Beyond the ‘good teacher’: guiding pre-service teacher reflections on culturally diverse students

Abstract

This article explores how reflective practice may be facilitated among pre-service teachers preparing to teach in culturally diverse classrooms. The significance of the mentor teacher’s ability to reveal her/himself as a reflective practitioner in order to promote student reflection is well documented. The article specifically addresses one teacher educator’s approach to offering mentor support with a focus on reflective practices related to cultural diversity. She explores how her ethnographic doctoral study on the classroom participation of adult South Sudanese students in different Australian learning environments has informed her own practice as a teacher, and ways in which her teaching philosophy and values were influenced by the sustained reflection needed to complete the study. By making explicit an aspect of her reflective practice, she aims to add to the growing body of literature on how to engage pre-service teachers meaningfully in reflection on their own classroom practice, especially in relation to teaching to diversity.

Keywords:

• reflective practice
• teacher educator
• teacher preparation
• cultural diversity

Notes

1. Ethical issues in the data collection specifically associated with dependency and partiality are addressed in detail elsewhere (Turner & Fozdar, 2010a). In order to protect the identity of the participants, all names given in the article are pseudonyms.