This conversational report uses student voice as data to determine whether the culture of urban sixth graders is being acknowledged and valued in the curriculum. While culturally responsive teaching has been touted by scholars as an important aspect of multicultural education and curriculum reform for at least a decade, students have seldom been…

Social capital theorist Robert Putnam (2007) argued that diversity produces fear and leads people to disconnect from one another. For student teachers, diversity of whatever kind--ethnicity, religion, class, disability, gender, or sexuality--generates fear and an expectation that it has to be managed. Civic education within teacher education has a…

Faculty members from a Midwestern university elected to compare two models of teacher preparation to determine if there was a difference in their ability to meet the needs of diverse learners. One model, located in professional development schools in the local urban school district, included awareness activities, discussions, and field experiences…

As a K-12 classroom teacher turned teacher educator, the author believes that it is imperative that teacher educators as university faculty strive to confront the educational inequities that exist in the public schools as a part of their vision for preparing today's teachers. By this, the author means that they commit to transforming the…

A concern for social justice in teacher education raises questions about the ways that schooling has failed to serve many students from diverse backgrounds. Who gets how much schooling is still an important issue. Equally vital is the kind of education that children and youth receive--and who decides. A focus on social and historical context…

Social justice is a concept that means equality and fairness. In education, this means equal access and opportunity for all students to maximize their fullest potential to become productive and contributive members of society. Within the last decade, the notion of teaching for social justice has become popularized in teacher education. Most…

In this article, we propose a developmental perspective on preparing preservice and in-service teachers to teach in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. We place emphasis on the importance of moving beyond didactic content-focused approaches to more systematic process-based efforts to scaffold cultural competence. Finally, we address…

Teacher education programs are preparing more homogeneous preservice teacher candidates, whereas students in the United States are becoming more diverse. In this article, I describe how 283 preservice teacher candidates gathered responses from interviews with 283 certified teachers (special and general education) during a clinical field…

In this article, I advance the argument for a listening pedagogy that attends to the voices of children and brings attention to multicultural and power issues. I focus on the need to nurture a student-centered educational system within the constraints of the high-stakes standards and accountability model. Embedded within an ethic of care and…

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of the complexities of introducing preservice teachers to critical pedagogies for urban teaching. The study documents students' reactions to a set of seminar and reflective writing experiences around depictions of urban teachers in popular culture--in particular, Pink Floyd's song "Another…

This article addresses the dilemma of promoting critical pedagogy within portfolio assessment, which has been implemented in many teacher education programs to meet state and national mandates for performance-based assessment. It explores how one teacher educator works to move portfolio assessment to a level of critical self-reflection that…

This article examines cultural sensitivity as a basis for culturally relevant teaching. It argues that classroom teachers are overwhelmed by the responsibility to educate an increasingly culturally diverse population. And because extant teaching strategies have failed to produce desired outcomes in these students, a culturally relevant curriculum…

The preparedness of grade-level classroom teachers to mutually accommodate the differential needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students is becoming increasingly essential. Levels of this preparedness are captured by the accommodation readiness spiral, a framework for understanding teacher education and professional development for…

The impact of globalization on many aspects of current social life has not left the field of multicultural education unaffected. Yet the theoretical call for the creation of global multicultural frameworks has not translated into teacher education practice. In one multicultural education class, I attempted to explicitly infuse global insights and…

The percentage of urban teachers who leave the profession within the first 5 years is more than 50%; inadequate preparation is often cited as a cause of urban teacher attrition. This article explores a qualitative study regarding teachers' perceptions of their experience of and preparation for teaching in urban schools. Data from teachers in urban…