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The "power" to change multicultural attitudes.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Linguistically and culturally diverse students continue to increase in our nation's schools. Pre-service teachers need to examine their multicultural attitudes and become sensitive and knowledgeable about multicultural issues in the classroom and curriculum. Using a pre-post quantitative research design, we examined 144 pre-service teachers' multicultural attitudes during a teacher preparation course. Data analysis revealed the one-semester course did not make a significant difference in pre-service teachers' attitudes. The authors argue multicultural education implementation should occur throughout the longevity of the teacher education program. Reflection of practice is imperative to a professor's potential to enact true change.

Introduction

The number of linguistically and culturally diverse students in our schools continues to increase while our teachers overwhelmingly remain monolingual, European-Americans (August & Hakuta, 1997; Cushner, McClelland, & Safford, 2006; Hodgkinson, 2002). Consequently, it is important for Teacher Education Programs (TEPs) to help their pre-service teachers not only to examine their multicultural attitudes but also to become sensitive and knowledgeable about multicultural issues in the classroom and curriculum (Garcia & Willis, 2001; Gay, 2002). Multicultural TEPs combine knowledge of subject matter and effective teaching with sensitivity to cultural diversity. The goal is to prepare future teachers "to be reflective, critical thinkers" (Gay & Fox, 1995, p. 241) who will promote social equity in their classrooms toward the greater goal of a "collective empowerment of minorities in their classrooms" (Lipmann, 1996, p. 52). Furthermore, these programs should help teachers create a "system celebratory of diversity" (Cannella & Reiff, 1994, p. 33) and a system which empowers students to perform academically (Cummins, 1990).

In contrast, traditional TEPs often integrate one or two "multicultural" courses into the coursework (Kea, Campbell-Whatley, & Richards, 2005). These traditional multicultural education courses have shown mixed results concerning attitudinal changes. Lenski, Crawford, Crumpler, & Stallworth (2005) have reviewed several studies substantiating this claim: "Some researchers have indicated pre-service teachers in multicultural courses had improved racial attitudes.... while others reported few or even negative changes...." (p. 4). These results indicate a true challenge for TEPs utilizing a traditional approach to multicultural education in order to bring about any significant and positive attitude change in their pre-service teachers. In spite of the rising cultural and linguistic diversity in our classrooms today, TEPs continue to utilize teaching practices of the past. These past practices focused primarily on what and how to teach, but not necessarily, on who is being taught (Kea & Utley, 1998). This reluctance to address the diversity of our students is truly unfortunate when studies show pre-service teachers who have had multicultural teacher education preparation are less likely to view difference as "deficit" (Irvine, 2003) and have higher self-efficacy in their instruction of diverse children (Pang & Sablan, 1998).

The purpose of this study was...

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