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This study looks at preservice teachers' attitudes toward children and teaching in an urban high-poverty community in relation to their involvement in two different literacy education experiences: one literacy course sequence addressed issues of cultural diversity with respect to this community, and the other did not explicitly address these issues. The study specifically examines preservice teachers' (a) attitudes toward children's literacy potential, (b) confidence in teaching children to read, and (c) interest in teaching in urban schools. The diversity-oriented literacy experience, combined with highly satisfying field placements, positively affected preservice teacher's confidence and interest in teaching children in this community. Further, these preservice teachers tended to recognize children's literacy potential, while those who took the more typical literacy courses tended to doubt these children's literacy abilities. They also exited the diversity-oriented literacy courses with an enriched sense of children's culture and home language, although their awareness of literacy as culturally situated practice remained superficial. Analysis of preservice teachers' cultural autobiographies provided evidence that they acquired many new understandings about race, class, culture, literacy, children, and teaching in the first literacy course. Based on these findings, recommendations are made for reforming preservice teacher curricula and forming stronger alliances with schools in high-poverty communities.Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Althier Lazar, Department of Education, Saint Joseph's University, 5600 City Line Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19131. E-mail: alazar@sju.edu 411 412 LAZARWhat happens in classrooms is first and foremost about the personal and collective connections that exist among the individuals who inhabit those spaces. Consequently, teachers' beliefs and values, how these are communicated to students through teaching practices and behaviors, and their impact on the lives of students-these are the factors that make teaching so consequential in the lives of many people (Nieto, 1999, p. 130).

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Teachers often resist discussions about racism in the classroom, yet it is a topic that is frequently addressed in multicultural literature. This study examines teachers in a graduate reading program (N = 58) who used picture books reflecting African American heritage with elementary school children in a summer reading practicum. Prior to teaching children, a subset of these teachers participated in a course that addressed issues of racism, allowing for an investigation of a course effect on teachers' comfort level with the literature and their addressing of themes that surfaced in the books. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze questionnaires, planning forms, lesson evaluation forms, and transcripts of teachers using the books to test the hypothesis of a course effect and to identify the range of variation in teachers' ways of using the literature. The teachers in both "course" and "comparison" groups tended to focus on the perspectives, feelings, and traits of the story protagonists when creating discussion questions and after-reading projects for students. Course teachers focused on the activism of Black protagonists significantly more often than comparison teachers did, although participants of both groups did not tend to represent racism as a system of White advantage. These findings suggests that literacy education programs can have an impact on teachers' ways of using multicultural literature, but to teach in critical and transformative ways, they will need programs that strengthen their understandings of constructs such as structural racism and help them facilitate thoughtful inquiries of this concept when using multicultural literature with children.