Using the Children's Literature Course to Promote Teacher Candidates' Cultural Competence

Introduction

Demographic changes in the United States mean more students from a variety of racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds sit in public-school classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2018a). However, the teaching force remains overwhelmingly White and female, especially at the elementary level (NCES, 2018b). The cultural and racial mismatch between teachers and their students can have consequences including teachers and students “misreading each other in their communication, interactions, and relationships and teachers misreading students’ aptitudes, intentions, abilities, attitudes, and behaviors” (Ukpokodu, 2011, p. 434). These situations may produce a culture as disability perspective (McDermott & Varenne, 1995) in which teachers, reflecting their own K-12 educational experiences (e.g., Alsup & Miller, 2014; Lortie, 2020), reproduce the same culturally normative classroom practices (Loewen, 2007). Such practices typically uphold traditional power structures in classrooms that privilege teacher voice and school knowledge while rejecting the lived experiences of diverse students as lacking in value to the classroom (Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 1995). Students exposed to these types of stifling classroom environments not only fail to find instructional materials and activities that reflect their backgrounds, they may find teachers exhibiting lowered expectations (Milner, 2020; Sleeter, 2008), misperceiving culturally-based ways of knowing as defiance (Brown & Crippen, 2017), using harsh discipline policies (Irvine, 2003) and delivering unmotivating instruction that may lead to a rejection of school altogether (Alexander et al., 2001; Rumberger & Lim, 2008).

One method for addressing the consequences of the racial and cultural gap between students and teachers is to build teachers’ cultural competence. Cultural competence entails teachers’ respect for cultural diversity, cultural self-awareness, knowledge of histories and cultural practices of diverse groups (e.g., those from various racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds), and capacity to use this knowledge to work with diverse students effectively and positively. Capacity, as defined by Howard and Aleman (2008), includes not only the technical knowledge and skills necessary to teach a specific content area but also “awareness of the social and political contexts of education and the development of critical consciousness about issues such as race, gender, culture, language, and educational equity” (Howard & Aleman, 2008, p. 158). Teachers who possess this capacity are able to teach in culturally responsive ways; they understand the way students’ race, gender, cultural and linguistic backgrounds serve as lenses through which they view their educational experiences and understand how to teach “through students’ cultural filters” (Warren, 2018, p. 172, emphasis in original). In doing this work, teachers actively push toward educational equity by understanding and challenging traditional power structures in K-12 schools that exclude the values and perspectives of students from nondominant groups (Weisman & Garza, 2002) and by actively dismantling commonly held assumptions about various cultural groups (Gorski, 2016).