NCCRESt

part of the Education Reform Networks

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Consciousness Raising

• Beyond Classroom-Based Early Field Experiences: Understanding an "Educative Practicum" in an Urban School and Community
  Examined the experiences of preservice teachers in an urban school and community-based early field experience (integrated with foundations of education and general methods courses). Data from observations, interviews, reflective writings, and focus groups highlighted five categories of student experience: deepening multicultural, eye-opening and transformational, masked multicultural, partially miseducative, and escaping experiences.
• But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
  Describes the centrality of culturally relevant pedagogy to academic success for minority students who are poorly served in public schools, discussing linkages between school and culture, examining the theoretical grounding of culturally relevant teaching in the context of a study of successful teachers of black students. Provides examples of culturally relevant teaching practices.
• Challenging Old Assumptions: Preparing Teachers for Inner City Schools
  Researchers analyzed journals and essays from an elementary teacher education course, examining white prospective teachers' changing views about inner-city schools with minority children as they completed fieldwork and relevant readings. The experiences helped them question old assumptions about urban students and teaching and about the value of multicultural education.
• Children of War: A Curriculum
  Emphasizes the importance of examining the position of children in war as they provide insight into the conflicts themselves that cannot be attained elsewhere. Presents a secondary curriculum entitled "Children of War" designed to promote an understanding of the phenomenon of children in war from multiple perspectives, including sociocultural, historical, and personal.
• Citizenship, Democracy and Political Literacy
  Draws on the Crick Report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools, to examine citizenship, democracy, and political literacy, considering the report's potential as a framework for promoting racial equality in European schools. Discusses the following issues: racism and the education system; racism, democracy, and citizenship education; and human rights and political literacy.
• Constructing Conceptions of Multicultural Teaching: Preservice Teachers' Life Experiences and Teacher Education
  Addresses the need for greater understanding of the complex, contradictory nature of preservice teachers' life experiences as they interact with a multicultural, social reconstructionist teacher education course. The paper describes a study of the course and portrays two students' prior experiences that influenced their motivations to teach multiculturally.
• Cooperative Learning in Israel's Jewish and Arab Schools: A Community Approach
  Describes the creation of the cooperation, investigation, literacy, and community (CILC) model within a holistic educational project in Acre, a Jewish-Arab mixed city in northern Israel, focusing on the implementation of cooperative learning at the schools and the work of the dropout investigative task force which was created to build community in the city and prevent dropout. (SM).
• Countering Prejudice against American Indians and Alaska Natives through Antibias Curriculum and Instruction. ERIC Digest
  Teaching from an antibias perspective means going beyond conventional multicultural education and introducing students to a working concept of diversity that challenges social stereotypes and discrimination. This digest describes current inadequacies in teaching about Native Americans, suggests ways to avoid common pitfalls, and provides guidelines for detecting anti-Indian bias in instructional materials.
• Critical Multiculturalism and Racism in Children's Literature
  Multicultural literature can help elementary students learn about cultural differences and racial bias and examine their prejudices and stereotypes. Critiques five children's books that emphasize the African American experience.
• Cultural Diversity and Conflict Resolution: An Interdisciplinary Unit for the California Fourth-Grade Classroom
  Proposes an interdisciplinary, fourth-grade conflict resolution curriculum that integrates content area activities that take into consideration the cognitive and moral development of fourth graders. The curriculum focuses on conflict resolution skills, diversity and conflict, and mediation.
• Culture-Centered Counseling Skills as a Preventive Strategy for College Health Services
  Successful counseling is possible if health care providers learn to interpret behaviors within cultural context. The paper describes a culture-centered approach, using a grid that matches same/different behaviors and expectations.
• Curriculum, Identity, and Experience in Multicultural Teacher Education
  Reports on the initial stages of an ongoing action-research project in multicultural teacher education. Viewing curriculum as the creation of culturally significant domains for conversation, the project inquired into how a secondary English-methods course centered on issues of cultural diversity and emerging professional identities was taken up by predominantly white, middle-class students.
• Development of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Commitment To Teach Diverse Student Populations
  Assessed Oakland University's elementary-teacher-preparation program to determine aspects of the program that most affected students' preparation to teach in diverse classrooms. Pre- and post-semester surveys of student teachers placed in urban/suburban schools indicated that students learned adequate skills for teaching diverse students, but their attitudes or beliefs about teaching in such settings were not adequately affected.
• Diversity Consciousness: Opening Our Minds to People, Cultures, and Opportunities
  This book examines the relationship between a person's success and his or her ability to understand, respect, and value diversity. It also explores how people can develop diversity consciousness.
• Diversity Education for Preservice Teachers: Strategies and Attitude Outcomes
  Analyzed the impact of emphasizing diversity in a foundations of education course. Various instructional strategies addressed issues of intolerance and promoted understanding of the importance of multicultural education for teachers.
• Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: A Case Study of Multicultural Organizational Development through the Lens of Religion, Spirituality, Faith, and Secular Inclusion
  Presents a case study of the University of Maryland Office of Human Relations Programs' (OHRP) efforts to confront Christian privilege and build a religiously, spiritually, faith-based, and secularly inclusive community campus-wide. Highlights four stages: rifts and tensions, reconnecting, reconceptualization, and realization.
• Effects of Language Arts Activities on Preservice Teachers' Opinions about Multiculturalism
  Examined the effects of reading children's literature about diversity and participating in related interactive activities on student teachers' opinions about multiculturalism. Intervention and control-group students heard lectures on multiculturalism.
• Embracing a Democratic Vision of the Community College: A Critical Multicultural Response to Recent Debates
  Discusses "Strengthening Collegiate Education in Community Colleges" (J. S.
• Empowering Pedagogies That Enhance the Learning of Multicultural Students
  Discusses the tenets of critical pedagogy, describing research on the presence of those tenets within discourse patterns and pedagogical practices in urban, community-based classrooms. Discourses and pedagogies of three female, African American teachers are highlighted, examining how teachers challenge students to consider alternate life possibilities, become critical thinkers, and consider transformation of their own and others' life situations.
• Faculty Experience with Diversity: A Case Study of Macalester College
  This study tested the belief that domestic racial/ethnic diversity in the classroom contributes to the preparation of students for civic responsibility, focusing on Macalester College, a small liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Macalester has committed significant resources to fulfilling its goals of multicultural recruitment and support of talented students, faculty, and staff of color and to establishing classes that reflect the range of social, artistic, scientific, and philosophical experiences of people nationwide.
• Finding a Voice for the Victimized
  Examines writers' growing awareness of the voices if the victims, exploring the representation of characters who resist subjugating colonial powers and tracing how various past and present authors have represented colonized peoples. By refocusing postmodern readers' consciousness on the violation of rights, authors reeducate and sensitize them to the contrasting voices that speak out against the persecution of those who are different.
• Finding a Voice for the Victimized
  Examines writers' growing awareness of the voices if the victims, exploring the representation of characters who resist subjugating colonial powers and tracing how various past and present authors have represented colonized peoples. By refocusing postmodern readers' consciousness on the violation of rights, authors reeducate and sensitize them to the contrasting voices that speak out against the persecution of those who are different.
• Increasing Teacher Diversity by Tapping the Paraprofessional Pool
  To increase the representation of people of color in teaching, the potential candidate pool must expand beyond those who are likely to attend college. Paraprofessional school personnel, who typically are from minority groups, constitute a ready source for increasing the supply of diverse teachers.
• Institutional Support for Diversity in Preservice Teacher Education
  Examines how institutions can provide support for diversity in preservice teacher education, focusing on the institutional context in which teacher educators work as they craft multicultural teacher preparation programs. Support includes strong institutional leadership and a campuswide vision for change, recruitment and retention of diverse students and faculty, and curriculum transformation.
• Learner Centered Schools as a Mindset, and the Connection with Mindfulness and Multiculturalism
  After acknowledging that learning and knowing are coconstructed social processes created and shared by teachers and students as learners, the paper examines mindfulness and multiculturalism as learner-centered processes. Mindfulness, multiculturalism, and learner centeredness are interdependent mindsets that encourage interplay between teacher, student, and content and that mediate the classroom environment.
• Leaving Authority at the Door: Equal-Status Community-Based Experiences and the Preparation of Teachers for Diverse Classrooms
  Describes a cross-cultural, equal status internship designed to prepare teachers for diverse classrooms, examining its influence on prospective teachers' emerging sociocultural perspectives and raced identities and exploring successes and challenges of this experience and what has been learned about supporting more mature anti-racist identities in the 3 years that students have been engaged in this internship.(SM).
• Making Peace: A Narrative Study of a Bilingual Liaison, a School and a Community
  Explores the role of bilingual liaisons in resolving conflicts and building bridges of understanding between schools and diverse communities, discussing the representation of individuals' voices and narrative forms that engage readers aesthetically and critically; addressing multiple conflicts affecting the lives of minority language students, their families, and schools; and noting the need to move to a paradigm of making peace. (SM).
• Multicultural Training Needs for Counselors of Gifted African American Children
  Identifies problems related to a counselor's lack of training to assist gifted African American children and proposes steps toward appropriate counselor training. A good multicultural training program has components of consciousness raising, antiracism, and knowledge and skill development.
• Multiculturalism, Church, and the University
  The article argues for the incorporation of multicultural objectives into Catholic university curriculum; maintains that the Catholic doctrine of diversified unity makes it particularly qualified to mediate among the polarizing elements of multiculturalism;contains 10 broad guidelines for establishing multicultural objectives within a Catholic university. (MJP).
• Pluralism and Science Education
  Examined how British preservice science teachers responded to an independent study pack designed to stimulate their understanding of race and culture. The pack provided information on cultural diversity and pluralism in Britain and educational responses to cultural pluralism.
• Preservice Field Experience as a Multicultural Component of a Teacher Education Program
  This study examined the effect of pre-student-teaching field experience in a multicultural setting on preservice teachers' cultural sensitivity. Preservice teachers took the Cultural Awareness Inventory before and after a field experience with minority students.
• Professional Development Guide for Educators. The Multicultural Resource Series, Volume 1
  This guide presents a collection of personal essays written by educators who describe how multicultural education has transformed their teaching. It also includes resources such as multicultural organizations, publications, videos, and Web sites.
• Reducing Resistance to Diversity through Cognitive Dissonance Instruction: Implications for Teacher Education
  Applied the principals of cognitive dissonance theory to an instructional strategy used to reduce resistance to the idea of white privilege, comparing groups of college students in diversity education courses that did and did not receive supplemental instruction on cognitive dissonance. Incorporating cognitive dissonance theory created an awareness of dissonance and has the potential to reduce resistance to diversity issues.
• Research, Writing, and Racial Identity: Cross-Disciplinary Connections for Multicultural Education
  Examined how white students in an undergraduate multicultural education course experienced difficult, emotional content about racism. Analysis of samples of students' reflective writing indicated that the coursework influenced students' racial identities.
• Shattering the Denial: Protocols for the Classroom and Beyond
  This book examines how to address and reduce racist practices in the schools, featuring an antiracist education teacher study that provided baseline figures on teacher perceptions of racism and demonstrated how teachers can successfully implement antiracist concepts in their classrooms.
• Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative
  This book argues for the importance of addressing the role of culture in the lives of student teachers. It explains how passionate dialogue in small groups about multicultural literature and autobiography can transform teachers' lives and practice, arguing for a broad and intellectual, yet practical and concrete, vision of teacher development in which teachers not only begin to explore issues of race and class, gender and culture, but also themselves as thinkers and articulate voices.
• Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers for Diversity
  This qualitative case study documents how one student teacher was able to enrich her understanding of what it means to work in a multicultural environment. The study examined what the student teacher considered to be culturally responsive teaching and how she described culturally responsive teaching.
• The Culturally Diverse Classroom: A Guide for ESL and Mainstream Teachers
  This handbook is for teachers and administrators involved with international students in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and mainstream settings. It is intended to raise awareness of the new American classroom.
• The Educational Politics of Identity and Category
  Strikes a new educational path through the politics of identity and multiculturalism by arguing for the need to equip young people with an understanding of how culture, race, and nation have been constructed. The paper discusses two multicultural and antiracist initiatives in Canada and examines the beliefs and politics of Simone Weil, Charles Taylor, Neil Bissoondath, and Arthur Schlesinger.
• The Invisible Minority: Preparing Teachers to Meet the Needs of Gay and Lesbian Youth
  Teacher educators can help prepare future educators to teach homosexual students by creating safe environments for homosexual students, providing positive role models, selecting relevant curriculum and activities, providing information and training for faculty, securing relevant library holdings, and conducting research on homosexual students. Commitment to all students must include commitment to homosexual students.
• The Place of Political Education in the Classroom
  Demonstrates the ability of children to understand global and political issues in a framework of interdependency and justice, as established in the "Children and Worldviews" Project. Children's responses and thinking are provided as well as examples of classroom strategies.
• The Role of Teachers in a Cross-cultural Drama
  Examines why there are so few Native American teachers in this country, specifically in the upper Midwest. Describes how one institution has increased the number of native teachers and notes student reactions to assimilation at a traditional, largely white university.
• The Use of Hypermedia in Effective Diversity Training
  A qualitative study examined the effects of a hypermedia program on diversity training completed by 65 undergraduate students. Results showed that when different types of implementation groups were utilized, discussion (considered vital to diversity training) only occurred on a regular basis in facilitated groups, and to a lesser degree in pair groupings, when mixed by gender and ethnicity.
• Using Immersion Experiences to Shake Up Preservice Teachers' Views about Cultural Differences
  A cultural-immersion project helped preservice teachers at the University of Nevada gain knowledge about other cultures and insight into how it feels to be part of a minority culture. Data from students' writeups of the projects indicate that students gained much from the experience (e.g., new information about specific cultures, challenged beliefs, and enhanced personal and professional skills).
• Using Intercollegiate Response Groups To Help Teacher Education Students Bridge Differences of Race, Class, Ethnicity
  To provide preservice teachers with opportunities for contact with people from racially and ethnically different backgrounds, one university initiated intercollegiate reader response groups using the WebCT format, which allowed students to converse with one another over distances, both within and across universities.