Supporting Critical Multicultural Teacher Educators: Transformative teaching, social justice education, and perceptions of institutional support

ABSTRACT

In most teacher education programmes in Canada and the United States, educators’ opportunities to develop equity-related skills are concentrated into single ‘multicultural’ courses. These courses tend to have a conservative or liberal orientation, focused on appreciating diversity or cultural competence, rather than a critical orientation, focused on preparing teachers to address inequity. In this study, based on a survey of instructors of multicultural and intercultural teacher education courses in Canada and the US (N = 186), we examined the relationship between the criticality of their multicultural teacher education courses and their perceptions of institutional support for the values they teach. We found a negative relationship between the two – the more critical the instructors’ approaches, the less institutional support they perceived.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• intercultural education
• multicultural education
• educational equity
• critical education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A binary logistic regression analysis for institutional support was also conducted employing demographic variables as independent variables. While some variables approached significance, relatively no reportable significance was determined across measures.

2. * indicates significance at 0.05; ** indicates significance at 0.1.

3. means calculated through an ANOVA.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul C. Gorski

Paul C. Gorski is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. His recent books include Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap as well as Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education, co-authored by Seema Pothini.

Gillian Parekh

Gillian Parekh is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in the Faculty of Education at York University. With a doctorate in Critical Disability Studies, Gillian has conducted extensive research with the Toronto District School Board in the areas of structural equity, special education, and academic streaming. In particular, her work explores how schools construct and respond to disability as well as organize students across programs.