Exploring three White American teachers’ dispositional stances towards learning about racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity

Abstract

This study, situated in the United States, is set in a context where large and growing numbers of children from non-dominant backgrounds populate American public schools while the vast majority of teachers teaching in US schools are White, monolingual women who may not have the requisite expertise to teach children from non-dominant backgrounds. This work focuses on the learning of three White teachers enrolled in a literacy course designed to foster teachers’ understandings of racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Results revealed that the three focus teachers, all members of a small online Book Club within the focus course, assumed different dispositional stances towards learning about diversity. Moreover, their overall dispositional stances shaped the ways they positioned themselves as learners in the course as well as what they learned in the course.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• teacher dispositions
• linguistic and cultural diversity

Notes

1. Julie, Cindy, and Elavie all developed the first course that we focus on in this paper. Elavie taught portions of several class sessions of the first course. She has since moved to a different university. We acknowledge Elavie here for her important contributions to the original design and implementation of the first course on which this paper is based.

2. When we refer to modes of positioning throughout our manuscript, we italicize the particular mode to which we refer.

3. We refer to “text” in the broad semiotic sense here (Scholes, 1989). Examples of texts read in the class included students' and instructors' words, expressions, and actions; videos; course books and articles, etc.

4. In a Privilege Walk Activity, the entire class assembles in a horizontal line standing side-by-side facing the instructor. The instructor then reads aloud a series of approximately 20 questions. As students hear each question they either take a step forward or backward. An example of the kinds of questions asked includes the following: Has anyone made fun of you, or teased you, because of your race or language? If the student answers a “No” to the question, she takes a step forward. If the student answers a “Yes” to the question, she takes a step backward. After all questions have been posed, classmates look at one another's respective locations. The students with the most privileged lives have moved in front of the original line. Students with the least privileged lives have moved behind the original line. This activity serves as a powerful physical representation of the effects of privilege in one’s life.

5. We are not suggesting here that only students in graduate programmes engage in deep reflective thinking. We are suggesting, however, that graduate programmes can foster this kind of thinking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cynthia H. Brock

Cynthia Brock is a Lecturer in Literacy at the University of South Australia. Her primary teaching interests include literacy instruction for children in the middle- and upper-elementary grades, literacy and diversity, and qualitative methods. She studies the literacy learning of upper-elementary children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Her current work focuses on disciplinary literacy teaching and learning in the elementary grades. She also explores how to work with pre-service and in-service teachers to foster the literacy learning of children from diverse backgrounds at the upper-elementary level.

Julie L. Pennington

Julie Pennington is an Associate Professor of Literacy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the United States. Her research interests include the use of autoethnography in teacher education and questions related to how teachers approach literacy instruction in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. She is the author of The Colonization of Literacy Education as well as articles and book chapters focused on issues related to literacy instruction in diverse settings with particular attention to how race is constructed in schooling at all levels.