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Student Teacher Attitudes

• "I've Really Learned a Lot, But...": Cross-cultural Understanding and Teacher Education in a Racist Society
  Describes a cross-cultural course offered by the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada) to develop preservice teachers' understanding of aboriginal cultures, taking data from instructors' experiences and student narratives. The paper discusses the lack of understanding in white preservice teachers' views of self and others and the implications for teacher education in a racist society.
• "It Never Occurred to Me That I Might Have a Gay Student in My K-12 Classroom": An Investigation of the Treatment of Sexual Orientation Issues in Teacher Education Programming
  This descriptive study examined two aspects of teacher education (text materials and curricular methods) with respect to the question of how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual (GLBT) issues are presented and discussed. The first study focused on a content analysis of a variety of textbooks (lifespan development, adolescent development, and multicultural/social foundations) that are available for use in teacher education programs.
• A Research Informed Vision of Good Practice in Multicultural Teacher Education: Design Principles
  Presents 14 design principles that explain good practice in multicultural preservice teacher education. The principles fall under the three main categories of (1) institutional and programmatic principles, (2) personnel principles, and (3) curriculum and instruction principles.
• Advocating Social Justice and Cultural Affirmation: Ethnically Diverse Preservice Teachers' Perspectives on Multicultural Education
  Investigated the attitudes of culturally diverse student teachers regarding multicultural education, social justice, and cultural affirmation. Surveys of preservice teachers before they were exposed to theories of multicultural education indicated that most were committed to teaching students of color and prioritized tasks addressing issues of social justice and curriculum that affirmed the cultures represented in the classroom.
• An Ethnographic Study of Preservice Teacher Resistance to Multiculturalism: Implications for Teaching
  This paper examines student teachers' resistance to multicultural education, contrasting the expectations of teacher educators, as expressed in the literature, with the perspectives of preservice teachers from a required multiculturalism course. The study involved participant observation, with the researcher participating in the course as a student, completing all assignments and readings, and participating in class discussions and group projects.
• An Urban Field Experience for Rural Preservice Teachers: "I'm Not Afraid--Should I Be?"
  Investigated the impact of an urban field experience on rural/suburban preservice teachers, examining what they learned and how they applied their learning. Data from observations and student self-reports indicated that the experience was very positive for the participants, and it raised their consciousness about urban education.
• Assessing Dispositions toward Cultural Diversity among Preservice Teachers
  Assessed preservice teachers' attitudes toward cultural diversity prior to entering into multicultural education courses at an urban university. Respondents indicated strong support for implementing diversity issues in the classroom and high levels of agreement with equity beliefs and the social value of diversity.
• Assessing Preservice Teachers' Zones of Concern and Comfort with Multicultural Education
  Examined preservice teachers' concerns and comfort with concepts and practices advocated as approaches to multicultural education. Data from surveys conducted at different points throughout a cultural-awareness course indicated that students believed in the need for multicultural education but differed greatly regarding choices for preferred approaches to multicultural education.
• Beyond Race Awareness: White Racial Identity and Multicultural Teaching
  Interviews examined whether white students' shifts in thinking about themselves as racial beings and about systems of oppression during a multicultural education course were evident in later teaching practice. Though students initially resisted learning about their own racism, they eventually became more willing to take some responsibility for racism.
• Care, Community, and Context in a Teacher Education Classroom
  Highlights growth that occurs when attention is paid to what teacher candidates should learn and how they should learn it, describing a class that combined attention to knowing students in a learning community, to constructivist pedagogy, and to core questions about educational equity, which led students to ask very different questions about themselves, their students, and being critical, transformative teachers. (SM).
• 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.
• Changes in Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs about Language Issues
  Examined how predominantly female, white preservice teachers' knowledge and beliefs about language issues changed after an intensive multicultural education course. Data from surveys and course assignments indicated that students made significant gains in three areas: personal beliefs about diversity; professional beliefs about diversity; and multicultural education knowledge.
• Changing Teacher Candidates' Beliefs About Diversity
  This study investigated how preservice teacher education program experiences and student life experiences related to positive changes in teacher candidates' attitudes toward student diversity. Five preservice teachers at the University of Utah completed interviews during their final term in the program.
• Coming to Terms with "Diversity" and "Multiculturalism" in Teacher Education: Learning about Our Students, Changing Our Practice
  Teacher educators addressed negative student responses to a multicultural foundations course by designing an action research study to investigate students' identities, experiences, and beliefs. Analysis of written assignments and focus group discussions uncovered three categories of beliefs about the purposes of schools in relation to cultural diversity.
• Comparing Pre-Service Teachers' Attitudes toward Diversity: Internship and Student Teaching Experiences
  This study used qualitative and quantitative methodology to ascertain preservice teachers' attitudes toward multiculturalism and diversity and determine how they viewed their student teaching and internship experiences with respect to issues of diversity. The 46 participating student teachers completed a cultural inventory in the spring of 1998 and then again in the fall of 1998 (after 3 months of student teaching).
• Complexities and Contradictions: A Study of Teacher Education Courses that Address Multicultural Issues
  Investigated how a teacher education course on educating diverse students affected student teachers' knowledge and attitudes. Pre- and post-course surveys indicated that the course contributed to some positive attitude changes regarding issues of diversity, though students appeared unable to detect the nuances in their attitudes toward race, class, and gender that could affect their abilities to become effective educators.
• Connecting Preservice Teacher Education to Diverse Communities: A Focus on Family Literacy
  Describes a teacher education program at the New College of California as an example of efforts to empower new teachers to meet the challenges of educating diverse students. Discusses the candidate intake process, the preprogram reading effort, community building, instructional strategies, and the family literacy program, which is integral to teacher education at the college.
• Constructing an Image of a White Teacher
  To confront racial issues in their classrooms, white student teachers reflected on their identities as white teachers and their understandings of multiculturalism. By confronting their identities and challenging the meaning of being white teachers, they could better pursue teaching practices to alter the way white students are educated about themselves and about multicultural education.
• Cross-Cultural Field Placements: Student Teachers Learning from Schools and Communities
  Presents two cultural immersion projects where student teaching and community involvement interact synergistically. Also discusses learning outcomes of the projects, examines the importance of service learning, and explains how traditional student teaching assignments can incorporate many of the design principles that characterize cultural learning and preparation for diversity.
• Cross-Cultural Field Placements: Student Teachers Learning from Schools and Communities
  Presents two cultural immersion projects where student teaching and community involvement interact synergistically. Also discusses learning outcomes of the projects, examines the importance of service learning, and explains how traditional student teaching assignments can incorporate many of the design principles that characterize cultural learning and preparation for diversity.
• 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 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.
• Effect of Multicultural Music Experience on Preservice Elementary Teachers' Attitudes
  Explores the effects of multicultural music-lesson planning on preservice elementary teachers' attitudes toward teaching from a multicultural perspective. Reveals a significant relationship between exposure to multicultural music and attitudes of willingness to teach it; no effect was observed on attitudes of willingness to teach in culturally diverse environments.
• 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.
• Effects of Teacher Preparation Experiences and Students' Perceptions Related to Developmentally and Culturally Appropriate Practices
  Case study of preservice early childhood teachers in a course on cultural diversity inquired how the course's structure prepared them for working with and understanding diverse students and families. Pre- and post-course surveys indicated that students perceived that they had made gains in their understanding of cultural diversity issues and were positively affected through their teacher preparation experiences.
• Empowering Student Teachers To Teach from a Multicultural Perspective
  This paper presents case studies of four middle school preservice teachers' experiences with multicultural education during their approximately 16-week student teaching practicum in the southeastern United States. Student teachers were male and female, aged 21 to 42 years; one was African-American and three were European-American.
• Empowering Student Teachers To Teach from a Multicultural Perspective
  This paper presents case studies of four middle school preservice teachers' experiences with multicultural education during their approximately 16-week student teaching practicum in the southeastern United States. Student teachers were male and female, aged 21 to 42 years; one was African-American and three were European-American.
• From Our Readers: Preparing Preservice Teacher Candidates for Leadership in Equity
  Describes the importance of moving beyond identity labels like Black, Hispanic, or female to examine how gender intersects with other social memberships like race and class. By considering more inclusive, individualized ways of viewing multiculturalism, educators can forge more meaningful conversations with students about diversity and equity.
• Good Days/Bad Days: Learning To Teach in Two Different Multicultural Schools
  This paper presents information regarding two university field programs in two elementary schools in New Orleans (Louisiana), serving culturally diverse children, and it attempts to reveal the influences of each school context on preservice teachers' acquisition of pedagogical content knowledge, their concerns and dilemmas, and their frames of reference about teaching children in a nonmainstream school setting.
• How Reading and Writing Literacy Narratives Affect Preservice Teachers' Understandings of Literacy, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism
  Discusses how to prepare teachers to educate diverse learners engaged in multiple and new literacies, describing a graduate course that introduced language, literacy, and culture. Data from students' writings, reading logs, reading responses, and final papers on literacy and pedagogy indicated that reading and writing literacy narratives was a positive experience, fostering multicultural understanding and complex conceptions of literacy.
• I, Too, Am an American: Preservice Teachers Reflect upon National Identity
  Preservice teachers read poetry by Langston Hughes and an Arab American student about being American, then composed and discussed their own poems. Poems helped them reflect on their own cultures and attitudes, thus developing a caring community of learners who valued diversity and human rights.
• Identifying the Prospective Multicultural Educator: Three Signposts, Three Portraits
  Investigates how prospective teachers respond to social differences they encounter in educational discourse and public schools, identifying three signposts indicative of prospective multicultural educators (desiring change because of identifying with educational inequality, valuing critical pedagogy and multicultural social reconstructivist education, and wanting to understand educational inequality and its causes). Presents data from observations and interviews with three teacher candidates.
• Increasing Preservice Teachers' Diversity Beliefs and Commitment
  Explored the attitudes, beliefs, and commitments to diversity of a predominantly Anglo-American population of preservice teachers enrolled in a diversity course. Results described beginning ethnorelative attitudes, beliefs, and commitments after participation in the diversity course; some theoretical underpinnings for understanding change (or lack of change); and a framework for facilitating positive multicultural experiences.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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).
• Looking Over the Edge: Preparing Teachers for Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Middle Schools
  The principles and practices of multicultural education became the heart of one middle school teacher education program. The five principles included fostering inter/intragroup harmony through learning communities, targeting social justice and affirmation of diversity, empowering students and teachers, seeing things from multiple perspectives, and preparing teachers explicitly for cultural and linguistic diversity.
• Mexican-American Preservice Teachers and the Intransigency of the Elementary School Curriculum
  Investigated how Mexican-American student teachers expressed their cultural knowledge in lesson planning and implementation. Semistructured interviews with Mexican-American student teachers working in elementary Professional Development Schools revealed little ethnic expression, even when teaching Mexican-American children.
• Moving Teacher Education in/to the Community
  Describes a set of structured experiences within a preservice teacher education program that helped construct, with the students, a critical perspective toward better understanding pupils' home, community, and school lives. The structured experiences occurred within a New Mexico school community research project combined with a course on families, schools, and communities.
• Multicultural Classrooms and Cultural Communities of Teachers
  Ethnographic data from a study of one teacher education program highlighted preservice teachers' values and beliefs concerning minority education. Results suggest that preservice teachers experience and adopt a meritocratic and hegemonic system of schooling in which academic performance is viewed in terms of individual abilities and based on mainstream norms.
• Multicultural Education Issues: Perceived Levels of Knowledge of Preservice Teachers and Teacher Educators
  This study assessed preservice teachers' and teacher educators' knowledge regarding issues related to multicultural education. Participants were 78 preservice teachers who completed the Multicultural Knowledge Test during the first class period of a Social Foundations of Education course.
• Multicultural Teacher Education for the 21st Century
  Discusses multicultural preservice teacher education, recommending that preservice programs be more deliberate about preparing white Americans for teaching diverse students because of the increasing division between white teachers and minority students. The paper examines preservice teachers' fear of diversity and resistance to dealing with race and racism, proposing a two-part program for preparing teachers to work with diverse students.
• Personal Transformations from the Inside Out: Nurturing Monocultural Teachers' Growth toward Multicultural Competence
  Contends that the transformation of incoming preservice teachers into multiculturally competent, committed advocates for all students can be achieved through a combination of sound multicultural research and best practice, discussing mediated cultural immersions, the role of attending faculty in student growth, and the three phases of mediated cultural immersion. The origins of mediated cultural immersion programs are described.
• 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.
• Preparations and Reflections: Teaching in a Widening World
  This paper discusses research on teacher preparation and teaching in diverse settings, using data from questionnaires about various courses and components of one teacher education program. Student teachers completed questionnaires before and after student teaching, and cooperating teachers completed them at the end of student teaching.
• Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Schools: Research and the Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness
  Reviewed research studies on preservice teacher preparation for multicultural schools, particularly schools serving historically underserved communities, examining the effects of such strategies as recruiting and selecting students, cross-cultural immersion experiences, multicultural coursework, and program restructuring. Very little research actually examined which strategies prepared strong teachers.
• 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.
• Preservice Teachers and Teacher Educators: Are They Sensitive about Cultural Diversity Issues
  This study assessed the beliefs about and sensitivity toward cultural diversity issues of teacher educators and preservice teachers. A group of 78 predominantly white preservice teachers and 45 predominantly white teacher educators completed the Beliefs About Diversity Scale, which assessed beliefs about race, gender, social class, ability, language/immigration, sexual orientation, and multicultural education.
• Preservice Teachers Integrate Understandings of Diversity Into Literacy Instruction: An Adaptation of the ABC's Model
  Investigated preservice teachers' understandings of their own and their students' cultural backgrounds, examining how they integrated those understandings into literacy instruction. The ABC model (autobiographies, biographies of students, cross-cultural analysis, analysis of cultural differences, and classroom practices) helped stimulate students to continue examining their lives, their cultural/linguistic backgrounds, and the impact of those factors on teaching diverse students.
• Preservice Teachers' Learning about Diversity: The Influence of Their Existing Racial Attitudes and Beliefs
  This case study examined how three white preservice teachers were similar and dissimilar in terms of their racial attitudes and beliefs, their prior interracial experiences, and certain personal characteristics. Participants had taken a multicultural education course and had been part of a larger study of teacher candidates' attitudes about diversity and the effects of multicultural education courses on those attitudes.
• Professional Development School Trade-Offs in Teacher Preparation and Renewal
  Examined the preparation of student teachers at four Professional Development Schools (PDSs) longitudinally, comparing their experiences with those of traditional student teachers. Data from meetings with administrators; site visits; document analysis; graduation and professional status information; student teacher surveys; and graduate surveys indicated that students appreciated PDSs' camaraderie, support, collaboration, and effectiveness.
• Promoting Bilingualism in the Era of Unz: Making Sense of the Gap between Research, Policy, and Practice in Teacher Education
  Examined efforts to promote bilingualism in a course for prospective teachers, Education of Bilingual Children: Theory and Practice, focusing on how student teachers grappled with the complex relationship between research, policy, and practice within bilingual education. Analysis of five types of literacy events indicated that students experienced a process of transformation in developing more positive attitudes toward bilingualism.
• 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.
• Rethinking Culture in the Pedagogy and Practices of Preservice Teachers
  Examines questions about culture and cultural identity that surfaced as student teachers in their elementary practicum attempted to learn about their students' communities and use culture in the classroom, illustrating how culture can be used in classrooms to frame and limit children and suggesting how to reframe classroom practices and multicultural goals in light of potential problems. (SM).
• Service-Learning in Teacher Education: Enhancing the Growth of New Teachers, Their Students, and Communities
  This book provides teacher educators, administrators, practicing teachers who work with preservice teachers, policymakers, and researchers with information on the conceptual, research, and application areas of service-learning in preservice teacher education.
• Shaping Teachers' Minds: Reflections on Cultural Discourse
  This paper highlights certain cultural models that have been effective in swaying culturally inexperienced teachers to reflect upon their attitudes and biases toward culture and literacy. It presents the actual reflections of student teachers as they respond to learning about cultural models of learning and discourse that may differ from their own.
• Small-Town College to Big-City School: Preparing Urban Teachers from Liberal Arts Colleges
  Describes a model program to prepare teachers from midwestern liberal arts colleges for urban teaching careers. Student teachers come to Chicago and live together, student teaching in local urban schools and completing regular professional development and cultural diversity activities.
• Teacher Candidates' Conceptions of Teaching and Learning: A Review
  The purpose of this paper is to provide a best-evidence synthesis of studies on preservice teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning and to describe their implications for teacher education.
• Teacher Education's Responsibility to Address Diversity Issues: Enhancing Institutional Capacity
  Preservice teachers must be prepared to address substantial student diversity and to educate all students to higher levels of understanding and competence. Many teacher educators are not competent to prepare new teachers in this area.
• Teaching about Diversity Issues
  Describes a course designed to help preservice teachers get in touch with their own attitudes and beliefs during an assignment that involves individuals from different backgrounds. Students' and teachers' perspectives on this learning experience are presented, focusing on such issues as religion, culture, social class, race, and teenage mothers.
• The Asset of Cultural Pluralism: An Account of Cross-Cultural Learning in Pre-Service Teacher Education
  Highlights a Canadian preservice educator in a cross- cultural course who worked with student teachers to understand how they encountered one another's diverse attitudes and values, promoting a theory of cross-cultural education that validated experiential interactions as moments of learning. This led to a vision of pluralism where diversity helped create interpretive competence through encounters of difference and self-study.
• The Benefits of Dialogue Journals: What Prospective Teachers Say
  Investigated preservice teachers' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks to using dialogue journals in a multicultural teacher education course. Students perceived many benefits related to facilitation of learning, self-reflection, self-understanding, procedural convenience, expression of ideas, feedback, and teacher student relationships.
• The Influence of Teacher Background on the Inclusion of Multicultural Education: A Case Study of Two Contrasts
  Examined the impact of preservice teachers' backgrounds on their multicultural perspectives in teaching secondary social studies, highlighting two student teachers with widely different backgrounds and beliefs. Data from papers, interviews, and observations showed significant differences in perspectives.
• 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 Relationships between Situated Cognition and Rural Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Understanding of Diversity
  A study examined the influence of situated knowledge embedded in 17 rural preservice teachers' autobiographies on their perspectives on diversity and future classroom practices. Four themes emerged in interviews: situative cognition in rural contexts; cultural groups being together but existing apart; understanding group similarities and differences; and desire to teach in a small rural school.
• The State of Public Education in the United States: Teacher Education Students' Perspectives
  This study examined the opinions of 44 teacher education majors, prior to student teaching, about the state of public education in the United States. It also investigated their perceptions of the opinions of faculty and practicing teachers regarding the same issue.
• The Use of Case Studies in Preparing Teachers for Cultural Diversity
  Cases offer prospective teachers vicarious experience in culturally different settings. This paper uses examples of cases from the Teachers for Alaska Program, which successfully altered the way teachers educated culturally diverse students.
• Understanding the School Community: A Field-Based Experience in Teacher Education
  Canadian preservice teachers were sent to volunteer in an inner-city Native American elementary school in order to gain some understanding of other cultures and thus examine their own attitudes toward race and culture. The program helped students understand the role of communication in communities and in teaching.
• 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 Popular Films To Challenge Preservice Teachers' Beliefs about Teaching in Urban Schools
  Discusses myths about urban education and education in general that are illustrated in three popular films about inner city schools, focusing on myths about learning, specifically about questions and answers, authenticity, and motivation; teaching, specifically about the center of the learning process; relationships with students, parents, and the institution; and culture. Proceeds from a constructivist approach to learning.