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Based on selective findings from a qualitative study with first generation college students, this article presents the contradictory and complex ways in which the participants perceived sociocultural diversity on campus and their place within it. The students’ narratives both affirmed existing boundaries of social belonging based on the conventional categories of race, ethnicity, and social class and transcended them. Cross-border alliances were being built on campus at the same time that new boundaries were forming in unconscious ways. The discussion focuses on the implications of this study for intercultural capital development.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how collective conceptual reflections facilitated by online blogs can promote pre‐service teachers' growth in multicultural education classes.Design/methodology/approachAnalysis of one blog is used to demonstrate how information gained through that triggered the instructor's informed reflection and guided subsequent in‐class teaching/learning.FindingsThrough the analysis of the demonstrative blog, it becomes apparent that while pre‐service teachers were appropriating vocabulary used in the field of multicultural education, their narratives were superficial and oversimplified. Subsequent in‐class activities designed to attend to the conceptual gaps were used to problematize the simplistic views.Research limitations/implicationsThe data presented cannot be generalized to all pre‐service teachers. Since the purpose of this paper is to attend to the process and not the content, the demonstrative blog serves only as one possible example, which can be easily adapted with different concepts/goals.Practical implicationsIt is proposed that the identification of students' collective zones of proximal development (Vygotsky) in key elements of the multicultural learning chain can provide important information to the instructor for the re‐design of future teaching.Originality/valueContinual assessment of the effectiveness of multicultural education classes is needed, if such classes are to have a long‐term impact on pre‐service teachers' future practice. The micro‐level method proposed in this paper offers one possible way to manage the oftentimes overwhelming amount of information that they are built upon while continually monitoring students' learning.

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