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Article Excerpt
For more than two decades, teacher education in the United States has been responding to the challenges posed by the "demographic imperative" (Banks, 1993; Dilworth, 1992; Nieto, 2000a) of an increasingly diverse school population. Researchers exploring these challenges have argued that "when the cultures of students and teachers are not synchronized, someone loses out. Invariably, it is the students" (Gay, 1997, p. 223). From this assumption, researchers have developed numerous approaches to culture-centered pedagogy (Au & Jordan, 1981; Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2000; Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), all of which are rooted in the belief that the best way to improve educational achievement for minority students "is to ensure that the delivery of all of [minority students'] educational services ... [be] culturally embedded" (Gay, 1997, p. 224). While slight differences distinguish each approach, researchers share a concern with preparing teachers to hold high academic expectations for all students, to value the cultural resources of their students, and to adopt a social justice agenda.
For teacher educators who accept that "culture counts" in education (Gay, 2000, p. 8), a driving task becomes helping beginning teachers develop cultural competence, which Ladson-Billings (2001) defined as taking responsibility for learning about students' cultures and communities and using students' culture as a basis for their learning. Although researchers provide detailed descriptions of teachers who model culturally competent dispositions, the effectiveness of these "dreamkeepers" (Ladson-Billings, 1994) may seem to be a matter of personal or cultural style that is impossible to emulate, especially for young White teachers (Seidl, 2007). Furthermore, portraits of highly accomplished culturally competent teachers gloss over the complexities beginning teachers encounter when they seek to center culture in the classroom. As Gay (2000) maintained, when beginning teachers' cultural backgrounds differ from those of the students they serve, centering culture in the classroom can be difficult. We need to understand how beginning teachers negotiate the complicated terrain of cultural competence.
In our work with White beginning teachers who actively sought to take on culturally competent dispositions, the process of developing cultural competence was a struggle fraught with multiple challenges. Emotional responses to racialized situations, unanticipated struggles with their own Whiteness, and the dynamics of their specific school context mediated beginning teachers' capacity to demonstrate cultural competence. This article closely examines one teaching moment in a White beginning teacher's classroom in order to look deeply at the ways in which emotion, race, and school context were at work in her enactment of cultural competence. Although Kelly (1) had chosen to participate in a special urban education program and although she believed she "owe[d] it to the world" to teach students who had fewer opportunities than she had (journal entry, January 25, 2006), Kelly's student teaching semester was fraught with moments in which emotion, race, and school context frustrated her attempts to teach in culturally competent ways. These factors filtered her vision, shaped her developing understanding of her experience, and played an ongoing role in her emergent beliefs about culturally responsive teaching.
The following research questions guided data collection, as well as subsequent analysis:
What does negotiation with cultural competence look like for a White beginning teacher committed to working in urban and underresourced schools? How do emotions, racial identity, and school context influence a White beginning teacher's negotiations with cultural competence?
In exploring these questions, our goal is to expand the research base surrounding culturally relevant pedagogy and to extend existing theories of cultural competence. The struggle faced by beginning teachers and teacher educators alike when they seek to center culture in the classroom is one we believe we have much to learn from. We hope this article begins a conversation that can help to normalize the fraughtness many beginning teachers and teacher educators encounter when they commit themselves to culture-centered pedagogy.
Review of Related Literature
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Although cultural competence originally focused on students, more recent articulations of this theory call on teachers to develop cultural competence as well. To be culturally competent, "educators must have knowledge of children's lives outside of school so as to recognize their strengths" (Delpit, 1995, p. 172). Culturally competent teachers must become, in essence, students of the cultures of their students, acquiring "thorough knowledge about the cultural values, learning styles, historical legacies, contributions, and achievements of different ethnic groups" (Gay, 2000, p. 44). Culturally competent teachers "use student culture as a basis for learning" and "promote the flexible use of students' local and global culture" (Ladson-Billings, 2001, p. 98). By learning as much as they can about the families, communities, and cultures of their students, culturally competent teachers can build "bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences" (Gay, 2000, p. 29) and serve "as a bridge between student culture and dominant culture" (Nieto, 2002, p. 18). This learning, however, extends beyond the cognitive domain.
The Fraughtness of Cultural Competence
Aware that prescriptions for enhancing teacher education tend to focus on the "cognitive, pedagogical, and political," Gay (2000) suggested that beginning teachers need more than "hopefulness and optimism" about their work with diverse students. She recognized that teachers will struggle and that this "struggle requires caring to be complemented by content and pedagogical competence, personal and professional confidence, and moral and ethical conviction" (p. 211, italics original). Taking on a culturally responsive disposition is, therefore, not a simple cognitive task that can be modeled and transferred to beginning teachers--it is a personal struggle that challenges affective as well as cognitive capacities. Beyond knowledge and skills, culturally responsive teachers must command affective qualities such as courage, willpower, and tenacity. Furthermore, Gay argued, "personal awareness and empathic feelings" about ethnic and cultural diversity are not enough; accompanying pedagogical action is needed to create instructional improvements for students of color (p. 209). For White beginning teachers who want to teach students of color, turning empathy and political conviction into culturally competent pedagogical action can be a formidable challenge. The affective dimensions of this challenge serve to complicate the matter for teacher educators, raising a difficult question: How do we prepare beginning teachers for both the cognitive and the affective struggles that the culturally responsive disposition demands? We believe the answer to this question lies, in part, in identifying factors that mediate the affective and cognitive struggles beginning teachers experience.
The Emotional Dimensions of Cultural Competence
Beginning teachers who bring a social justice agenda to their teaching, as called for in the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy, often experience emotions such as anxiety and guilt when they recognize that they are "implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront" (Boler, 1999, p. 166). In addition, when White beginning teachers work with students of color for the first time, the process of examining their assumptions about race can bring on emotions of uncertainty, insecurity, and fear. Such introspection, which is essential for culturally responsive educators, requires a degree of emotional risk for which many beginning teachers and teacher educators are unprepared.
Trainor (2005) highlighted the importance of emotion in education for social justice by showing how the political-critical and affective-feeling domains are linked in discussions of race, demonstrating the importance of dealing with emotion when White students encounter racial "others." Similarly, Lindquist (2004) argued that the resources students tap when they encounter people and contexts different from themselves "lie within the domain of the emotional" and called on educators to see "how these affective responses function as a form of work" (p. 188). These frames suggest that emotion mediates the development of cultural competence in beginning teachers. While the beginning teachers in our study actively sought to take on dispositions of cultural competence, their emotional responses to encounters with cultural "others" often served as obstacles in the development of "actionable" (Lindquist,...
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