Abstract
This chapter presents the results from a collective case study of 23 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a Children's Literature course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. It explores how course instruction in and around high-quality, culturally diverse children's literature facilitated both displays of culturally competent dispositions and cultural knowledge of self and others. The chapter also describes how the preservice teachers under study applied their culturally competent dispositions as they rehearsed selecting texts, planning activities, and asking questions to their future students. The Cultural Competence for Teaching Framework provided a useful metric to evaluate participants' displays of cultural competence across the course of the semester. Within this chapter, the authors describe how they embedded cultural competence education inside the course including a description of the activities, texts, and pedagogy used.
TopIntroduction
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).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Nondominant Culture: Cultural group(s) subordinated by dominant cultural group(s); includes people of color, LGBTQ+, individuals with disabilities, people living in poverty, amongst others.
Empathy: The ability to experience the feelings of another, stands in contrast to sympathy which means to understand another’s feelings.
Collective Case Study: A qualitative case study methodology involving more than one case where researchers look for patterns of findings across cases.
Critical Literacy: An examination of the relationship between language and power in texts. Consists of four dimensions: Interrogating multiple perspectives; disrupting commonly held assumptions; examining relationships involving power; and taking action and promoting social justice.
Dominant Culture: Cultural group(s) that possesses more societal power; includes White, Christian, middle- and upper-class males, cisgendered, non-disabled, native English speakers.
Cultural Competence: Knowledge of and respect for cultures as well as the ability to interact positively and effectively across cultures.
Ethnorelativism: The ability to see values and behaviors as cultural rather than universal.