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Teacher Role

• "Would I Use This Book?" White, Female Education Students Examine Their Beliefs About Teaching
  Examines the interplay of two added components to a reading/language arts methods course: professional readings informed by diverse viewpoints; and participation in a multicultural literature discussion group. Explores how this methods course extended students' understanding and beliefs about teaching the history and lives of the varied groups of people who make up the United States.
• A Cultural Mosaic
  The diversity program initiated in a Philadelphia high school is based on the following principles: teachers should educate themselves about diversity, spread and reinforce the word, think outside the box, lead by example, and use multiple strategies to prepare students to succeed in a multicultural world. (JOW).
• A framework for understanding and assessing systemic change
  The education system, like most organizational structures, needs fundamental changes to keep pace with the social and economic conditions of an increasingly complex global society. Taking an aerial view, this paper describes the topography of systemic change to provide multiple stakeholders a better vantage point for communicating and making decisions about their own systems.
• A Solitary Struggle
  Reports on a discussion among seven teacher activists about the challenges they face in standing up for social justice in their schools. Promoting equity in education can be a lonely task for teachers who must struggle to find a balance between being activists and being accepted.
• Carnegie Corporation's Youth Intergroup Relations Initiative. Report of a Meeting Convened by Carnegie Corporation of New York (New York, NY, October 15-17, 1997)
  The Carnegie Corporation's initiative, established in 1996 to create a "new generation of tolerance," included grants to 16 institutions for cutting-edge research in various social science disciplines. Some themes are presented from the second meeting of project leaders for these research efforts.
• Changing Teacher Education through Professional Development School Partnerships: A Five-Year Follow-up Study
  Investigates the impact of involvement with professional development schools (PDS's) on how colleges prepare teachers, following several partnerships longitudinally. The paper examines how changes in teacher education have resulted from PDS involvement, discusses the question of institutionalization of PDSs, and describes the potential for PDSs to provide for the simultaneous renewal of schools and colleges.
• Classrooms for Learners, Not Winners and Losers
  Differentiated instruction is an umbrella concept that allows teachers to pull together many disparate messages about multicultural education, alternative teaching and learning strategies, alternative assessments, learning styles, and standards. Developing a range of instructional strategies represents a fine tuning, not a new instrument.
• Creating Safety To Address Controversial Issues: Strategies for the Classroom
  Presents seven elements of a safe classroom in controversy-driven courses, where students can exchange ideas rather than emotions as they learn and discuss. The elements are: collegiality, empowerment, role modeling, preparation, shared purpose, reflection, and commitment.
• Curricular Approaches To Developing Positive Interethnic Relations
  Examines how curricular approaches have helped build positive interethnic relations in a large, ethnically diverse high school, documenting four curricular approaches teacher leaders used to address issues of race and ethnicity and exploring the impact of those approaches on student learning. Illuminates how teacher leaders and administrators created the conditions for these curricular reforms to be sustainable.
• Education and Class
  The working class is nearly invisible in multicultural education literature. Examines the possibilities of a more careful foregrounding of the complexities of social class in shaping life chances, focusing on the educational experiences of working class students and discussing the poor in order to promote understanding of the potential of teacher advocacy to help all children living in poverty.
• Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls
  Picture books that depict the variety of ethnic, racial, and cultural groups within U.S. society (known generally as multicultural picture books) allow young children opportunities to develop their understanding of others, while affirming children of diverse backgrounds.
• Gender Stereotypes in Children's Picture Books
  Research has examined how gender stereotypes and sexism in picture books affect the development of gender identity in young children, how children's books in the last decade have portrayed gender, and how researchers evaluate picture books for misrepresentations of gender. A review of the research indicated that gender development is a critical part of the earliest and most important learning experiences of a young child.
• Graduates of professional development school programs: Perceptions of the teacher as change agent
  Investigated whether graduates of Professional Development Schools perceived themselves as change agents, implemented practices supporting change, and chose schools supportive of change. Teacher surveys indicated that most respondents believed they were change agents, that they were viewed as change agents, and that they practiced behaviors indicative of change.
• Inclusive Schooling Practices: Pedagogical and Research Foundations: A Synthesis of the Literature that Informs Best Practice About Inclusive Schools
  This monograph summarizes the literature base that informs current understanding of the best approaches to support students with disabilities in inclusive settings.
• Learning to Lead from the Middle: An Apprenticeship in Diversity
  An adult educator working with marginalized multicultural groups describes how the community defined the following core values for working with diversity: living the respect for diversity, climate of extended family, shared grassroots ownership, blend of creativity and practicality, organizational effectiveness, work for the common good, and leadership and advocacy within the larger community. (SK).
• Looking at the Evidence More Carefully: Achieving the Ideal?
  Schools could make a major contribution toward a racist-free society by stressing more emphatically the need for teachers and students to critically examine all the evidence before making judgements or taking action. By instilling into children a basic set of rules enabling them to make appropriate judgements, teachers can help people rationally defend their beliefs, opinions, and behaviors.
• Making the Most of the Classroom Mosaic: A Constructivist Perspective
  Teachers today are required to be sensitive to a wider range of multicultural differences than ever before. Explores whether they can combine teaching content into a single package for all children, or whether they must continuously repackage the content for each of the diverse groups they teach.
• Models of Multiculturalism: Enhancing Immediacy and Relevance When Teaching Cultural Diversity
  Considers today's students the "postguilt generation." Proposes that teachers reconsider the way that students are exposed to issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality, creating class activities that allow students to experience the boundaries and definitions of identity. Presents three models of classroom activities.
• Multicultural Education: Common Problems Experienced by Various Cultures
  The United States today is a pluralistic society, and a multicultural curriculum is a necessary component of the overall school curriculum. Multicultural education should address the culturally and the linguistically diverse student.
• Pedagogic Discourse and Equity in Mathematics: When Teachers' Talk Matters
  Discusses the role and nature of pedagogic discourse. Suggests that teacher talk plays an important role in the learning of radically, ethnically, and linguistically 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.
• Preparing Teachers To Support American Indian and Alaska Native Student Success and Cultural Heritage. ERIC Digest
  This digest briefly summarizes the literature on preparing educators to promote the success of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. Success in Native terms means not only academic achievement but also the development of the whole person.
• 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.
• Professional development schools: Looking ahead
  Speculates on the future of Professional Development Schools (PDSs), examining: the Holmes Group's beginning vision of PDSs; PDS progress; persistent problems; the vision of learning and learning to teach; the role of the university at large; the structures of schools and PDSs; teachers' roles; recent enabling trends; and a primary purpose for PDSs.
• Professional Growth: Teaching Truth
  Emphasizes teacher's role in imparting multicultural education to students by relating personal experience of a teacher who unravels his family history and discovers with pride his multicultural heritage. (BAC).
• Race and Ethnicity Issues in the Sociology Curriculum
  Shows why the sociology curriculum in English education fails to acknowledge the multicultural nature of British society and ways in which sociology teachers can improve things through their own research and teaching. British teachers and students can learn about cultural differences together.
• Raising Expectations To Improve Student Learning
  The issue of low teacher expectations of students is addressed, bearing in mind that any effort to address low teacher expectations for students that does not address the broader issue of school change will fail. The first section of the monograph explores the relationship between teacher expectations and student achievement.
• Taylor’s Story: Full Inclusion in Her Neighborhood Elementary School
  Content Abstract: Analysis of the experience of a student with severe mental retardation who experienced full inclusion in her neighborhood elementary school revealed that the student’s opportunities for social participation and friendship improved, several adaptive skills were developed, the classroom teacher played a critical role in orchestrating the level of academic inclusion, and transition planning was essential. (Author/JDD) Method Abstract: ”Data from interviews, sociometric measures, videotapes, and field notes were used to present the perspectives of administrators, general and special educators, students and Taylor’s parents.” Quantitative and qualitative research methods utilized.
• Teacher Educators' Role in Promoting the Tenets of Multicultural Education
  Few preservice and beginning teachers are prepared for the diversity of today's classrooms. Educators must be aware of the many ways in which people are diverse and recognize that diversity is an enormous advantage.
• Teaching Is a Cultural Activity
  Explores teaching as a cultural activity by focusing on U.S. and Japanese systems of teaching in the context of cultural beliefs about how students learn and the teacher's role in the learning process.
• Teaching Social Studies Multiculturally: Implications for Teachers
  The changing demographics in U.S. institutions have contributed to the increasingly multicultural nature of classrooms.
• Technology Meets Diversity
  Describes the development of an electronic book that provides a forum on the history and culture of Native Americans in the Lakota Nation. Illustrates how such multimedia programs can help teachers with multicultural education.
• The Dynamic Nature of Response: Children Reading and Responding to "Maniac Magee" and "The Friendship."
  Analyzes the conversations and writings of 2 ethnically diverse populations of fifth-grade children (ages 10 and 11) in response to the powerful and difficult themes contained in two award-winning children's books. Discusses the child's voice; the teacher's role as cultural mediator; responses at the literal level; reading between the lines; responding to moral dilemmas; and personal responses to the books.
• The Language and Literacy Spectrum, 1996. A Journal of the New York State Reading Association
  Sharing concerns and interests of New York State educators in the improvement of literacy, this annual journal raises educational issues such as current thoughts about literacy instruction, educators' roles, literacy in its many forms, college-community literacy partnerships, and recommended reading materials.
• The Reading Workshop: Creating Space for Readers
  With so many different approaches to teaching reading, how can a teacher make sense of the best paths available? This book, by describing its author/educator's day-to-day schedule and giving an overview of how the workshop operates over time, provides a flexible framework a teacher can adapt and implement to suit his or her needs.
• The Role of a European American Scholar in Multicultural Education
  Attempts to broaden the theoretical base and practical applications of multicultural education by examining the contributions of European American educators to the process. Advocates members of the dominant culture using their own lives as starting points for studying how that culture is maintained.
• 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 Transformation of the Teachers' Role at the End of the Twentieth Century: New Challenges for the Future
  Rapid global changes have transformed education for the elite into mass education, resulting in the following: new teacher responsibilities, less educational activity by families, mass media access to learning, multicultural education models, change in the social worth of education and status of teachers, fewer resources for education, decline of authority and discipline, and teacher overload. (SK).
• The Values of a Global Perspective
  Asserts that college curricula, student activity programs, and institutional partnerships should each work toward the goal of promoting multicultural awareness. States that, as the nations of the world become more accessible to one another, students must learn to live comfortably with other peoples and cultures, and that teachers are instrumental in opening students' minds to this prospect.
• Toward an Integrative Multicultural Learning Environment
  Describes the role of integrative curriculum reform in fostering multicultural education in Brown Barge Middle School, in Pensacola, Florida. Examines the efforts of one team of teachers to create a multicultural curriculum, noting factors in their success.
• Using Multicultural Resources for Teachers To Combat Racial Prejudice in the Classroom
  Presents questions that will assist early childhood teachers in evaluating their own views and behaviors toward various ethnic groups. Provides resources for teachers to educate themselves, parents, and students.
• Waging Peace in Our Schools
  The Resolving Conflicts Creatively Program (RCCP) described in this book asserts that schools must educate the child's heart as well as the mind. RCCP began in 1985 as a joint initiative of Educators for Social Responsibility Metropolitan Area and the New York City Board of Education.
• Waging Peace in Our Schools
  The Resolving Conflicts Creatively Program (RCCP) described in this book asserts that schools must educate the child's heart as well as the mind. RCCP began in 1985 as a joint initiative of Educators for Social Responsibility Metropolitan Area and the New York City Board of Education.
• What Really Happens? Community Service Learning for Multicultural Teacher Education
  A qualitative, interpretive case study utilized ethnographic techniques to discover what happens, and what preservice teachers think about what happens, within a credited community service learning component for a multicultural education course. Subjects were 24 preservice teachers studied as one case.