Cultural Construction Zones

Abstract

In working with preparatory teachers, we have tried to "place diversity front and center" to help students "see culture" as a prerequisite for culturally responsive teaching. The language arts methodscourse students who, like the authors, are White women from middle-or upper-income families, participated in learning opportunities that included writing cultural memoirs, field experiences in diverse settings, and written reflection on the relation between their cultural constructions and those of the students they were teaching. In this article, we turn around the culture question we've pushed the students to consider to ourselves: What are we learning about our students as cultural beings that is helping us prepare them more effectively to be culturally responsive teachers? We identified three areas of growth: We reconstructed our understanding of students as complex cultural beings, of ourselves as privileged teachers of the privileged, and of the nature and relationship of resistance and risk.

Autobiographies in Preservice Teacher Education: A Snapshot Tool for Building a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

“…Additionally, reflection provides a way to achieve better understanding of students' cultures and the significance of linking family, home, culture, and learning (Vogt & Au, 1995). However, teacher educators must model the process, ask the right questions, facilitate deeper discussions, and present more in-depth prompts (Adams et al, 2005;Allen & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2004;Fecho, 2000;Morton & Bennett, 2010). Mezirow's (1997Mezirow's ( , 2000 Transformative Learning Theory guided our inquiry.…”

Getting into the Zone: Cases of Student-Centered Multicultural Literacy Teacher Education

“…Considering teachers' heterogeneity in knowledge and experiences with diverse students, teacher educators need to provide safe spaces for preservice and in-service teachers to build on their own knowledge about teaching diverse students. And teacher education courses need to serve as testing grounds for the consequences of their own assumptions and beliefs about diverse learners and revise them to develop thoughtful understanding about teaching (Allen & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2004;Kumar & Hamer, 2013).…”

Beyond Sociolinguistics: Towards a Critical Approach to Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Teacher Education

“…In this way, one of the aims of multicultural teacher education should be to help preservice teachers 'bring front and center' (Allen & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2004) their culture and linguistic heritages. In the current article, my goal is to illustrate how two White, monolingual preservice teachers initiate a process of consciousnessraising (Freire, 1982) -becoming aware of their own cultural and linguistic location in the world -through participation in a sociolinguistics course on language and ethnicity.…”

“…Allen & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2004;Florio-Ruane, 2001;Rosaen, 2003;Trainor, 2002;Willis, 2003) document how when asked, 'What is your culture? ', White preservice teachers respond that they do not have a culture.…”