To meet increasing need for the preparation of teachers who are going to teach the diverse student population and to make social change in the United States, multicultural education has been introduced as a required foundational course in teacher education programs. As of its importance, there has been great attention given to research focusing on the rationale for teaching this course. Often this research has investigated the demographic imperative as constitutive factors of this rationale. However, because students of all demographics have involved some levels of resistance to multicultural issues, researchers have suggested that further studies are needed that do not simply assume the demographic aspects; rather, to consider how the pedagogy of this teaching, as it pertains directly to the critical pedagogy and as it is employed by multicultural novice teacher educators, is understood and enacted, what is promised and limited through the employment of a critical pedagogy in multicultural education, and what are possibilities to respond to the limitations while enabling the promises.My dissertation aims to respond to these questions. Framing my dissertation into an ethnographic case study, a theoretical argument, and an art-based autoethnography, I explore the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators in a research-based university in the United States. I argue that while multicultural education novice teacher educators pursue critical pedagogy, they face numerous challenges that derive from limitations inherent in the critical pedagogy itself. These challenges are complicated because they may be a source of multicultural novice teacher educators' vulnerability, a hinder of their commitment to critical pedagogy, and an obstruction of social change goals through multicultural education. Yet, the challenges can be addressed if multicultural novice teacher educators employ a post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation that integrates arts, relationality, and affect in multicultural education classrooms. My dissertation promises the employment of post-critical theory in teaching multicultural education that informs art, affect, and relationality to mediate the limitations of contemporary critical pedagogy, to have students engage with social justice through education, and to inform broader social change goals through multicultural education.
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