To successfully move the field of teacher education beyond the fragmented and superficial treatment of diversity that currently prevails, teacher educators must articulate a vision of teaching and learning in a diverse society and use that vision to systematically guide the infusion of multicultural issues throughout the preservice curriculum. A vision is offered of culturally responsive teachers that can serve as the starting point for conversations among teacher educators in this process. In this vision, culturally responsive teachers (a) are socioculturally conscious, (b) have affirming views of students from diverse backgrounds, (c) see themselves as responsible for and capable of bringing about change to make schools more equitable, (d) understand how learners construct knowledge and are capable of promoting knowledge construction, (e) know about the lives of their students, and (f) design instruction that builds on what their students already know while stretching them beyond the familiar.

Over the past two decades, the short supply of teachers of color in elementary and secondary public schools has drawn the attention of policymakers and educators alike. To address the widening cultural chasm between teachers and their students, a variety of initiatives that aim to recruit people of color into teaching have been launched. Little attention has been paid, however, to articulating a research-based rationale for increasing the diversity in the ranks of teachers. This gap in the professional literature renders ongoing teacher diversity efforts vulnerable given the emphasis placed these days on research-based evidence in making decisions regarding the proper use of limited public resources, including funding for education. The purpose of this article is to address the noted gap in the literature. From an extensive review of the literature, we identified three major arguments for diversifying the teaching force and assessed the extent to which they are validated by empirical research. The results are reported, and implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.

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The use of a dispositional framework in the preparation of teachers, especially one that attends to issues of social justice, has generated considerable debate of late. In this article, the author argues that assessing teacher candidates' dispositions related to social justice is both reasonable and defensible. She explains why social justice matters in teacher education, provides a definition of the term dispositions and discusses why programs of teacher education must attend to them, and gives examples of practices used at one institution to assess teacher candidates' dispositions related to social justice to illustrate that such assessment can be done in a fair and principled manner. The author concludes that underlying the dispositions debate is an all-out war to define the goals of public education, the role of teachers, the nature of knowledge, and conceptions of learning, teaching, and learning to teach.

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