Manufacturing Dissent: The New Economy of Power Relations in Multicultural Teacher Education

Abstract

This article challenges conventional understandings of White preservice teacher resistance by contextualizing it within the historically situated pedagogical relations of the multicultural teacher education classroom. It describes the power effects of a cultural mismatch-driven, "critical" reflection approach to the preparation of the White preservice teacher and offers as an alternative a practice of Loving Subversion. In this approach, critical reflection is used not to reinscribe White racist identity but to develop a purposeful sense of White antiracism. A practice of Loving Subversion is necessary, it is argued, if we are to build genuine capacity among White preservice teachers for effective work with culturally and linguistically diverse students.

When "Other People's Children" Are Your Own: A Multicultural Teacher Educator Learns About Difference From the Inside Out

“…There are the frequently cited attributes of the "typical preservice teacher" to contend with-ignorance of the history and cultural practices of nondominant racial/ethnic groups, disinterest in working with nonmajority students, negative perceptions of these students' abilities and low expectations for their performance, an individualistic view of school failure, an uncritical understanding of the U.S. social structure, and so forth (Richardson Bruna, 2002, 2005)-but perhaps the most frustrating is the mere lack of exposure to "others," to "difference" itself. Of the 80 students I taught this year, all except one, an international student from Malaysia, came from White, middle-class, monolingual English-speaking, Christian homes and communities.…”

“…Here, "everyone is White." 2 Working with this profile of students has offered me many important lessons, lessons that affirm the importance of my chosen field and serve to rededicate my energies to the ongoing task of learning pedagogical balance: How to balance respect for my students' need, on the one hand, to feel personally and professionally "safe," usually associated with being silent; with the rigor, on the other, of a "syllabus of risk" (Berman, 2002), one that sparks the personal and professional "crises" necessary to achieve the core instructional outcome of multicultural-teacher education -discovering a critical voice (Richardson Bruna, 2002, 2005). But, of all the lessons I've learned this year in helping Iowa's future teachers understand their roles and responsibilities in working with "other people's children," the most important lesson of all was one I learned, outside university walls, from my son's experience in his second-grade classroom.…”

“…But the resonance of Jordan's words merits the risk: "It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection." We have to help our students uncover connections they might share with their students, connections that empower them and around which they can create a new personal and professional identity (Richardson Bruna, 2002, 2005). What better way to do that than by modeling the connections we have uncovered in our lives and work?…”

Technology and tasks for bridging the language-content gap: Teacher-researcher collaboration in a third-year Spanish writing course

“…For these students, FL classes targeted to monolingual students are often ill suited and mismatched (cf. Richardson Bruna, 2002). Monolingual FL learners will undoubtedly have different instructional needs from bilingual heritage learners who have already had ample exposure to oral Spanish registers outside of schooled contexts.…”