This article is downloaded from

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It is the paper published as:

Author: N. Santoro

Title: Teaching in culturally diverse contexts: what knowledge about self and others do teachers
need?

Journal: Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy

ISSN: 0260-7476 1360-0540

Year: 2009

Volume: 35 Issue: 1 Pages: 33-45

Abstract: This article draws on data from a small-scale qualitative study conducted in Australia
that explored how pre-service teachers engaged with students from culturally diverse
backgrounds during practicum and how they understood their own ethnic identities. The findings
of the study suggest that pre-service teachers have simplistic understandings of their students
cultures and limited understandings of how their own identities are constituted through, and by,
ethnicity. Such limited knowledge about the ethnic self and the ethnic other has implications for
the development of multicultural pedagogies. The article raises concerns for teacher education
including the need to provide opportunities for pre-service teachers to understand the ethnic self
in relation to the ethnic other through ongoing critical reflection.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607470802587111,
http://www.informaworld.com,
http://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/R/-?func=dbin-jump-
full&object_id=10529&local_base=GEN01-CSU01

Author Address: nsantoro@csu.edu.au

CRO Number: 10529

1
 Teaching in culturally diverse contexts: What knowledge about ‘self’ and
‘others’ do teachers need?

Ninetta Santoro
Charles Sturt University
Australia

Abstract:

This article draws on data from a small-scale qualitative study conducted in Australia that

explored how preservice teachers engaged with students from culturally diverse

backgrounds during practicum and how they understood their own ethnic identities. The

findings of the study suggest that preservice teachers have simplistic understandings of

their students’ cultures and limited understandings of how their own identities are

constituted through and by, ethnicity. Such limited knowledge about the ‘ethnic self’ and

the ‘ethnic other’ has implications for the development of multicultural pedagogies. The

article raises concerns for teacher education including the need to provide opportunities

for preservice teachers to understand the ‘ethnic self’ in relation to the ‘ethnic other’

through ongoing critical reflection.

Introduction

In the last twenty-five years across Europe, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia

and many other parts of the world, the ethnic and cultural make-up of communities has

2
undergone rapid and radical change. Unprecedented movements of people across national

borders due to sustained periods of political upheaval and war in many regions as well as

the development of global labour and education markets has resulted in communities,

some of which have traditionally been culturally homogenous, becoming increasingly

diverse (International Organisation for Migration 2005; Irish Refugee Council 2005;

UNHCR 2004). Such changing demographics are producing new challenges for many

schooling systems. Even in the United States, Australia and Canada where there is a very

long history of immigration of people from many cultural groups and diversity is not a

new concept in schools, changing demographics present new and different challenges.

For example, in Australia, where there are over 200 languages other than English and 3

main Indigenous languages spoken by approximately 17% of the population (Australian

Bureau of Statistics 2006, 146), pockets of Australian society are overwhelmingly

monolingual and Anglo-Australian. Over the past decade, the development of new

education markets in the government secondary school sector and rural schools has meant

a rapid increase in the number of full fee-paying students from South East Asia

(Australian Bureau of Statistics 2003). Many schools that have been relatively

homogenous are experiencing, for the first time, cultural diversity within their student

population. Often, teachers in these locations have had little experience in working in

multicultural contexts.

The need for all teachers to develop culturally responsive pedagogies has become

increasingly urgent. Although such a professional requisite is contained in standards for

teaching (e.g. Department of Education and Training 2003; Education Training

3
Committee 2005; Victorian Institute of Teaching 2003), it is inconsistently and often

ineffectively addressed in teacher education. Much research suggests that in general,

teachers are not well prepared to teach students whose cultural values and beliefs are

different from the mainstream (e.g. Achinstein & Athanases 2005; Gay and Howard

2000; Leeman 2006). According to Valli & Rennert-Ariev, many teachers “feel

inadequately prepared and seldom choose to teach in multicultural schools” (in Vavrus

2002, 15). Such schools, commonly regarded as ‘hard-to-staff’, are often understaffed or

staffed with teachers seeking transfers. High levels of teacher turnover in these schools

means that students “have a high probability of being taught by an under-prepared

teacher” (Martinez 2004, 5). Thus, students from some ethnic minority groups continue to

achieve outcomes below their peers (Luciak 2006; Teese & Polesel 2003; Windle 2004).

The nature of teacher knowledge required for teaching in multicultural contexts has

increasingly been the focus of much research (e.g, Chong 2005; Garcia & Lopez 2005;

Solomon et al. 2005). Following a review of such literature, I have loosely categorised it

into three broad and interconnected areas; Knowledge of Pedagogy and Practice,

Knowledge of Students and Knowledge of Self. These knowledges are complex and each

contains many interrelated sub-categories of knowledge. In this article I draw on data

from a small-scale qualitative study to highlight the knowledge of pre-service teachers in

regards to two specific aspects of these knowledge sets: Knowledge of Students and

Knowledge of Self. Here, I highlight eight preservice teachers’ understandings of how

their students’ identities and their own identities are constituted through and by ethnicity.

I suggest that ‘knowing the ethnic self’ and the ‘ethnic other’ are inextricably connected

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and are crucial to developing Multicultural Pedagogies and effective classroom practice.

Finally, the article raises implications for teacher education.

In what follows, I provide a brief overview of the study from which the data discussed in

this paper, is drawn.

The Study

A different quality practicum? Interrogating sameness and difference with preservice

teachers was a small-scale study funded through a Deakin University Quality Learning

research Grant in 2003 and conducted in partnership with my colleague, Andrea Allard. It

explored how eight preservice teachers constructed their own identities in terms of

ethnicity and socio-economic class and how they engaged during teaching experience

with secondary school students who had different ethnic and socio-economic classed

identities from themselves. The preservice teachers were either in the third year of a four

year degree or the final year of a post-graduate teaching degree. Like most teachers in

Australia, the participants in this study are from the dominant cultural ‘mainstream’ and

attended Anglo-Australian middle-class schools for their primary and secondary

schooling. They are monolingual and have had little experience of either working or

living in multicultural contexts. As part of their participation in the study, they

volunteered to complete a three-week teaching experience in one of two inner-city

government secondary-schools in Melbourne, Australia. The majority of students at each

school came from a Language Background Other than English (LBOTE) and were from a

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range of backgrounds including Horn of Africa, Bosnian, Serbian, Vietnamese, Chinese

and Iraqi. Most also received an Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), a

government subsidy paid to families living in poverty.

Data for the study were collected in three stages: 1) Pre-Teaching Experience. Before the

students undertook their teaching experience they participated in a two-hour Focus Group

where discussion elicited information about how they constructed their own identities in

terms of social class and ethnicity; 2) Teaching Experience. During their three-week

teaching rounds, each preservice teacher kept a reflective journal where they noted their

concerns, issues and experiences while working with different groups of learners.

Researchers also visited each preservice teacher and kept field-notes that documented

their observations of some of the preservice teachers in the classroom and their

conversations with them about the professional and personal challenges of teaching for

diversity; 3) Post-Teaching Experience. Following the teaching experience, the preservice

teachers were interviewed individually to follow up pertinent issues that had emerged

during stages one and two. A final Focus Group discussion enabled participants to

compare and reflect on their experiences.

Post-structuralist theories of identity have informed the study. Developed from the work

of Derrida (1976), Kristeva (1986), Lacan (1977) and Foucault (1978), post-structuralism

assumes identity to be multiple, negotiated, dynamic, changing and changeable (Davies

2000; Reay 2001; Watson 2006). The notion of a unified self with a set of core

characteristics has been rejected in post-modern times in favour of a view of identity as a

6
complex matrix of factors. Identity ‘markers’ such as ethnicity, gender and social class

for example, come together in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, to constitute

‘the self’. For example, one is never simply an ethnic Chinese but also a social classed

and gendered Chinese. However, how people ‘perform’ their identities depends on how

they position themselves and are positioned (i.e. their positionality) within the range of

discourses and discourse communities to which they have membership such as schooling,

professionalism and so on. Important also, is how people respond to the power and power

relations inherent within such discourse communities and how they take up or resist the

ways they are positioned.

In order to examine how preservice teachers understand their own identities and those of

their students, discourse analysis was used. This meant that it was important to focus on

the complexities of identity and to highlight the tensions between actual practices and

intended classroom practices and deconstruct binary opposites. As Weedon claims, “The

process of deconstruction reveals how binary oppositions are not expressions of a natural

order, but rather discursively produced under specific historical conditions” (Weedon

1999, p.105). The data analysis examined the interview and focus group data, that is,

‘texts’, for broad themes and recurring discursive practices that shaped how the

preservice teachers position themselves and are positioned within discourses of

multicultural teaching. It also attended to the silences, what was not said and the

discursive practices that shaped identities in implied but not explicit ways. According to

Fairclough, “What is ‘said’ in a text always rests upon ‘unsaid’ assumptions, so part of

the analysis of texts is trying to identify what is assumed” (2003, 11). According to

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Luke, discourse analysis is “a political act itself, an intervention in the apparently natural

flow of talk and text in institutional life that attempts to “interrupt” everyday common

sense” (1995,10).

In this article, I use the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic identities’ in preference to ‘race’ and

‘racial identities’. This preference reflects concern about how ‘race’ has been historically

connected to biological determinism and popularly regarded as ‘natural’ rather than

socially constructed. This does not mean however, that I do not recognise that skin

colour shapes the subject positions that are created for, and taken up by all people. Nor

does it mean that I accept, without question, the notion of ‘ethnicity’. It too, can be

reduced to its fundamental elements — in a postmodern and globalised world where

national boundaries and social boundaries are constantly changing and being recast, the

attribution of cultural traditions and characteristics as fundamental to a particular ethnic

group can be highly problematic.

Due to the small-scale nature of the study reported here, the data presented are not

intended to represent the perspectives of all preservice teachers and the findings are not

generalisable to contexts beyond these cases. Nevertheless, the data provide valuable

insights into the knowledge of eight preservice teachers in regards to the ‘ethnic self’ and

the ‘ethnic other’. Furthermore, while I understand the problems of separating ethnic

identity from other aspects of identity, for reasons of brevity, I have selected an aspect on

which to focus in this article, that is, how preservice teachers understand themselves and

their students as constituted through and by ethnicity. I have written elsewhere about the

8
intersections of ethnicity with gender and social class in regards to these data (for

example, Santoro 2007; Allard & Santoro 2006).

Knowing the ‘Ethnic Other’ and the ‘Ethnic Self’

Classroom practice marks the coming together of complex and interrelated sets of

professional teacher knowledges. Knowing what and how to teach culturally diverse

students is dependant upon teachers understanding their students’ learning needs and

recognising how and when those needs are different from and/or similar to the needs of

students from the dominant cultural majority. Delpit, speaking about teaching in

multicultural contexts, claims it is necessary “to really see, to really know the students we

must teach” (Delpit 1995, 183). Therefore, in order to really know students of ethnic

difference, teachers need to understand the nature of their students’ ‘ethnic identities’,

that is, what their cultural practices, values and beliefs are, and how these shape them as

learners and members of ethnic communities.

The findings of the study reported here suggest that the preservice teachers had limited

knowledge about their students’ cultural values, practices and traditions. Kylie who

attributed her lack of knowledge about other cultures to having grown up in an isolated

rural and culturally homogenous community reflects upon how she began to develop

knowledge about her students during her teaching experience. She says:

9
 I was very interested in learning about their different cultures so she [the

supervising teacher] just talked and talked and talked on through our lunch

hour, and that made me feel a lot better because I walked into class feeling

as if I knew them a lot better. Like I didn’t know that the Vietnamese girls’

parents were so strict and there are arranged marriages and all that […]

They’re not allowed to go out to parties, not allowed to go out with boys,

they’re very much set in their culture. That’s what the girls do, they stay at

home and get married.

Here, Vietnamese culture, as understood by Kylie’s supervising teacher and now Kylie, is

characterised by practices that control, hinder and restrict girls. Such a construction is

clearly problematic. It is at best, a generalisation that attributes some aspects of

Vietnamese culture to all Vietnamese-Australian girls. At worst, it is a racist portrayal of

Vietnamese culture as oppressive. Kylie has put her trust in her supervising teacher and

taken this advice on board as ‘the truth’. While this is not surprising, given that Kylie is a

novice teacher, it is also troubling that she does not begin to critique the advice but seems

to readily take up such a deficit discourse. She goes onto say:

It [this information] helped me to understand that’s why they’re so quiet,

that’s why they don’t say anything, that kind of thing, it helped me to

understand that. […] Like, when I went up to the girls [to ask them

questions], one of them would say what I’d just basically said and then the

rest would just agree and nothing else would be said.

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Similarly, on the basis of advice given to her by other teachers at the school, Kylie

attributes the rowdy and disruptive behaviour of her male students to their being Muslim.

She says:

…speaking to a couple of other teachers they did tell me that some of the

Turkish boys see the females if they haven’t got the head set over them as

easy, that they’re sluts, that kind of thing. That’s just from the way they’ve

been brought up…If a new female teacher comes in, that teacher has really

got to stand up for herself and tell them that she’s in charge and that they

are to respect her.

Kylie’s response to the boys, as the teacher suggested, was to assert her authority, remind

them about the school rules concerning behaviour and the need to respect teachers. In

reference to how she dealt with the behaviour of one particular student, she says, “I went

into the class and I said, “Right you’ve got one chance”. I gave him one chance. “Right,

move!” […] He wasn’t used to me doing that. He thought he could get away with it and

then in the end I sent him out of the room and then he knew I was for real”.

These stereotypical constructions of Vietnamese girls as quiet and Muslim boys as

disrespectful and disruptive are troubling for a number of reasons. Firstly, such

constructions suggest that culture (and gender) is singular, fixed, generalisable and shapes

learners in predictable, consistent and often, negative ways. Students’ responses to

schooling are regarded as predetermined — all students from a particular ethnic group

11
will behave in the same way and will conform to similar cultural expectations. Secondly,

it constructs the students, their cultures and “the way they’ve been brought up” as the

problem and places the blame on the students and their families. There are however, a

number of explanations for the students’ disruptive behaviour or reticence to participate

in class, including inappropriate or culturally irrelevant curriculum, poor teacher-student

relationships and so on. By constructing students as ‘the problem’, there is a risk that

teachers may not see the need to interrogate their own practices or the discourses of

schooling that work to marginalise some students. The solution lies with the students

themselves — the teachers simply need to find ways to ‘manage’ them. Thirdly, Kylie’s

naming of the students as ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Vietnamese-Australian’

or ‘Turkish-Australian’, denies the complexities of hybrid and multifaceted identities.

Individuals can identify with a number of ethnic and cultural groups to inhabit an “in

between space” (Bhabha, 1994 p.38), or to develop what Anthias refers to as a

“transnational positionality” (Anthias 2001, 620). Positionality, that is, the intersection of

one’s social position and one’s social positioning, can be constituted across national

boundaries and national belongings. What emerges is a newly forged identity rather than

an identity that is an amalgam of the distinctive characteristics of a number of cultures.

Furthermore, in naming the students as ‘Vietnamese or ‘Turkish’, even though they are

Australian born, Kylie sets up a binary between ‘real’ Australians, that is, those of Anglo-

Celtic heritage and ‘the rest’. According to Nicolapoulos & Vassilacopoulos, “In

Australia, whiteness is historically and socially constructed through processes that

position […] designated migrant groups as what we might call ‘perpetual foreigners

12
within the Australian state’, quite apart from their legal status or self-understandings”

(2004, 32).

In direct contrast to how some of the preservice teachers explicitly and uncritically

attribute their students’ behaviours to their ethnicity, others were reluctant to

acknowledge that their students’ differences actually did shape their responses to

schooling and that these were factors to consider in classroom practice. When reflecting

on how her students’ ethnicities shaped them as learners, Hannah suggested:

Kids are kids. […] Everyone has problems and if you are going to start

looking at some people, it’s really important that everyone receives the

same level of attention, I think. […] It’s very important to not make a

big deal of cultural difference.

Hannah’s response highlights a tension between acknowledging and explicitly naming

difference and seeing students as ‘the same’. Causey et al. refer to the tendency to see

everyone as the same as “naïve egalitarianism” (2000, 34). It does not acknowledge that

students are different, that differences do matter and some people are treated unequally

and have unequal access to resources because they are different. Students do not have the

same problems — to give them “the same level of attention” can ignore how schooling

practices often privilege those students of the dominant cultural group while

marginalising others. Perhaps Hannah took up this discourse of egalitarianism because

13
she was concerned about the risk of stereotyping students and being misunderstood as

racist. Speaking about a North American context, Pollock claims that educators need to

name ‘race’ and to “lead and participate in race conversations” (2004, 121) “in order to

purposely challenge an existing simple race system, in which the distribution of social

and tangible resources remains perennially unequal” (p. 43). Practices that attempt to

homogenise students, to blur the boundaries between ethnic minority groups and the

‘mainstream’, can serve to silence debates about the inequalities that do exist because of

racial and ethnic difference. How does one talk about inequalities – and address them,

without naming the differences on which inequalities are based?

Not surprisingly, given their lack of knowledge about their students’ cultures and

identities, the preservice teachers struggled to engage their students in learning. In

particular, they found it difficult to design lessons that were culturally relevant and

accessible. When developing units of work they were unable to see beyond their own

localised and taken-for-granted understandings of the world to what was culturally

relevant for their students. For example, Susan was surprised to find that her 14 year-old

Turkish-Australian students were disruptive during a social education class about The

Crusades and the lives of the crusaders. She had spent long periods of time designing and

sourcing material for a lesson about the crusaders’ shields that she was certain would

engage her students. However, she had naively assumed that the presentation of the

crusades from a ‘western’ perspective was an appropriate lesson. When I talked to her

about why this might be the case, it became clear that she had little understanding of the

socio-political and cultural discourses that may have shaped the students’ understandings

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of, and engagement with this topic. Similarly, Sally also chose to teach a topic to her 15

year-old students that required them to draw heavily on cultural knowledge they did not

have, while ignoring the cultural knowledge they may well have had. She used an issue

that had recently been in the Australian newspapers as the basis to teach argumentative

writing skills to an English class consisting primarily of second language learners from a

range of backgrounds including Vietnamese, Arabic, Serbian and Somali. The issue was

that a former Anglican Archbishop and newly appointed Governor General, (the Queen’s

representative in Australia) had been forced to resign because of the public perception

that he had, in his former position of Archbishop, mishandled claims against priests

accused of child abuse. Sally reported that this lesson did not go as well as she had hoped

— the students struggled to understand the newspaper text she had given them because

they were not familiar with the religious or political terminology integral to their

successful reading of the article. She was surprised to learn that the students, most of

whom were not Protestant, “didn’t even know what an Anglican or an Archbishop was!”

In order to develop culturally relevant materials teachers must know what is culturally

relevant to their students and must recognise when existing curriculum fails to build on or

acknowledge the cultural knowledge students bring to their learning. This requires them

to have knowledge of their students’ cultural traditions and practices and understand how

they are different from or similar to those of the ‘mainstream’. Teachers need to move

beyond their own worldviews in order to develop and understand their students’

perspectives.

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The preservice teachers’ lack of knowledge about the complexities of ethnicity as it

relates to students is clearly of concern. Similarly, some of the supervising teachers’

advice to the preservice teachers was often based on stereotypes. It is not always the case

that practising teachers who are working with students of ethnic difference on a daily

basis have acquired, simply through experience, the knowledge needed for teaching in

multicultural contexts. According to McIntyre, some teachers who are members of the

dominant cultural and ethnic mainstream can “perform the multicultural tricks while

never having to critique [their] positionality…” (McIntyre 1997, 13). It is the critiquing

of their positionality that might enable them to understand how their own ethnicity shapes

their relationships with students, their expectations of them and their classroom practices.

Such critiques are essential if teachers are to move beyond seeing teaching for diversity

as something that focuses only on the ‘other’.

The preservice students had little awareness of their own subject positionings in relation

to ethnicity. They understood ‘ethnic’ as a label for ‘others’ but not themselves. For

example, Jody says in response to a question about how she understands her ethnicity:

“I’d always assumed that I had none — or one that wasn’t all that interesting.” Why does

Jody assume herself to be ‘ethnic-less’ or at best, with an ethnicity that is so

uninteresting, it barely counts? Her understanding of ‘ethnic’ is in keeping with the way

it is popularly used in Australia as a noun for people of non-British heritage or as an

adjective for the cultural practices of the ‘ethnic’ other. The real ‘ethnics’ have ‘ethnic

food’, ‘ethnic dress’ and ‘ethnic customs’ and so on, while the real ‘Australians’ in

contrast, are without an ethnicity (Tsolidis, 2001).

16
Sally also equates being Australian with being cultureless, or at best, not having a very

interesting culture. She says, recounting an interaction with a student who asked her

about her ethnicity:

[…] when one of the kids asked me if I was Italian, I thought, oh I wish I

could say “yes”. I just wish I could say “yes” […] my family has been here

since the First Fleet [first British settlers to Australia in 1788] and it’s not

quite as interesting or, I don’t know… I talked to my family about it a lot, and

Dad said to me, “But on the other hand, don’t you think that we’re lucky that

because we’re Australian, we can kind of take on parts of other cultures?” We

have tomato day. We’re not Italian, but my Dad likes to think that he is. […]

We have tomato day and the amount of food and activities that we do at home

are so multicultural…I think it is disappointing that in real life that you are

just Australian.

Sally’s statement about her family having been in Australia since the beginning of white

settlement can be read as an assertion of her status as a ‘real’ Australian. Claims of

belonging embedded in time and history are commonly made by Anglo-Celtic

Australians to differentiate ‘real’ Australians from those with a more recent immigration

history. After establishing her belonging, Sally goes on to construct her Australian-ness

as bland and uninteresting in comparison to the cultures of the ‘exotic other’. However, it

is because she is “just Australian” with the privileges that membership of the hegemonic

17
‘mainstream’ brings, that she and her family can select what aspects of ‘ethnic’ culture

they will allow to shape and enrich their lives. In his work on multicultural Australia,

Hage says:

In the context of Australian multiculturalism, the point being made is not

simply that the discourse of enrichment places the dominant culture in a

more important position than other migrant cultures. More importantly

this discourse also assigns to migrant cultures a different mode of

existence to Anglo-Celtic culture. While the dominant white culture

merely and unquestionably exists, migrant cultures exist for the latter.

Their value, or the viability of their preservation as far as White

Australians are concerned, lies in their function as enriching cultures

(1998, 121).

The acceptance of and even ‘envy’ of particular cultures by those of the hegemonic

‘mainstream’ is popularly believed to be evidence of a successful multicultural Australia

where different cultures are valued. However, while some aspects of some cultures are

celebrated in some contexts in Australia, at the same time, the same ethnic minorities can

struggle to gain equal access to resources or to voice opinions contrary to those of the

hegemonic mainstream (Jakubowicz 2002). The acceptance of minority cultures under

such circumstances is a process characterised by a complex process of othering. In other

words, they are accepted because they are ‘other’. However, when minority cultures do

not enrich the lives of those in the dominant majority, or when their members are

18
reluctant to assimilate and take up the beliefs and values of the mainstream

indiscriminately, they are often constructed as ‘problems’ rather than as ‘interesting’.

Implications for Teacher Education

It is clear that to engage students effectively in learning, teachers need to know their

students and to understand their cultural backgrounds and the values and practices that

may underpin their expectations of, and responses to schooling. In teacher education,

such knowledge is sometimes developed through units of study that cover the cultural

characteristics, histories and traditions of particular ethnic groups. Such an approach is

of some value if it stresses that all cultures are multifaceted and changeable, that students

can have common experiences associated with their membership of a particular ethnic

group, but that within each ethnic group, there are also different experiences. However,

because such an approach usually focuses entirely on ‘the other’, it may simply construct

members of the hegemonic ‘mainstream’ as the ‘norm’ from which all else is understood

as different. Thus, culturally diverse students can be seen as ‘problems’ who need to be

‘managed’ so they fit in with the beliefs and values of the dominant ethnic majority.

Alternatively, their cultural differences might render them novel, exotic and ‘colourful’.

In either case, these constructions can simply affirm and reinforce stereotypes.

What is needed in teacher education are opportunities for knowledge about ‘the other’ to

be developed in conjunction with knowledge of self. These knowledges are mutually

19
constitutive − each builds upon, and is dependant on the other to make meaning. Palmer,

referring to the connection between good teaching, knowledge of students and knowledge

of self suggests, “When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. […]

and when I cannot see them clearly I cannot teach them well” (Palmer in Hinchey 2004,

1). Taking Palmer’s sentiments a little further, teachers need to come to know

themselves as ethnic and encultured if they are to understand their students and engage

with the complexities of teaching for diversity. This means understanding how their own

ethnic identities shape their teaching identities, their classroom practices and their

relationships with students. However, the eight preservice teachers in the study reported

here, lack awareness about their own ethnic positionings. They have never considered

that they have an ethnicity, let alone how it shapes their relationships with others and the

teaching discourses they privilege and/or silence in their classrooms. Other research

suggests similar findings for teachers in general (e.g. Aveling 2006; Milner, 2006). How

can teacher education make visible to them what is invisible, make explicit the

“investments that […] have been woven into the everyday fabric of what is considered

common sense” (Boler & Zembylas 2003, 111) and help them understand the ‘ethnic

self’?

Critical reflection, a skill long argued by many scholars as vital for teachers in general

(Dinkelman 2000; Schön 1983; Zeichner and Liston 1996), must underpin any approach

to teacher education seeking to help teachers understand the ‘ethnic self’. Wiedeman

suggests on-going critical reflection is integral to the development of teachers’

understanding of “their social identity in relation to the identities of their students and

20
especially as related to differences of privilege, relations of power, and oppression”

(Wiedeman 2002, p. 206). While the “emotional labor” (Boler & Zembylas 2003, 130)

needed for such reflection can be intensive, the issues it raises can compel “…preservice

teachers […] to focus on “themselves, their own experiences, life worlds, privileges,

struggles, and positions in relation to others (their students, their students’ parents, their

students’ communities, and their students’ ways of knowing…” (Milner 2006, 371).

Developing preservice teachers’ knowledge about the ‘ethnic self’ and the ‘ethnic other’

is difficult and challenging work. It may require teacher educators to unsettle what are

students’ deeply rooted beliefs about the centrality of their position within the hegemonic

‘mainstream’. According to Collins, preservice teachers, “Like all of us, […] can only

think through the lenses provided by the language and ideas to which they have been

introduced. The concepts and theories to which they have access quite literally set the

limits of their capacity to reflect” (Collins 2004, 232). Teacher educators must extend

their students’ reflective capacities about self and others in sensitive and non-

confrontational ways. If preservice teachers feel sufficiently threatened by having to

consider their ethnic identities, including the privileges accrued to them as members of

the dominant majority, there is a risk that they will simply find ways to justify, rather

than interrogate, their existing beliefs about others and their lack of knowledge about self.

While a detailed discussion of the specific strategies teacher educators might use to

develop their students understandings of self in relation to their students is beyond the

scope of this paper, it is important to note that the skills of reflection should be explicitly

21
taught. Preservice teachers do not automatically know what constitutes meaningful

reflection and reflective practice (Russell 2004). Some may see it simply as a process of

review and evaluation with an emphasis on the technical aspects of teaching rather than a

way to also understand how personal beliefs and values shape one’s sense of self as a

teacher and one’s teaching practices. In the case of teaching for diversity, it is important

that teacher education enables preservice teachers to reflect on how teaching identities are

constituted through ethnicity, and how they are played out through classroom practices.

What assumptions about their students’ cultures underpin preservice teachers’

expectations of them as learners and in what ways are these assumptions socially

constructed and shaped by their own positionings? In what ways are such expectations

evident in how and what is taught? For example, had Susan understood something of the

religious values of her Turkish-Australian students and had she been conscious of how

her perspectives on the topic were shaped by her own taken-for-granted cultural values,

she may have approached the teaching of the topic differently. She could have drawn on

the students’ knowledge of The Crusades and engaged them in discussion about how

historical events are understood from multiple perspectives and that ‘the truth’ depends

on one’s positionality.

However, without opportunities for both reflection and firsthand engagement with

culturally diverse student groups, knowledge of self and knowledge of others cannot

inform practice in effective and meaningful ways. School experience policies must reflect

the importance of preparing all teachers to teach for diversity by ensuring a significant

proportion of preservice teaching experience is spent in schools where there are

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opportunities to reflect upon and critique the teaching of culturally diverse students in

relation to self. Furthermore, the preparation of teachers for culturally diverse contexts

should not be confined to elective units for those preservice teachers who have a

particular interest in cultural diversity or think they might be likely to teach in culturally

diverse schools. Given the changing demographics of student populations, all teachers

should be prepared to teach culturally diverse student cohorts. Such preparation is

integral to the ‘core business’ of teacher education, and it should be, to varying degrees,

the concern of all teacher educators and integrated through all components of a teaching

degree.

While there has been an increase in research concerned with teacher ethnicity (e.g. Basit

et. al 2004; Santoro, 2007; Han & Singh 2007), there has been very little attention paid to

teacher educators and how their practices are shaped by their positionality. Given that

teacher educators, like most teachers, are drawn from the dominant ethnic majority, like

their teacher colleagues, many may not have considered the ‘ethnic self’ in relation to the

‘ethnic other’. They need to understand their own positionings before they can put in

place strategies to develop such complex understandings in their students. It might be fair

to speculate that learning about and reflecting on the ‘ethnic self’ in relation to the ‘ethnic

other’ is as important for some teacher educators as it is for preservice teachers.

Potentially, this is an area of important professional development and research.

The challenges facing teacher education seeking to prepare teachers to work productively

in culturally diverse contexts are significant. Complicating these challenges is a looming

23
international teacher shortage. In Australia, there is pressure on teacher education systems

to prepare greater numbers of teachers in shorter periods, to streamline teaching degrees

and to adopt what Collins describes as a revival of the “a craft apprenticeship model of

teacher training” (2004, 228). Potentially, this means that preservice teachers will spend

more time in schools learning the craft of teaching and less time in universities engaged

with theory. However, learning to teach for diversity requires sophisticated levels of

reflective skill, opportunities for practice as well as theoretical understandings of critical

race theory, multicultural eduction and so on — such knowledge cannot be developed in

schools and nor can it be developed in short periods of time. There is a risk that learning

about self will prove to be too costly and too time consuming. Teacher education may be

forced to take up ‘quick fix solutions’ to preparing culturally responsive teachers that will

simply focus on ‘ethnic others’. It is imperative that teacher educators ensure that the

knowledge preservice teachers need for increasingly diverse and global classrooms is

prioritised highly, and that it remains firmly ‘on the agenda’ of teacher education.

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