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An invitation to support diverse students through teacher education.

Article Excerpt
Dear Presidential Candidate,

Every candidate for president has ideas about how to strengthen teaching and ensure all students access to qualified teachers. But few of those ideas actually support and strengthen excellent teaching of our diverse students. I would like to share insights about what is needed and why, and ask for your help if you are elected president, based on my two plus decades of research and experience in teacher education for diverse students. I begin by describing two remarkable teachers in California to illustrate what strong teaching of diverse students looks like (Sleeter, 2005) and what the diverse students of this nation need of teachers. Then I outline three ways in which you, as president, can support excellent teaching and teacher education.

SNAPSHOTS OF STRONG TEACHERS OF DIVERSE STUDENTS

Juanita was in her 5th year of teaching when I visited her second-grade bilingual classroom of 19 students, all of whom were from low-income Mexican homes. I had become intrigued by her work because her second graders were writing books using computers. The local administrators had become intrigued because her students were outscoring other second-grade classes in the district. Juanita's teaching was based on rich professional knowledge, creativity, and high expectations for students whom other teachers often find difficult to teach.

Juanita started teaching children to create books when she realized that so much of the standard skills-based instructional program was boring. She told me, "I enjoy teaching but I didn't find it fun.... It was all about paper and pencil, paper and pencil, and I knew the kids were getting bored. I was getting bored myself." An immigrant herself, Juanita recalled that she had become "really hooked on computers in high school," partly because they helped her learn English. She began to see herself as an author in university courses in which books were created with student writings. She realized she could empower her students as writers and creators of knowledge, just as she had become empowered. She saw her students as potential college-goers but realized that college preparation, particularly for students of families that could not afford computers and had not been to college, meant that teachers needed to do more than just teach standards.

Juanita taught her second graders to compose text on the computer, augmenting it with scanned photos and clip art. She also taught them how to do some basic Internet research. For example, for a book featuring biographies, each child chose a person to research, then wrote a page about that person's life and inserted the person's photo. Each book had a table of contents, was bound with a decorated cover, and had a pocket with a library card so children could check it out to take home. It took some experimentation and persistence to figure out how to teach students to use computers because, although Juanita had professional training in using computers as a teaching/learning tool, most local second-grade classrooms were not organized for this purpose.

Juanita used the grade-level standards as a guide, but she expected and taught more than they require. After carefully studying the standards and adopted texts, using a combination of experience and professional knowledge, she identified which standards are key and which she could skip to make space for student-centered teaching strategies. She also tailored her curriculum for college preparation. Her combination of vision, high expectations, and pedagogical skill enabled her to teach deeply and to high levels. As a result, her students outscored those of other teachers who were following scripted curriculum packages that currently substitute for teacher professional knowledge.

Christi was in her 8th year teaching high school English when I visited her classroom. I was intrigued by her passion for using narrative writing to teach culturally diverse students to empathize and communicate with each other, and I was interested in seeing how she had used curriculum design skills learned in teacher education to accomplish this. Christi's school serves two adjacent communities: One is affluent and predominantly White, and the other is working class and culturally diverse. A White woman, Christi had grown up in the working-class community, where she had developed interest in diversity. She told me that as a student, she "was always hanging out with different groups, and just learning, learning their language and just listening to them, going to their homes, meeting their families." She added, "You could start a conversation with somebody or a friendship with somebody that just changes...

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