the present. Leigh noted, “. . .this article was
speaking strictly linguistically, factually about what Black English was in the past. . .we
didn’t really get into how Black English is sometimes or oftentimes seen as inferior or
bad English today. This was more getting at how these language patterns formed. . .you
[Karen] were trying to help us. . .know the facts about the origin [of Black English].” In
terms of Black English today, Leigh suggested that Smitherman “offered her point of
view, which is not that it is lazy or poor grammar today, and others might disagree.”

Jen thought that Snritherrnan’s idea about current day Black English as legitimate
language was just her “opinion,” and she compared Smitherman’s view with “Others
believe that this is just a lazy form of English, that they just don’t want to speak the right
way.” She noted, “You [Karen] were basically describing the fact about where Black
English came from, which is something most or all of us did not know and Smitherman
wrote about this.” She added that “when we were talking about the history of Black

English and where it came from was not an opinion.”

Smitherman as facts about the past, but what about the present?

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Both Amanda and Reenie viewed Smitherman’s text as a set of facts about the
origins of Black English. In addition, these two focal students believed that we omitted
an important discussion about the current status of Black English today. They wanted to
know “what happened in between,” as Amanda stated. Amanda and Reenie believed that
the students were getting what both called “the correct information about the past,” but
then we did not carry through with the topic into the present. They both wondered how
Smitherman’s factual history of Black English connected to the present day language of
African American communities and suggested that Smitherman may be just one
perspective on the current status of Black English.

Reenie labeled Smitherman’s text as “fact regarding the historical explanation for
Black English. She added, “The historical part was pretty cut and dry; this is just how it
was derived.” Then Reenie noted that we did not talk about “how to connect this to
current ideas about Black English, where Smitherman may be just one idea” or “we did
not connect her facts to current controversial questions and ideas about students” in
classrooms.

Similarly, Amanda viewed Smitherrnan’s explanation of “the origin of Black
English” as what she labeled as “the facts.” Amanda also thought that this information
should have led to class discussion about Black English today. She talked about “all the
years between slavery and today’s Black English” and wanted to know, “What happened
in between?” She raised the questions, “What is Black English today, and is there a
difference between Black English back then and Ebonics today?” because she believed
that we did not address these. She wondered, “Maybe she [Smitherman] is just one

perspective on what Black English is today, but we did not address today.”

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It is important to note that Amanda felt that because the facts about the origins of
Black English were new to her and because I was the one who chose the text, she
accepted Smitherman’s ideas as fact. She stated, “I didn’t know enough about this stuff.
I took it as fact. Anything that you pretty much give me like this, it is long, with
examples of what was going on, I would pretty much take it as fact. She noted, . .a lot
of us had not dealt with Black English in our lives and in our classes. . .We did not know
where Ebonics started.”
Smitherman as facts about the past and present

Both Jessie and Alyssa felt that Smitherman offered the truth about both the past
and present day structures of Black English. They understood the factual origins of
Black English as in relationship with the facts about Black English as a language today.
Jessie suggested that having a history gives Black English legitimacy and Alyssa
suggested that the class needed to hear Smitherman’s ideas because their misperceptions
about this topic had to be “corrected with the facts.”

Jessie viewed this segment as the students’ learning about past and present, or
“the origin of Black English, which connected to present day Black English.” She noted,
“I think that that was one of the coolest things that I got out of this class, is that the
understanding of Black English as slang or lazy, when really, that is not true today and is
not where it originated from.” She added, “And I thought that was really cool, knowing
that Black English has logic behind it.” Jessie associated having a history with knowing
that current Black English is a legitimate language. She viewed this as important work,
since students had no exposure to what she called the “real history behind Black

English.”

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Alyssa suggested that Smitherman was “providing the facts about history,” or
“truths about the origin of Black English,” and that I wanted “students in our class
understand these truths in order to understand the fact of Black English as a language
today.” She added that students needed to “surface their preconceived notions” in order
to replace them with what she called “Smitherman’s correct ideas.”

This analysis shows that students varied in their perceptions of Smitherman as
talking about past or present and as offering the facts or one perspective. It also points to
the question: what can be said about students’ beliefs regarding Black English? In the
final piece of this analysis, I briefly synthesize what students took away regarding Black
English as a language today.

Summary of students’ beliefs about Black English as a language

It was clear that three focal students, Alyssa, Jen, and Jessie, shared the belief that
Black English is indeed a language. Even before the semester began, Alyssa was
convinced that Black English is a legitimate language. She attributed her belief to her
prior experiences in a linguistics course. Both Jen and Jessie suggested that this class
session changed their ideas about what Black English is. These two students indicated
that they used to believe that Black English was what Jen called a “slang and lazy form of
Standard English” but after the class session, both believed that Black English is what
Jessie called, “a legitimate language in its own right.”

It is less clear what the other five focal students ended up taking away. Although
three students, Stan, Leigh, and Lisa, viewed Smitherman as one perspective on present
day Black English, none clearly stated whether they agreed with her perspective. The

other two, Reenie and Amanda, had lingering questions about the current status of Black

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English, and neither articulated whether they believed Black English to be a language or
not.

Before turning to the implications of the multiple parts of this analysis, it is
important to document a part of my own learning about Black English. Since teaching
this course, I have examined another scholarly perspective on Black English. This shapes
the implications of this chapter.

A post-class reflection on the reading: Smitherman as one perspective

Since taking Smitherman’s class and teaching the course described in this
dissertation, I have begun to read ideas that differ from Smitherrnans’s arguments, in
particular the ideas of John McWhorter, a prominent scholar in the field of linguistics
who focuses some of his work on the study of pidgin and Creole languages.” Unlike
Smitherman, McWhorter views Black English as a dialect of English rather than an
African-derived Creole, explaining that “Black English in the United States has
sometimes been presented as a Creole or Semicreole, but almost all of the traits brought
to bear in such arguments are actually inheritances from nonstandard regional British
dialects that slaves were exposed to. ..[T]he dialect [Black English] lacks hallmark
African-created Creole features” (2001, p. 169). Although McWhorter acknowledges the
development of the Creole which became Gullah in the Sea Islands off of the coast of

South Carolina, he writes that “elsewhere, where plantations were smaller and interracial

 

2” My initial (and ongoing) reading of McWhorter’s ideas can be attributed to at least two events: a remark
made by Geneva Smitherman during my experience her in doctoral course and several discussions that I
have had with my advisor, Doug Campbell. Geneva briefly commented that she did not agree with
McWhorter’s ideas during one class session, and at the time, our class was not reading his ideas nor was I
familiar with them. Much later on, while analyzing the data of this chapter, I shared Geneva’s comment
with Doug and he recalled that part of the disagreement between the two might have to do with the debate
regarding whether Black English is considered a dialect of English or whether it is considered a Creole
derived from West African languages and English. Since talking with Doug, I have read several of
McWhorter’s books (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001).

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interactions richer, the Creole itself was not preserved, instead serving as one element in
the mix which created African-American Vernacular English” (2000c, p. 206).
McWhorter (2001) stresses that Black English only retains a “few legacies” of its history
of being created as a form of English on plantations by speakers of West African
languages.

Although McWhorter discusses and refutes the common misconception that Black
speech differs from Standard speech only in terms of slang, or that Black English is “bad”
or “lazy” or a degraded form of English, he does not agree with the claims during the
Ebonics controversy of 1997 that “Black English is an African language with English
words” (2000b, p. 53) and that Ebonics should be used in schools. He explains that the
Ebonics resolution in Oakland, California was demonstrative of a cult plaguing the
African American community that he labels as one of victimology, separatism, and anti-
intellectualism. He goes on to offer evidence from many other countries where students
bring home dialects to classrooms just as different from the standard dialect in their
country (and with even greater differences than those between Black English and
Standard English) and learn the standard dialect through “simple daily immersion” (p.
189). Drawing upon this evidence, as well as other evidence such as statistics that show
that Black students lag behind White students in decent schools, he suggests that it is not
language that holds back Black children, but rather what he views as an historical legacy
of victimhood in the students’ culture itself (see especially pp. 184-211).

Although one could situate McWhorter’s and Smitherman’s ideas within a larger
linguistic debate about the politics of language, literacy and access to education of

African American students in our schools, I was not familiar with the work of scholars

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like McWhorter at the time of my teaching. This plays a role in examining the
implications of my analysis.
Implications of Black English segment for teaching and learning about diversity

The analyses in this chapter point to the critical complexities regarding the roles
that text comprehension, the knowledge base of diversity, students’ ideas, and teacher
educators’ goals and knowledge play in teaching and learning about issues of diversity.
These complexities are reflected in at least two key questions. First, what counts as
knowledge about Black English in the context of preservice teacher education? And
second, what are ways of teaching this knowledge?
Knowledge of Black English: Particular foundational beliefs

Although there is not universal agreement about the historical development and
linguistic classification of Black English, linguistic scholars do agree on fundamental
principles about Black English and what teachers ought to know (Feldman, 2002; Labov,
1970; Smitherman, 1977; McWhorter, 2000a). Thus, in spite of the differences between
McWhorter and Smitherman regarding the historical development and linguistic
classification of Black English, it may be more significant for preservice teacher
education that these two scholars agree that Black English is a rule-govemed system.
Like Smitherman, McWhorter (2000a) describes all dialects as equally complex and
nuanced, noting that evaluations of dialects are evaluations of the speakers’ place in
society. He notes how the idea of one “best” English is so “relentlessly hammered into
us throughout our lives” and how we are “misled in thinking of varieties of English other

9”

than the standard as ‘wrong (p. ix). This notion that children naturally develop the

ability to use a variety of language with complex rules that are consistent and that are

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shared by other members of their community is what Feldman describes in the context of
teacher knowledge as an “apparently simple truth” that “is perhaps the most important
linguistic understanding for all teachers in our schools” (2002, p. 113).

Similarly, in his seminal work, The study of nonstandard English, Labov
explicitly argues that “it is most important for the teacher to understand the relation
between standard and nonstandard and to recognize that nonstandard English is a system
of rules, different from the standard but not necessarily inferior as a means of
communication” ( 1970, p. 14). Moreover, Labov situates his work on nonstandard
English within what he calls one of the fundamental principles of sociolinguistic
investigation, which states that “every speaker will show some variation in phonological
and syntactic rules according to the immediate context in which he is speaking” (p. 19).
Labov notes that these shifts are determined by the relationships between speakers, the
larger social context (e.g., school, home, work, etc.), and the topic.

This suggests that there are two fundamental principles for preservice teachers in
teacher education programs: 1) Black English is a rule-govemed linguistic system, and
2) for all speakers, language choices are shaped and reshaped by a host of contextual
factors. This leads to a consideration of the ways in which teacher educators teach and
preservice teachers learn this knowledge.

Teaching about Black English: A mdagogy for text comprehension or scholarly debate?

The analysis of the talk in this excerpt from one class discussion demonstrates
that my pedagogical approach can be characterized as recitation (Almasi, 1996). Almasi
notes that in a recitation, there is little exchange among students because the teacher does

at least 50% of the talking, determines the questions that will be asked, the order of those

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questions, and the correctness of students’ responses to those questions. Moreover, the
teacher usually gives immediate feedback as to the correctness of students’ responses.
Almasi explains that recitations suggest to students that meaning is located in the text and
that students can extract or realize meaning through teacher questioning. Recitation talk
also sends the signal that the teacher is the “ultimate authority in the discussion context”
(p. 7).

While Almasi writes that students involved in recitations “may come to view the
purpose of these interactions as primarily for the teacher’s sake or for assessment
purposes” and not for the “construction of meaning” (p. 4), findings in this chapter
complicate this perspective. The focal students in this study agreed that my pedagogical
approach in helping them “get” what Smitherman’s text means was important and
responsible. Students suggested that they needed support in understanding Smitherman’s
work, and from their perspective, I was taking my responsibility as their instructor
seriously. However, the analysis of this chapter also indicates that the focal students did
not leave with a single interpretation of Smitherman’s text. What students took away was
more complex than I as their teacher had imagined. Students brought ideas about
knowledge that intersected with what it meant to understand a text. These ideas, framed
as two dimensions (past / present and fact / perspective), reflect the complexity of
students’ meaning constructions, even during a series of teacher-initiated questions that
were more literal or text-based. These dimensions raise important questions about how
teacher educators talk about knowledge of language diversity and other issues of
diversity.

Link to teacher attitudes and knowledge

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There is evidence that having particular foundational beliefs about Black English
leads to enacting better teaching practices. Landry (1975) investigated the effects of
teaching elementary teachers Black English phonology and grammar and found a
significant positive relationship between teachers’ knowledge of Black English and
positive attitudes toward speakers of Black English. Similarly, Washington and Miller-
Jones (1989) found that a teachers’ higher level of knowledge of Black English was
reflected in a greater level of interactional success with students who speak Black English
and nonstandard varieties of English. These studies suggest that teachers’ general
understanding of Black English as a complex and rule-govemed system of language
facilitates a critical step of teachers building respectful relationships with students who
are speakers of Black English. These findings are promising, and raise questions about
the role of teacher education in supporting these outcomes.

Teacher educators might situate topics as long-standing debates. If knowledge
about language is framed as a dialogue among scholars in a field who share particular
foundational principles and who debate other ideas, students might learn to participate in
a community that discusses the significance of the issues. Yet, two central tensions or
questions persist. First, must the comprehension of particular ideas or terms (e.g.,
pidgins, Creoles, dialects) precede entry into a field of scholarly debate (e. g., Black
English as a Creole or Black English as a dialect of English)? And second, does a
pedagogy of scholarly debate really avoid teacher educators’ desire for students to
construct the “right” ideas about Black English?

Looking across three chapters: A richer analytical portrait

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Each chapter in which I have presented focal students’ perception of class talk is
rich in and of itself. An even richer analytical portrait of teaching and learning about

diversity emerges when we look across the three chapters.

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Chapter 7

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: CREATING A PARALLEL PRACTICE
IN TEACHER EDUCATION

“To assume that students are not thinking or thoughtful about the issues undermines a
pedagogical process in which ethics, respect, and dialogue describe the teaching
relationship” (O’Donnell, 1998, p. 65).

“To know our students means to maintain an attitude of respectful awe at the range,
diversity, and elasticity of human experience” (Tatum 1997, p. 325).

Introduction

Regenspan believes that teacher educators “need a concerted effort to contradict
the inappropriate expectations that have prevailed in the field” (2002, p. 75). She is
referring to the need for teacher educators to combat the belief that preservice teachers
are unable to think in complex ways about social issues. In addition, Reganspan situates
this need in what she calls “the parallel practice” implications for teacher education: just
as teacher educators want teacher candidates to expect competence for the children that
they will work with in public school classrooms, teacher educators also need to expect
competence for teacher candidates in university classrooms. This dissertation helps
conceptualize creating such a parallel practice in teacher education.

To explore further a conceptualization of teacher candidate competence, this
chapter is divided into four sections. First, to re-visit my research questions, I outline the
three data chapters as accounts of teacher candidates’ sense-making. The questions that
framed this study were:

1. What resources do preservice teachers bring to learning about diversity? What
happens to those resources in whole class discussions?
2. What are the content and process of the talk about issues of diversity in whole

class discussions?

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3. What are preservice teachers’ perceptions of “learning about diversity” during
particular whole class discussions?
The data chapters suggest that teacher candidates bring multiple and complex resources
to their learning and that these resources vary across the three chapters. In the second
section, I draw upon a framework of situational variation (Mehan, Herweck, & Meihls,
1986) to understand the variance across class sessions. This framework helps view
competence not as an unwavering or inherent condition located within teacher candidates,
but rather as a label that is constructed and linked with situation or context. In the third
section, I outline critical directions for future research and several policy implications. I
then describe several key implications for teaching that stem from an ongoing dialogue
that I have had with other teacher researchers while I conducted this study. I conclude
this chapter by suggesting that rather than focusing on what teacher candidates do not
bring to our classrooms, teacher educators need to listen for what our teacher candidates
do bring to their learning.
Three accounts of students’ sense-making
This dissertation study has shown that White teacher candidates are neither a

homogeneous group of learners nor are they a group of deficient learners. Not only was
there variation across the teacher candidates’ ideas, the teacher candidates brought
complex resources to their learning about diversity. These resources included their
personal experiences and stories, their beliefs about the role of assumptions, their ideas
about the role of consensus and multiplicity in learning, and their orientations toward

knowledge.

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Findings from chapter 4, Exploring issues of diversity through talk about
students’ experiences, indicated that students used their own experiences of “making it”
to college as resources for creating knowledge about issues of diversity. This pushes
toward relying less on what Ladson-Billings calls “received knowledge” and more on
“knowledge in the making” (1999, p. 229). Some focal students used one student’s story
about reaching college to articulate their own stories, suggesting that the variation across
students’ stories served as a resource for students. Hobson, referring to the work of
Grumet and Pinar, indicates that the use of personal experiences “allows teachers to ask
their own questions, articulate their own stories, explore their own memories, and
strongly affirm the legitimacy of their own real experiences” (1995, p. 7). Regenspan
argues for the value of this work, noting,

It is critical that we work to draw our students into an alternative culture of

literacy, where people read in order to make sense of their own lives. Such sense-

making then raises possibilities for new forms of healing, beauty, and activism in
both their own lives and in the life of their communities. I make the assumption
that only teacher education students who have internalized such a rich conception

of literacy will effectively promote it with children. (2002, p. 51)

Yet, as this chapter showed, the focal students differed in terms of how they
understood the role of experiences and stories for learning about issues of diversity.
Some focal students saw students’ stories as logical and reflective of their experiences
while two students saw the need for telling correct stories or for correcting others with
their stories. This raised questions about the role of assumptions in sharing personal
experiences in class discussions because some students saw assumptions as constructive
while others did not. In describing the challenge of using her students’ experiences in a

master’s course on literacy and culture, McVee writes, “. . .one thing I have learned in

looking across the narratives written and told throughout the course is that we must

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provide opportunity for creating and valuing narratives based on personal experience, but
we must also scaffold and provide opportunities for critical examination of narratives”
(1999, p. 175). Krall similarly notes that “self-understanding” or who we are in relation
to the world must be “pursued reflectively” (1988, p. 468) and O’Donnell (1998)
describes this reflective work as the need to link the individual to the macro-societal-
cultural level. Similarly, Macedo argues that “the sharing of experiences should not be
understood in psychological terms only. [This sharing of experiences] invariably requires
a political and ideological analysis as well” (1994, p. 175). The chapter 4 analysis
demonstrates how the focal students began to engage in this type of work. But more
importantly, the findings substantiate my primary claim in this dissertation: White
teacher candidates are neither homogeneous nor deficient.

In chapter 5, Learning about diversity with a Barbie advertisement: The
complexities of consensus and multiplicity, students brought rich experiences with a
cultural icon to our whole class discussion. The use of Barbie as a cultural artifact
sparked student engagement not only in one class session, but across the entire semester.
Drawing upon work in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies which “starts where
people are but does not assume that either they [the students] or we [the teachers] know
the answers in advance” (Grossberg, 1994, p. 20) helped highlight the tension between
consensus and multiplicity when having whole class discussions about diversity using
this icon. As chapter 5 revealed, not only is it impossible to know and reach a consensus
about answers in advance, it can be difficult to reach consensus about what issue is being
discussed or what issue warrants discussion. For example, while several students

concentrated their energies on how Barbie was a problematic construction of beauty,

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other students, especially Amanda, believed that Barbie was not the real issue.
Moreover, the students differed regarding their understandings of the role of multiple
ideas in learning. Though these insights about students’ perspectives do not absolve us
from the question of what we might need to agree upon when learning about diversity,
what is most germane to my overarching argument is that homogenization and deficit
lenses are inaccurate descriptions of what White students bring to their learning about
issues of diversity.

In chapter 6, Learning about diversity with Smitherman: What does it mean
to “get it?”, students felt that, compared with the resources that they brought to the other
two whole class discussions (their personal experiences of making it to college and with
Barbie), they had fewer resources to draw upon and that there was less variation in terms
of the experiences that students brought to this discussion. However, even though
students felt that they had fewer resources to draw upon, my analysis of students’ sense-
making showed that students brought complex ways of understanding knowledge to their
learning. The threads of knowledge as either perspective or fact and relating to the past
or present provide evidence of these complex constructions. Trying to understand text as
perspective or fact, and as considering the past or the present indicated how students
differed in how they assessed what it meant to “get it” or understand Black English. This
analysis also indicated that students labeled my responsibility in this class session as
guiding them to an understanding of a more scholarly text. This pointed to the critical
question of what knowledge students need at what point in their teacher preparation.

The three class sessions in this study differed along important dimensions. This

variance included the topics of discussion, the nature or genre of the texts being

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discussed, the times during the semester when the discussions occurred, the students’
familiarity with one another and with me, the students’ comfort level with the topics, the
students’ perceptions of their knowledge about and experiences with the topics, and my
goals as the teacher for each class discussion. In addition, the amount of teacher talk and
student talk varied, as well as what students thought about my role as their teacher, and
the extent to which I followed or relinquished my outlined plan. All of these dimensions
contribute to the context of each discussion and thus, a view of each session as its own
situation or event.
Competence as situational

In writing this dissertation, situational variation has emerged as a conceptual
framework for naming and understanding teacher candidates’ competence across the
three class sessions. I draw upon the framework of several scholars who characterize the
situational variability in students’ performances and argue for a context-specific view of
competence (Erickson & Schultz, 1977; McDermott & Varenne, 1995; Mehan, Hertweck,
& Meihl, 1986). This conception of situational competence counters the notion that
competence is a general or static trait because ability is not understood as inherent in
students’ minds or acts (Mehan, Hertweck, & Meihl, 1986). Based on their work in
studying disability, McDermott and Varenne explain that “disabilities are less the
property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus” (1995, p. 324). Thus,
generalizations about competence from one context of performance to another will not
necessarily be accurate because students’ performances are specific to particular events.

Situational variance recognizes that students’ performances vary with context.

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This performance variation has been named as a “culture as disability approach”
in which a student “must be seen in terms of the people with whom he interacts and the
ways in which they structure their activities together” (McDermott & Varenne, 1995, p.
340). This approach does not describe students as much as it attributes views of students
as learning disabled in some way to the people most immediately involved in
constructing the label. Thus, disability is a characteristics that is made possible through
particular social interactions. Mehan, Herweck, and Meihls describe this social or
contextual construction of disability by describing how ability is “constituted by
educational practices enacted as a routine part of organizational life” ( 1986, p. 160).
They specifically describe disability as “a function of the interaction between educators’
categories, institutional machinery, and students’ conduct” (1986, p. 164). Similarly,
Erickson and Shultz note that “people in interaction become environments for each other”
(1977, p. 148). Thus, the products of educators and students’ interactional work are the
labels that teachers place on students’ abilities and the roles that teachers construct for
students (Mehan, Hertweck, & Mehil, 1986, p. 156). Finally, it has been noted that by
having so many students designated with labels of incompetence, institutional
arrangements are served and perpetuated (McDermott & Varenne, 1986).

This understanding of situational variance can be used to frame the competence of
the teacher candidates in this dissertation study. Situational variance suggests that it is
helpful to think of each of the three chapters in this study as three distinct events or
situations that made something different of the focal students. Rather than some sort of

stable set of invariant conditions beneath the trait of competence, the focal students

varied across these three situations because their competence is not some kind of

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individual or private possession. Rather, their competence can be understood as
inextricably linked with a host of contextual or interactional factors. Thus, the ways in
which the teacher candidates and I participated in class discussions reflected our
knowledge of what behavior or interactions were considered appropriate in any given
class session. The focal students and I enacted what Erickson and Shultz describe as the
capacity for monitoring contexts, an essential part of social competence (1977, p. 147).
Future research and policy implications
Future research

The increasing gap between the backgrounds of students and their teachers
represents the area that has received the most attention in multicultural teacher education
literature and this has engendered a host of questions regarding how to prepare
prospective teachers of European American backgrounds. This underscores the critical
need for more research on the experiences of teacher candidates during teacher education
programs and beyond. To begin, additional research that investigates particular
pedagogies implemented in teacher education is warranted. Specifically, there is a need
for additional research on the use of ethnographic work, narrative texts, students’ own
personal stories, and popular culture artifacts in teacher candidate learning about issues of
diversity. In addition, this dissertation points toward a need for more research on what
the acquisition of discourse in the field of multicultural teacher education looks and feels
like from the perspective of teacher candidates. Research on the intersection of students’
orientations toward knowledge or epistemological beliefs and their learning about issues
of diversity can help teacher educators create more educative learning experiences for

teacher candidates. Although the findings from this study suggest that the focal students

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were not a homogeneous group in terms of what it meant to understand issues of race,
class, and gender, more research is needed on whether and how White teacher candidates
grapple with their White privilege in their everyday lives. At the programmatic level,
there is also a critical need to research how particular programs build coherence across
coursework, field experiences, and other structures.

Because this study focused on perceptions of discussions in one course, more
longitudinal research that extends beyond one course is needed. Cochran-Smith, Davis,
and Fries note, “There is very little empirical attention to the outcomes of multicultural
teacher education, either in terms of prospective and new teachers’ teaching practices or
K-12 students’ learning” (in press). Martin and Van Gunten (2002) also call for research
on teacher candidates after they graduate from teacher preparation programs. Research
of practicing teachers’ professional development regarding issues of diversity (which
may include continuing coursework in colleges of education) remains an important
extension of research on preservice preparation, especially given a conception of teachers
as lifelong learners (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Holt-Reynolds, 1992; Little, 1993) about
diversity (Florio-Ruane, 2001; N ieto, 1998). Similarly, Zeichner calls for a much closer
look at the “long-term consequences of. . .various approaches to teacher education for
diversity” (1996a, p. 163).

This study specifically suggests the need for research on whether and how
viewing and treating White teacher candidates pedagogically as diverse and competent
translates into how teacher candidates view and pedagogically treat their K-12 students.
In other words, research that examines whether and to what extent teacher educators’

efforts to de-deficitize and dehomogenize teacher candidates affect whether teacher

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candidates similarly treat their own students is warranted. Furthermore, if a goal for K-
12 students is to understand individuals and groups in complex ways, research regarding
how this kind of pedagogical effort on the part of teacher candidates affects how diverse
groups of K-12 students conceptualize each other is necessary.

With any research efforts, this dissertation study suggests that how researchers
conceptualize what and whom they study is critical. Given assumptions about teacher
candidates as lacking resources that follow from the demographic imperative, current
theory and research seems to focus on how preservice teachers’ ideas, beliefs, and
understandings need to be changed. For example, Kennedy writes that one important role
for preservice teacher education is to change preservice teachers’ initial frames of
reference, noting that teacher education is ideally situated to foster such a shift in
thinking because it is “located squarely between teachers’ past experiences as students in
classrooms and their future experiences as teachers in classrooms” (1999, p. 57).
However, if the first and predominant intention is to change preservice teachers, this
might thwart an understanding of preservice teachers as learners who bring resources
worthy of study. Constructing teacher candidates as in need of change may be
inaccurately grounded in an assumption that preservice teachers, especially White
preservice teachers, are a group of homogeneous and deficient learners. This might
contradict a research goal of understanding preservice teachers, how teacher education
can be constructed in educative ways, and how teacher candidates learn to participate in a
community of multicultural teacher educators.

Policy implications

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This study suggests a need for teacher education policies that conceptualize the
integration and trajectory of multicultural content within teacher preparation programs
and that foster faculty recruitment and training.

This study raises the question of what counts as the most critical content for
teacher candidates in moving toward competence regarding these issues. What or whose
knowledge is deemed essential multicultural content remains open to debate. Often
courses about issues of diversity and equity foreground race, class, and gender.
However, this may not be enough. Wallace (2000) calls for a greater emphasis on
linguistic diversity, immigrant issues, gay and lesbian parenting, sexual orientation
issues, disability studies, and spirituality because she finds that these ideas tend to be
marginalized.

Programmatically, we need to consider policies that support the creation of
coherent teacher education programs that integrate issues of diversity and equity
throughout all courses and field experiences. These policies must also challenge the
historic separation in education departments of the teaching of foundations courses from
the supervision of our students’ fieldwork (Martin & Van Gunten, 2002; Regenspan,
2002). Determining a trajectory of course content remains a critical part of this process.
Villegas and Lucas note, “It would be unrealistic to expect teachers-to-be to develop the
extensive and sophisticated pedagogical knowledge and skills of culturally responsive
teachers during their preservice preparation” (2002, p. 30). However, it may be realistic
to create policies that support preservice teachers to exit their teacher preparation
programs with a vision of what culturally responsive teaching entails and an

understanding of what culturally responsive teachers do.

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This dissertation also points to implications for faculty recruitment and training.
The recruitment of faculty committed to multicultural education is imperative
(MacDonald, Colville-Hall, & Smolen, 2003). Policies that recognize and support
teacher educators as learners about issues of diversity are critical if these issues are to be
a central part of the mission of colleges of education. Wallace writes that in order to
create a multicultural teacher education, “Teacher educators need comprehensive
professional preparation that requires transformation in their own thinking and in their
lives” (2000, p. 1090). It bears noting that just as with preservice teachers, building on
the resources that teacher educators bring to their learning is essential.
Teaching implications

While writing this dissertation, I interacted with many teachers and teacher
educators through their writing about their teaching (e.g., Ball, 1993; Bell, Washington,
Weinstein, & Love, 1997; Cochran-Smith, 1995; Cockrell, et al., 1999; Duckworth, 1996;
Featherstone, 2003; Gallas, 1995; Levine-Rose, 1999; Nieto, 1998). Although the
majority of these educators teach in contexts quite different from my own, my
interactions with them have helped me outline the following four implications of this
dissertation for teaching about issues of diversity: 1) pursuing students’ sense-making, 2)
caring across differences, 3) assessing by comparing, and 4) teaching as (un)learning.
Each of these implications reflects a central goal of how to engage with students in
learning about diversity. Taken together, these implications help re-define what it means
to be a competent teacher educator.

Pursuing students' sense-making

210

As a teacher educator, I continually struggle with what Bell (1993) and Levine-
Rose (1999) describe as a dilemma of having to teach a well-defined set of facts or
concepts in a field while staying committed to helping students construct their own
understandings or knowledge. Gallas writes about this challenge, believing that she knew
where the students’ thinking was going, but her ability to asses the “real path” of her
students’ thinking may have been “limited by [her] own conceptualization of how to
direct and guide it (1995, p. 9). Gallas comments, “I did not always richly construct what
their [her students’] understandings were” (p. 10) because of her focus on where students
should be.

Several other scholars helped me grapple with this challenge. Duckworth writes
that her fundamental point is to not to “excise” a student’s thoughts and feelings and
“replace them with other thoughts and feelings,” but rather to “to try to understand the
person’s thoughts and feelings” and to “have the person articulate his or her own thoughts
in different areas and in different ways” (1996, p. 116). She adds that this “usually
means acknowledging complexity rather than replacing one simple way of looking at
things with another simple way of looking at things — acknowledging the complexity and
seeing where that leads.” Similarly, Featherstone notes, “the more invested I am in
getting my students to embrace certain beliefs, the harder it is for me to listen with
genuine curiosity to the ideas they actually have — especially the ideas that conflict with
the ones I am trying to ‘sell”’ (2003, p. 3). When Featherstone decides to nurture her
own curiosity about her students’ ideas and her determination to “think well” of her

students, she notes her growing enjoyment of the students and of their ideas (2003, p. 6).

211

Citing Meier, Featherstone notes that “we cannot really respect someone unless we have
made an effort to understand how they think” (2003, p. 7).

These teachers help name the tension that I felt as a teacher educator in requiring
that students “get” something in particular when I wanted students to construct their own
understandings. In believing I knew where students had to go, and that I needed to direct
and lead them to particular places, I wonder how I could have known what my students
already knew or thought and how I could have known where “further” was for my
students. In the case of Black English, I continually struggled with wanting to excise
students’ ideas and replace them with particular ideas, and I wonder how this interfered
with my abilities as a teacher educator to know about my students’ understandings of
history and perspective. Like Featherstone, I wondered how we can be open to hearing
what students bring if our success as teachers depends on whether our students take up
the same ideas we think.

Caring across differences

A second implication gleaned from ongoing dialogue with other teachers is the
significance of caring across differences. Duckworth describes a teacher who says “how
hard it is to know what to do about your own feelings and beliefs when they are different
from some children’s” (1996, p. 118), offering the example of talking with students in her
class who are pro-nuclear compared with herself and other students who think differently.
(p. 119). Duckworth elaborates,

I think a critical theme to develop with children is that it is hard work to resolve

conflicts. Resolutions cannot be reduced to having the good guys win and the bad

guys lose. It takes hard work to manage to have no losers — to have everyone get
home safely. And it takes hard work for teachers to develop the sense in children

that this complex goal is feasible and desirable. . .It is a matter of being present as
a whole person, with your own thoughts and feelings, and of accepting children as

212

whole people, with their thoughts and feelings. It is a matter of working very

hard to find out what those thoughts and feelings are, as a starting point for

developing a view of a world in which people are as much concerned about other

people’s security as they are about their own. (1996, p. 121)

In the field of multicultural teacher education, Nieto echoes this emphasis on
caring about others and acknowledge the challenges of doing this work. She describes
how all perspectives must be acknowledged and investigated, which is “much easier in
theory than it is in practice” because it “often proves to be a complex balancing act
between providing equal access to all, or hurting personal feelings by making statements
that are outright racist, heterosexist, and so on” (1998, p. 30). Nieto (1998) writes that
consensus need not (and probably should not) be the result of courses on issues of
diversity, and explains that creating community is what we can hope to build. She
elaborates by describing a kind of caring that developed among her students, despite the
very real differences that did exist; caring did not mean that ideological differences
disappeared (p. 31).

Assessing by comparing

Because teachers are pursuing students’ sense-making and creating caring
communities in which difference can be respected in the context of coursework, this
inevitably leads to implications for assessment. Because teacher educators have ideas
that they want their learners to consider, they are not unbiased nor is the discourse in their
classrooms truly democratic (Cochran-Smith, 1995, p. 560), particularly in light of the
need for teacher educators to assess their learners (Cockrell et al., 1999, p. 354). As long

as teacher educators pass out grades that reward “correct” thinking, they continue to

tempt students to impress them with the “right answers,” whether they are conscious of

213

this or not. Those students who disagree with the teacher’s agendas may be more easily
viewed from a deficit perspective.

Perhaps there is a need to shift assessment practices away from grading how well
teacher candidates can apply teacher educators’ rationales to how well they explore
arguments. In an attempt to negotiate the challenge of assessment, Cockrell and her
colleagues (1999) offer an alternative. These teacher educators created a capstone
assignment in their course that asked students to evaluate ideas by comparing opposing
articles on a topic. They describe their assessment in the following way: “We evaluated
this paper based on a rubric that did not make adoption of a particular position a
condition for a good grade” (p. 354). In support of this idea, Sleeter writes that she has
found that her White students are “more likely to entertain another perspective, as long as
it is not presented as the only ‘correct’ one” because “partly what students resist is the
implication that the sense they have made of their lives is wrong” (1996, p. 120). N ieto
also explains that for multicultural teacher education, “there can be no ‘politically
correct’ or unchallenged perspectives” (1996, p. 30).

Teaching as (un)leaming

A fourth implication that stems from my dialogue with other teachers addresses a
conception of teaching as continual learning and unlearning. Weinstein writes,

Unless I can admit to students that I am still in the process of learning and that

there are areas about which I still need to be educated, I may give the impression

that there are simple solutions to which I have access. This places great pressure
on me to have ‘the answer.’ One way of diminishing the pressure is to disclose

my own uncertainties to students“ It also models that unlearning prejudice is a

lifelong process in which there are rarely simple answers. (in Bell, et al., 1997, p.
304)

214

Weinstein articulates how self-disclosure of our own learning and unlearning is an
important part of multicultural teaching, and that “one of the most powerful ways of
teaching is through modeling the behavior we hope to encourage” in our students (p.
307). In other words, to ask and encourage our students to engage with material focused
on issues of oppression requires a willingness on our part as teachers to take the same
risks that we ask of our students. This risk-taking counters a prevailing image of teacher
in control and teacher as expert in a field (Bell, 1997, p. 307). Yet, exposing our own
struggles with issues of racism, classism, etc. is a process of revealing our uncertainty
and can help students gain access to the process of learning.

Furthermore, understanding our own process of learning and unlearning can help
us as teachers appreciate and acquire patience regarding the process that our students go
through in developing their own awareness about oppression (Bell etal., 1997). When
we focus on uncovering or entering our students’ process of unlearning, we can prepare
ourselves for both what is going on for students and why, as well as noting what this
triggers for ourselves.

Summary: Re-defining teacher educator competence

Taken together, these four implications, pursuing students’ sense-making, caring
across differences, assessing by comparing, and teaching as (un)leaming, re-define what
it means to be a competent teacher educator. Rather than a traditional view of teacher
competence as mastery and expertise, competence becomes teaching in ways that “invite
challenge and model ongoing learning. Bell and her co-authors (1997) describe teacher
educator competence as the ability to create an atmosphere where difficult dialogues can

occur, where teacher educators enable themselves and their students to expose and look

215

critically at their own assumptions and biases, and where building a community that
encourages risk-taking and action to challenge oppressive conditions within and beyond
the classroom occurs.

This brief description of four implications constructs a view of learning about
issues of diversity as a life-long process in which issues of time, space, and context need
to be considered (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Florio-Ruane, 2001). Further, Cochran—Smith
(1995) adds that the challenge may be to conceive of this life-long process not as
indicative of long-term deficits, but rather as important time and space for teachers to
wrestle with the uncertainties of what working for equity looks like in classroom practice.
Conclusion: Tapping into the “untapped potential”

Allen and Labbo write that when they “came to know [their] students more fully
as people, more deeply as students-becoming-teachers,” the students did not express
openly negative comments about diversity content, as had been the case with their
previous cohorts (2001, p. 50). Allen and Labbo describe this shift as a movement from a
“‘You should’ stance to a ‘Who are you?’ starting point,” as they formed more personal
relationships from which to enact and explore culturally engaged teaching. This type of
teaching requires a commitment to listening to students; this work of listening requires
“re-tuning our ears so that we can hear what they say, and redirecting our actions in
response to what we hear” (Cook-Sather, 2002, p. 4).

I believe that this re-tuning involves a fundamental shift of tuning into what is
going on, rather than tuning into what is not going on. This involves conceptualizing and
enacting a pedagogy in which we as teacher educators “need to use our authority. . .to

discover what the questions can be in the everyday lives of our students, and what

216

political possibilities such questions open up” (Grossberg, 1994, p. 20). Robin, a teacher
in a study conducted by Ladson-Billings, describes these possibilities, noting, “’Just as
there is a vast of untapped potential, yes, genius, among the children, there is also a vast

untapped potential among the teachers who serve the children’” (2001, p. 201).

217

APPENDICES

218

APPENDIX A

Catalogue of discussion topics

The three listening session segments are bolded and italicized

 

Class
session

Date

Discussion topics21

 

1

January 9

Who are we? - Our names, identities
Esperanza’s name — excerpt from House on mango street

 

January 11

Rules of engagement

Purposes of education

Intersection of culture and learning
Teachers’ knowledge about culture
Differences as culturally based
Notions of progress

Main ideas of course syllabus

 

January 16

Service learning requirement

Purposes and consequences of schooling

Intersection between schooling and cultural differences
Who constructs the cage? (based on Angelou’s work)
Social mobility and individual choice

 

January 18

Gains and losses from going to school
Aspirations, meritocracy, achievement ideology

 

January 23

Stories of the two groups in MacLeod’s text

Small group presentations on social reproduction theories
Can anyone become President?

Race, class, gender - intersected with opportunity

 

January 25

Songs: Pink Floyd (Another brick in the wall — Part II)
and Billy Bragg (To have and to have not)
Social reproduction theories

 

January 30

Relationship between schools and social class
Relationship between institutions, race and hard work
Segment #1 : Personal experience

Opportunities and the job structure of our society
Choice in the context of capitalism

 

February 1

Stories of the two groups in MacLeod’s book
Cultural capital,‘achievement ideology, social
reproduction, resistance theory, institutional racism

 

 

 

February 6

 

Service learning check-in and connections
Cultural capital and achievement ideology through

 

 

2’ These topics are one representation of what the class discussed during each session. Other catalogues
contained sections of class discussions that I transcribed and the questions that I had about the content and
the process of class discussions immediately after they happened.

219

 

 

pictures

 

10

February 8

Teachers’ differential expectations of students based on
race and social class

What can / should teachers do?

Does social mobility really exist? How do we explain
what happened to the groups in MacLeod’s book?
What is a teacher’s responsibility with rich kids?

 

11

February 13

N ieto’s classification of school achievement theories
Song: Second opinion’s Their way

 

12

February 15

Small group facilitation on Kohl’s book (I won ’t learn
from you)
Unlearning, failing to learn, not-leaming distinctions

 

13

February 20

Simulation - Spanish class
Equity and equality
Linguistic diversity

 

14

February 22

Advertisement with 3 Barbies pictured
Segment #2: Barbie

 

15

February 27

Codes of power, culture of power, racism of schools

Need to listen to educators of color, parents of our
students

 

16

March 1

Small group facilitation on Paley’s book (White teacher)
Color blindness

 

17

March 13

Linguistic diversity (connections between language and
ethnicity, language and identity; what counts as a
language?; are some varieties of language better than
others?)

 

18

March 15

Stan’s trip to a museum that has a Barbie exhibit
What is Black English?
Segment #3: Black Epglish

 

19

March 20

Language variation

What is the role of teachers when it comes to teaching
language?

Is there such a thing as Standard English?

Clip from My fair lady

 

20

March 22

A look at language, race, class, gender through Disney
film clips
Are we way over analyzing things?

 

21

March 27

Small group facilitation on Kissen’s book (The last
closet)

LGBT, homophobia, heterosexism

What do we think the Bible says about this?

 

 

22

 

March 29

 

One teacher’s response to addressing homophobia in his
school
Language questions — e. g., who can say queer?

 

220

 

 

What does it mean to be an ally?
Video: It ’s elementary: Talking about gay issues in
school (New Day Films)

 

23

April 3

How is our class community growing? What do we need
to work on?

What is gender bias? How does it manifest itself in
schools?

 

24

April 5

Small group facilitation on Orenstein’s book (School
girls)

Sexism and racism, feminism, gender bias, gender
equity, the experiences of women in our class

 

25

April 10

Issues of disability: ableism, Public Law 94-142, LRE,
IEP, mainstreaming
Intersections with race, gender, language

 

26

April 12

Small group facilitation on Kozol’s book (Savage
inequalities)

Intersection of funding inequalities and race
Comparison of funding across our class’ high schools

 

27

April 17

Juxtaposition of three articles on White police officer’s
shooting of Timothy Thomas, a young African American
man, in Cincinnati

Close examination of sentence construction, pictures
(e.g., what is rioting, what is good citizenry, when is race
mentioned, etc.)

 

28

April 19

Tracking simulation and de-briefing (basic to advanced
classes; unequal distribution of materials)

 

29

April 24

Small group facilitation on Shannon’s text (text, lies, and
videotape)

How are corporations affecting communities?
Connections to MacLeod’s work

 

30

April 26

The title of our course — what is it? Why? Is it
adequate? In what ways it is (not) adequate? What
would you name our course?

 

 

31

 

May 3

 

Sharing of final exams and reflections on course

 

221

 

APPENDIX B

Catalogpe of assigped course readings

The three listening session segments are bolded and italicized

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Class Date Assigned Readings

Session

1 January 9 Cisneros, S. (1986). House on mango street. (pp. 10-11)).
Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press.

2 January 11 No assigned readings

3 January 16 Angelou, M. (1969) I know why the caged bird sings. (pp. 142-
156). New York: Random House.

4 January 18 Rodriguez, R. (1982) Hunger of memory. (pp. 46-59). Boston,
MA: David R. Godine Publisher, Inc.

5 January 23 MacLeod, J. (1995). Ain ’t no makin’ it: Aspirations and
attainment in a low-income neighborhood. Chapters 1 & 2.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

6 January 25 MacLeod — chapters 3, 4, & 5

7 January 30 Discussion segment #1
MacLeod - chapter 6

8 February 1 MacLeod — chapters 7 & 8

9 February 6 MacLeod — chapters 9 & 10

10 February 8 MacLeod — chapter 11
Decker, E. (1997). Who owns the wealth? In Funding for
justice: Money, equity, and the future of public education.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.
Sides, P. (1997). Really rich, white guys. Funding for justice:
Money, equity, and the future of public education. Milwaukee,
WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.
Sides, P. (1997). Build prisons or build schools? “Lock’em
up” mentality puts record number of youth in jails. In Funding
for justice: Money, equity, and the future of public education.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

11 February 13 Nieto, S. (1992) Cultural issues and their impact on learning. In

 

 

Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural
education (pp. 136-137). London: Longman.

Nieto, S. (1992). Toward an understanding of school
achievement. In Affirming diversity (pp. 229-249). New York:
Longman.

 

222

 

_A‘ _-4

 

12

February 15

Kohl, H. (1994). I won’t learn from you. In I won ’t learn from
you and other thoughts on creative maladjustment (pp. 1-32).
New York: The New Press.

 

13

February 20

Newman, KS. (1988). Falling from grace: Downward mobility
in the age of aflluence. (Chap. 1: American nightmares; Chap.
8: Falling from grace; Afterword). Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.

 

14

February
22

Discussion segment #2

Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy
in educating other people’s children. In Other people ’s

children: Cultural conflyg’ tin the classroom. (pp. 21-47).
New York: The New Press.

 

15

February 27

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A
personal account of coming to see correspondences through
work in women’s studies. In M. L. Andersen & P. H. Collins
(Eds) Race, class, and gender: An anthology. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Schneidewind, N. & Davidson, B. (1994). Black lies/White lies.
In Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

 

16

March 1

Tenorio, R. (1994). Race and respect among young children. In
Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

Paley, V. (1989). White teacher. Excerpted Chapters 1 —3; 7-9;
26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schofield, J .W. (2001). The colorblind perspective in school:
Causes and consequences. In J .A. Banks & C.A. McGee Banks

(Eds.). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. (4’”
Edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 

17

March 13

Ovando, CJ. (2001). Language diversity and education. In J .A
Banks & C.A. McGee Banks (Eds.). Multicultural education:
Issues and perspectives (4’h Edition). New York: John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.

 

18

March 15

Discussion segment #3

Smitherman, G. (1977). From Africa to the New World and
into the Space Age; ‘It bees dat way sometimes’ In Talkin ’

and testifyin’: The language at Black America. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State Universiq Press.

 

 

l9

 

March 20

 

Christensen, L. (1997). Whose standard? Teaching Standard
English in our schools. In D. Levine, R. Lowe, B. Peterson, &
R. Tenorio (Eds). Rethinking schools: An agenda for change

 

223

 

 

(pp. 128-135). New York: The New Press.

 

20

March 22

Black English cartoon on p. 360 - In G. Smitherman (1981)
(Ed.) Black English and the education of Black children and
youth. Center for Black Studies: Wayne State University.

Excerpted conversation on p. 218 — In G. Smitherman’s (1977)
Talkin’ and testifyin ’: The language of Black America.

Wolfram, W. (Fall 2000). Everyone has an accent. Teaching
Tolerance Magazine, 18.

 

21

March 27

Lippi-Green, R. (1997). Teaching children how to discriminate:
What we learn from the Big Bad Wolf. In English with an
accent. London: Routledge.

Christensen, L. (1994). Unleaming the myths that bind us:
Critiquing fairy tales and films. In Rethinking our classrooms:
Teaching for equity and justice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking
Schools, Ltd.

 

22

March 29

3 handouts: 1. Definitions of terms; 2. Youth at risk; 3. What’s
it like to be young and gay in American schools today?

Gordon, L. (1995). What do we say when we hear ‘faggot?’ In
Rethinking schools: An agenda for change. New York: The
New Press.

 

23

April 3

Kissen, R. (1996). The last closet: The real lives of lesbian and
gay teachers. Excerpted chapters 4, 7 & 8 (pp. 41-56; 84-109).
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

 

24

April 5

Sadker, D. & Sadker, M. (2001). Gender bias: From colonial
America to today’s classrooms. In J .A Banks & C.A. McGee
Banks (Eds.). Multicultural education: Issues and
perspectives. (4th Edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.

 

25

April 10

Orenstein, P. (1995). School girls: Young women, self-esteem,
and the confidence gap. Excerpts. (pp. 3—26 (Leaming silence);
pp. 51-61 (Fear of falling: Sluts); pp. 93-102 (Hunger strike)).
New York: Doubleday.

Jordan, J. (1992). Report from the Bahamas. In M.L. Andersen
& RH. Collins (Eds.) Race, class, and gender: An anthology.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

 

 

26

 

April 12

 

Excerpt: Figure 1.4: Placement in the Least Restrictive
Environment (p. 17). In R. B. Lewis & D. H. Doorlag. (1991).
Teaching special students in the mainstream. 3rd Edition. New
York: Macmillan Publishing Co.

Heward, W.L. & Cavanaugh, R.A. (2001). Educational equality

 

224

 

 

for students with disabilities. In J.A Banks & C.A. McGee
Banks (Eds.). Multicultural education: Issues and
perspectives, (4th Edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.

 

27

April 17

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. Excerpted chapter 4.
(pp. 133-174). New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Miner, B. (1997). Savage inequalities, 1997: An interview with
Jonathan Kozol. In Funding for justice: Money, equity, and the
future of public education. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking
Schools, Ltd.

 

28

April 19

Poverty rates for children: Excerpted chart (p. 60). Funding for
justice: Money, equity, and the fitture of public education.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

Noddings, N. (1997). All children deserve the best. In Funding
for justice: Money, equity, and the future of public education.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

Anyon, J. (2001). Inner cities, affluent suburbs, and unequal
educational opportunities. In J.A Banks & C.A. McGee Banks
(Eds.). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. (4’h
Edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 

29

April 24

Schwabe, M. (1994). The pigs: When tracking takes its toll. In
Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

Oakes, J. (1994). Tracking: Why schools need to take another
route. In Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and
Estice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

 

30

April 26

Shannon, P. (1995). text, lies, & videotape. Excerpted chapter.
(pp. 75-93). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

 

 

31

 

May 3

 

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire’s critical
pedagogy. In McLaren, P. & Leonard, P. (Eds.) Paulo F reire:
A critical encounter. (jp. 25-35). London: Routledge.

 

225

 

 

APPENDIX C

Catalogue of guiding questions taken from the course syllabus

The three listening session segments are bolded and italicized

 

Class
sessions

Dates

Guiding questions

 

1&2

January 9
& 11

Foundations: What do we think the purposes of education are?
How are some purposes in conflict with others? What do we
think schools / teaching / learning should be about? What is the
role of culture in education?

 

3&4

January
16&18

Insider perspectives: What do these autobiographical pieces
have to say about the purposes of education? About race, class,
language, gender, etc.? About the relationship between
differences and purposes of education? About aspirations and
opportunities? Are there costs or losses involved with going to
school? If so, what are they and for whom do they occur and
why? How do Maya Angelou and Richard Rodriguez help us
think about our own experiences and views on the purposes of
education?

 

5&6

January
23 & 25

Reproduction theories: What do different theories of social
reproduction have to say? What are some of the key terms for
our coursework together? How do families, peer groups, and
economic factors affect social mobility and social reproduction?

 

7&8

January
30 &
February

What is the role of school for the Hallway Hangers and the
Brothers? How does school affect social mobility and
reproduction? How do their stories help us reflect on the
purposes of education?

Discussion segment #1

 

9&10

February
6 & 8

How are we thinking about the relationship between structures
and agency? What is happening eight years later with the
Hallway Hangers and the Brothers? Why? What is to be done?
What can we do? How do we think about the economic
structure of our society and its relationship to the HHs and the
Bs?

 

11&12

February
13 & 15

What are the multiple ways in which theorists / educators make
sense of student achievement, as laid out by Soniz Nieto? What
are the implications of each of these explanations? Where
would Herbert Kohl fit in? Why? How does Kohl explain
student resistance? How do you?

 

 

13&14

 

February
20 & 22

 

Raising our consciousness: What is race? What is class? What
are codes of power? What is unearned privilege? How do these
matter in education? What are some implications for teachers?

 

226

 

 

Discussion segment #2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 & 16 February What does it mean to be conscious of our race, class, gender,
27 & etc.? What can we learn from Vivian Paley, Peggy McIntosh,
March 1 and Rita Tenorio about race, gender, religion, gender, etc. in
society and in the classroom? What we do think each author
teachers us about differences and addressing differences?
l7 & 18 March 13 What counts as a language? Why? How is language connected
& 15 to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, etc.? Where do messages
about language come from? What would it look like for teachers
to honor linguistic diversity in the classroom?
Discussion seflnent #3
l9 & 20 March 20 What is the relationship between language, power, and cultural
& 22 capital? What should teachers be aware of regarding language?
What can teachers do?
21 & 22 March 27 How is sexual orientation an issue of diversity, power, and
& 29 opportunity? How is sexual orientation an issue for classrooms,
for schools, for teachers?
23 & 24 April 3 & What is girls’ experience of school like? What do these authors
5 say about the opportunities allowed and denied girls in school
and outside of school? How do girls’ experiences and
opportunities compare with boys’ experiences and
opportunities?
25 & 26 April 10 How is education for children with disabilities an ethical, social,
& 12 and political issue? What are the issues here?
What are the “savage inequalities” about? What is the
relationship between schools / opportunities and funding?
27 & 28 April 17 What do these authors have to say about unequal educational
& 19 opportunity? Why does it occur? What are its implications?
What is tracking? What are the ways in which it occurs? Why
does it occur? How does it relate to differences and to the
purposes of education?
29, 30, April 24, According to Patrick Shannon, what are the consequences of
& 31 26, & competitions in schools? What do we think the relationship
May 3 between schools and competition should be? What do we think

 

 

schools should be about? What do we think the perfect school
would look like?

 

227

 

APPENDIX D

Initial interview protocol for interviewing first semester students

 

An investigation of students’ conceptualizations of learning in [name of course]

Note: These questions represent the areas that I would like to cover with participants.
Given the conversational nature of qualitative ethnographic work, related questions
within these areas may be asked during interviews.

Possible questions for interviews with first semester students
Reflections about our course / Student learning (in general):

What was our course about for you?

What counted as learning for you in our course?

What did you find (not) helpful about our course? Why?

What do you think you were supposed to learn about diversity? Opportunity?

Power?

What do you think counts as learning about these issues?

Do you think that this course helped you in your possible path toward becoming a

teacher? How so? In what ways (did it not)?

7. Did your thinking about teaching change over our course time together? How? If
not, why do you think that it did not change? What would have been more helpful, in
your opinion? (How could the course have helped better prepare you for teaching?)

8. Were there particular discussions/assignments/readings that your found supportive?
Why were those supportive to you?

9. Were there particular discussions/assignments/readings that you did not find
supportive? Why were those not supportive to you?

10. What did you (not) enjoy? Why?

1]. What surprised you about our course? Why?

12. Was there anything challenging about our course? If so, what? Why?

:5pr

9‘.“

228

APPENDIX E
Revised interview protocol for interviewing second semester students
An investigation of students’ conceptualizations of learning in [name of course]

Note: These questions represent the areas that I would like to cover with participants.
Given the conversational nature of qualitative ethnographic work, related questions
within these areas may be asked during interviews.

Possible questions for interviews with second semester students

1. How would you name / describe what you learned in our course?

2. What was the role of your personal experiences in the course?

3. Were there particular answers you were supposed to learn? What counted as an
answer?

4. Were there ‘answers’ or knowledge that everyone was supposed to take away from
the course?

5. Should there be ‘right’ answers in the course?

6. Was there a ‘track’ in the course? What was the track? What did it mean to stay on
track or get off track in the course? Did you agree with the track?

7. What did the structures of the course communicate about knowledge / teaching /
learning? (e. g., the square formation of our seating arrangement; the dialogue rather
than lecture format, the required course writings)

8. What was the role of discussion in our class? (What did you make of class
discussions?)

9. Were there any class discussions that really struck you, that you remember? Why
were they so striking to you?

10. What did you think my role was, as the teacher?

11. Is there anything else you wanted to comment upon?

229

APPENDIX F

Themes for selecting discussion segments

Content:

These questions aim to explore preservice teachers’ perspectives on what happened in
whole class discussions:

1.

What topics are discussed in the talk?

a. preservice teachers’ personal experiences or stories

b. similarities / differences (across students’) interpretations of ideas, beliefs, and
personal experiences

c. the process of talk (i.e., meta-processing whole class discussion) (initiated by

me; initiated by preservice teachers)

preservice teachers’ interpretations of ideas from course texts

my interpretations of ideas from course texts

individual preservice teachers’ beliefs

my beliefs

my personal experiences or stories

implications for teaching

=-°.=r<1° rm?-

2. Whose ideas are on the table?

3. How do preservice teachers describe individual and collective learning from
whole class discussions?

4. What do preservice teachers believe that whole class discussions suggest in terms
of a knowledge base of learning about diversity?

5. What do preservice teachers name as the challenges in learning about diversity
from whole class discussions?

Process:

These questions aim to explore preservice teachers’ perspectives on the process of actual
whole class discussions:

:“P’EQT‘

Who directs the talk?

What role(s) do preservice teachers assume in these discussions?

What role(s) do I assume in these discussions?

How do preservice teachers name the challenges involved in the process of
engaging in whole class discussions?

How do we as a class react to differences of ideas, experiences, and
interpretations?

Do we as a class explore differences (multiplicity?) of ideas, experiences, and
interpretations? How?

Do we make moves to value preservice teachers’ ideas in these discussions?
What are they?

230

8. Do we make moves that do not value preservice teachers’ ideas in these
discussions? What are they?

231

APPENDIX G
Additional interview protocol for second semester students 1 for listening sessions]
An investigation of students’ conceptualizations of learning in [name of course]

Note: These questions represent what I would like to cover with participants. Given the
conversational nature of qualitative ethnographic work, related questions may be asked
during interviews.

I divide the potential questions for interviews with participants into three areas:

A) questions about the participant’s career at MSU,
B) general questions applicable to all discussion segments we will discuss, and
C) specific questions for each discussion segment

For section C, I first provide a brief summary of the topics discussed in each discussion
segment. Then I provide a list of specific questions for that segment.

A. Questions about participant’s educational / career trajectory since completing
[name of course]

1. Have you applied to the teacher education program? If you have, were you
accepted? If you have not, are you still considering teaching?

2. Where are you now in the course work of the program?

3. What are your plans after graduation?

B. General questions about all of the discussion segments:

1. How did you think the discussion went?
2. How did the discussion feel to you?
3. What topics did you think were discussed in the talk? Should there have been

other topics we discussed here?

4. What did you take away from the discussion? Do you remember if you had

thought about this issue or topic before this class discussion? Before having [this

course]?

What did you think about students’ ideas in the discussion?

How did you think other students’ ideas were treated during this discussion?

How did you think that your own ideas were treated during this discussion?

What were your reactions to personal stories in the discussion?

How did you perceive my role(s) during the discussion?

0. What counted as your individual learning from the discussion? What counted as
collective learning from the discussion? Were there things that all students were
supposed to take from the discussion?

11. What was I as the teacher supposed to take away?

~©ws99

232

From your current vantage point:

1. What are your reactions to the discussion, looking back on it now?
2. What do you notice now about how we were in the class?
3. What do you think has happened that gives you your perspective now?

C. Specific questions for each discussion segment:

Discussion segment #1

Topics discussed during this segment:

In this segment, the class discussed opportunities for a college education and jobs, using
the text we read as well as students’ own personal examples. The students discussed the role of
individual choice and the structures of society in the distribution of opportunities. In addition,
one student commented on the way in which we listen to personal examples when they are shared
with the class.

Questions for participants about this segment:

What were your reactions to each student’s share during this segment?

What did you perceive as the role of personal knowledge here?

How did you feel about the ideas presented here?

How do you think we treated the multiplicity of ideas? Was that ok? Why (not)?

Discussion segment #2

Topics discussed during this segment:

In this segment, we discussed a Barbie advertisement. Students shared what they noticed
regarding particular details of the advertisement, and they shared their interpretations of those
details. The students questioned standards of beauty in our culture and the consequences of
having toys reflect particular standards.

Questions for participants about this segment:

What did you think about the use of the advertisement in the discussion?
What did you take away from this discussion?
0 Did this discussion relate to our course work? What did this have to do with [name of
course]?
What did you perceive to be the role of personal stories here?
What did you notice about students’ perspectives?
What were your reactions to the (varying) ideas across students? (What was the
divergence of opinions about for you?)
0 How did we treat the multiplicity of ideas? Was that treatment ok? Why (not)?
0 How did this discussion compare with the rest of our discussions during the semester?

233

Discussion segment #3

Topics discussed during this segment:

In this segment, we discussed the reading for that day: 2 chapters from Smitherman’s Talkin and
Testijyin. We first focused on Smitherman’s definition of Black English and her account of the
history of Black English. Then we discussed what she calls the “push pull” phenomenon in the
Black community.

Questions for the participants about this segment:

What did you think about the role of the text (Smitherman’s chapters) during this
discussion?

What did you think were my goals for the class?

What role did students’ ideas play here? Why?

What did you make of the role of students’ experiences in this discussion?
How did this class discussion feel to you?

234

APPENDIX H
One-page handout for listening sessions

Our semester of [name of course]
[Dates of semester]

Setting the context of our course:

0 General overview of our course:
0 Readings on race, class, language, gender, sexual orientation, disability
0 We all read MacLeod (Ain ’t no makin ’ it)
0 Each student read one book with book club group and for facilitation of one
class (see books spread out on the table)
Service learning experiences
Short papers and critical responses
Participation self-assessments
Final paper on consciousness

0 Rough chronological sketch of semester (31 classes together):

Angelou; Rodriguez

Social reproduction theorists

MacLeod (6 classes) (Hallway Hangers and Brothers)

Theories on school achievement

Book club — Kohl (concept of not-leaming)

Equity / equality activity — Spanish simulation

Barbie artifact discussion

The codes of power — Delpit

McIntosh - White privilege

Book club - Paley (young children and issues of race)

Readings on language - language acquisition, Black English, Standard
English, dialects, Disney (Ovando, Smitherman, Christensen, Wolfram,
Lippi-Green)

Sexual orientation (Gordon; It ’s elementary video)

Gender (Sadker & Sadker); Book club - Orenstein (girls in schools)
Disability

Book club — Kozol (school inequalities; school funding)

Articles on shooting of Timothy Thomas

Art tracking simulation — the issue of tracking (Schwabe; Oakes)
Book club — Shannon (articulating what we mean by literacy)

Title of our class - discussion

0 Artifacts (e.g., songs, cartoons, newspaper clippings, advertisements, movie clips,
etc.)

235

APPENDIX I

Handout for class session on Smitherman’s chapters

Smitherman’s chapters 1 & 2 from Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black
America

A. Questions for consideration:

1.

2.

3.

What is Black English, according to Smitherman? How many African Americans
speak Black English? What are the origins of Black English? Where did it come
from, according to Smitherman? (chapter 1)

What is the push-pull phenomenon that Smitherman describes? (chapter 1) How
might this affect teachers / students in schools?

What overall message do you think Smitherman wants us as readers to take from
her chapter, “It Bees Dat Way Sometimes” (chapter 2)?

B. Draw some kind of representation of the relationship of dialects of English (Standard,
Black English, etc.); draw a representation of Smitherman’s conceptualization of
English / Black English / etc.; are there differences in representations? What do they
signify?

C. More questions that arise for us to consider:

1.

Should students be allowed to speak or write Black English in class? When?
Why?

What kinds of strategies might help speakers of Black English learn Standard
English? What kinds of problems might we anticipate with any strategy?
What does “Ebonics” mean?

What was the debate over Ebonics all about? Why do you suppose it received
such national attention?

D. What questions, issues, concerns, etc. do you have — that have arisen from your
reading these chapters, that Smitherman does not provide answers for, that you have
continued to struggle with, even before these readings, etc.?

1.
2.
3.

E. Questions/thoughts/etc. from watching the video

236

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