Normalizing the Fraughtness

Abstract

Preservice teachers seeking to develop cultural competence can face a struggle fraught with multiple challenges, even when they are committed to culturally relevant pedagogy. This article closely analyzes one White beginning teacher’s negotiations with cultural competence during a lesson in her student teaching semester, then traces how she made sense of that lesson in the weeks and months that followed. Findings indicate that taking on cultural competence posed both cognitive and affective challenges. More specifically, emotional responses to racialized situations, inner conflicts over Whiteness, and the dynamics of the school context combined to mediate the development of cultural competence. This study suggests that teacher educators should focus not only on the achievement of cultural competence but also on the struggle involved in enacting it. By giving more attention to how beginning teachers develop cultural competence, teacher educators will be better prepared to help beginning teachers normalize the fraughtness involved in the struggle.

Re-Imagining Asian Religious Identity: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Religion and Race in Australian Schools

“…This is a challenge and task that should be an integral part of teachers' work towards social improvement and social justice. One group of researchers has reported on how addressing this challenge requires the normalisation of the fraughtness for pre-service teachers, out of which a culturally sensitive and relevant pedagogy can emerge [63]. Other educators have also utilised critical race theory in attempts to confront, subvert and transcend the "normativity accorded to 'white' landscapes" [64].…”

“I Understand the Struggle”: Leveraging the Lived Experiences of African American Teachers in TESOL

“…Moreover, representations of African American first-grade teachers interacting with Latino newcomers in language arts classrooms are relatively hard to come by. White females of middle social class and capital, who constitute the majority of the K-12 workforce and dominate literacy instruction in the elementary grades, are the focus of a large body of professional literature aimed at cultivating dispositions toward diversity (Allen & Labbo, 2001;Buehler, Ruggles Gere, Dallavis, & Shaw Haviland, 2009;Haviland, 2008;McDonough, 2009).…”

Blank Canvas and Glass Ceiling: Using Visual Metaphors and Narratives to Examine Preservice Teacher Development

“…Since the 1990s, multicultural educators (Cochran-Smith, 1991;Delpit, 1995;Gay, 2002;Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2001Nieto, 2005;Valdes, 1996) have asserted the importance of understanding the role socio-cultural context plays in constructing one's values and beliefs and how this awareness can enhance teacher candidates' ability to teach diverse student populations. More recent literature has focused on the relationship between teacher candidate dispositions and the adoption of multiple perspectives and strategies that improve teacher effectiveness (Buehler, Gere, Dallavis, & Haviland, 2009;Gay, 2010;Schussler, Stooksbury, & Bercaw, 2010;Villegas, 2007). In particular, Schussler and colleagues (2010) found that teacher candidates who possessed the greatest capacity to evaluate their own assumptions were more likely to question their own thinking and actions and therefore better able to adopt multiple perspectives.…”