Teacher Candidates’ Developing Beliefs About Diversity and Its Role in Effective Literacy Teaching

Abstract

This study explored teacher candidates’ understandings of diversity, equity, and equality, and how these beliefs differed throughout teacher preparation. Researchers surveyed teacher candidates at the beginning and at the completion of their program to compare responses to a question inquiring about student demographics in the context of literacy education. Researchers found that teacher candidates’ understandings of effective literacy instruction ranged within a continuum between stances of equity and equality, and that exiting candidates’ responses were more robust and descriptive. Implications include the need for a focus on multicultural education across teacher education programs to yield more equity based beliefs.

More being, different doing: Illuminating examples of culturally relevant literacy teaching

“…As our findings established, the selection and use of multicultural texts saturate preservice and in‐service literature on culturally relevant literacy teaching. As teacher educators, we, too, have found topics of multicultural text selection to be the most widely adopted and discussed practice by our preservice teachers (Kwok et al., 2020). This is unsurprising because text selection is tactile and concrete.…”

“…Moreover, research on teachers' beliefs about diversity complicates these pathways to broadening teacher perspectives and orientations toward asset‐based and culturally relevant teaching. As teacher beliefs are reflected in their actions, teacher educators should work on teachers' existing perspectives and experiences related to culture and social justice, even when such experience is limited (Kwok et al., 2020). By framing preservice teachers' beliefs about diversity as a lens to be broadening, the emphasis shifts toward methods for expanding their perspectives rather than highlighting their deficiencies (Kwok et al., 2023).…”

Enriching preservice teachers' translanguaging stance and practices toward emergent bilingual learners through virtual professional development

“…Translanguaging and other equity‐based practices should not be relegated to one professional development event a semester or to one session. For PSTs to develop this mindset and accompanying practices, frequent engagement with concepts of language use, equity, identity, power, and race is necessary (Deng et al, 2021; Kwok et al, 2021). In addition, development of a critical translingual approach is a multifaceted progression through which PSTs learn to reflect on how power is communicated through language and language users, on how their personal experiences with language are reflected or not in school‐based literacy events, and on how they can begin to create space for frequently marginalized languages, cultures, and races (Seltzer, 2022).…”

Teacher Education’s Moment: From Solution to Challenge

“…For example, Souto-Manning (2021) issued a clarion call for literacy teacher preparation programs to rectify their previous collusion in the accrual of educational debt owed to marginalized learners and their families by taking up an abolitionist stance in literacy teacher education. In her work, Souto-Manning questions why, in teacher education programs, we remain complicit in the continuation of racism and asks how we can interrupt the trauma circle inflicted by the field (Kwok et al, 2021; Rios, 2020). In this issue, we include three articles (Dignath, Fink, & Kunter; Heineke & Vera; Santibanez, Snyder, & Centeno) that seek ways to speak truth to this challenge and interrupt these injustices to nurture equity perspectives among literacy teachers in ways that bring critical issue, and perhaps teacher-led approaches to challenge, to the fore.…”