Preservice Teacher’s Intercultural Experiences In Shaping Their Developing Identities As Teachers Of Diversity

Author(s):

Denise Beutel(presenting / submitting)Donna Tangen

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 10 C, Professional Development for Inclusive Education

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

15:30-17:00

Room:

W6.21

Chair:

Jo Rose

Contribution

While school classrooms in many countries across the globe have experienced large increases in cultural and linguistic diversity over the past two decades, the demographic profile of the teaching workforce has remained relatively static (Santoro & Forghani-Arani, 2015). This trend is evident across many European countries, such as Italy, Austria and the Republic of Ireland and is also present in Australia, a multicultural society where the teaching force has remained largely Anglo-ethnic (Cruickshank, 2004; Han & Singh, 2007). The rapid rate of demographic change in student populations has led to challenges for education systems. Of particular concern, is that the educational outcomes of some groups of culturally diverse students lag behind those of the dominant mainstream culture (Santoro & Forghani-Arani, 2015). One reason attributed to the disparity in educational achievement of some groups of students is that many teachers are ill-prepared to teach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Darling-Hammond, 2012) with teacher education identified as failing to adequately prepare preservice teachers to be culturally responsive practitioners. It is argued that, as part of teacher education, preservice teachers need to be provided with opportunities to consider how their own positioning within a culture shapes their possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) as teachers who will engage the diversity of learners in their classrooms (Tangen, Henderson, Alford, Hepple, Alwi, Shaari & Alwi, 2015).

While there is a plethora of research exploring preservice teachers’ preparedness for teaching students with disabilities, Florian (2012) identifies that teacher education must also consider the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity presented in classrooms. This change in narrative creates a change in intercultural sensitivity, which is identified as an individual’s attitudes and understandings of differences specific to their worldview and the worldview of others (Bennett, 1986, 2004). Worldviews encompass awareness of one’s subjective cultural context and acknowledges how individuals discriminate phenomena in the world. Bennett’s (1986) Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) measures the orientations towards cultural differences from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. Ethnocentrism describes the orientation where one’s own culture is experienced as central to reality in some way and where individuals seek ways to avoid cultural differences. Ethnorelativism describes the orientation where one’s culture is experienced in the context of other cultures, where one’s culture is ‘experienced as just one of a number of equally complex worldviews and where individuals seek ways to understand and accept cultural differences (Hammer et al., 2003, p. 425). The underlying principle of the DMIS is that as one gains more complex and sophisticated experiences of cultural difference, the more one’s potential intercultural competence becomes.

In this study we focus on the ethnorelativisim and/or ethnorelativism constructs in exploring how intercultural experiences may impact on preservice teachers’ possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) as teachers of diverse learners. We posit that preservice teachers’ worldviews have an impact on their perceptions of their possible selves as inclusive educators. With its origins in educational psychology, possible selves theory has been used to examine the motivations, affect and behaviours of teachers in different educational contexts (Yuan, 2016), and how individuals navigate important life transitions such as preparing for a new career (Hamman et al., 2010). To our knowledge, these two theories have not been considered together before in understanding preservice teachers’ perceptions of themselves as teachers.

Method

Forty preservice teachers of 305 enrolled in a one-year graduate-entry teacher education program in a large Australian university participated in this study. All participants were enrolled in the core subject, Engaging Diverse Learners, generally taken in the first semester of study. As the name suggests, the focus in the subject is on developing preservice teachers’ knowledge and understanding of the theories and principles relating to the provision of socially just education, creating supportive learning environments for the diversity of learners in classrooms and the application of these principles to classroom practices. All students enrolled in the subject were invited to complete an online questionnaire. The first part of the questionnaire comprised questions collecting demographic data that included participants’ age range and gender. Further questions asked the participants to identify who inspired them to become a teacher and the image they had of themselves of the teacher who they aspired to become. Further open-ended questions focussed on the qualities or strengths that participants perceived they had to engage effectively with diversity and on their prior experiences with diversity. A process of content analysis (Mayring, 2004) was used in this study with categories emerging after repeated readings of the data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). As part of the process, each researcher read and re-read the data separately looking for themes. The data were analysed horizontally as well as vertically. That is, the complete set of responses for each questionnaire was examined as well as analysing the whole set of responses for each individual question. Following the initial independent analysis, the researchers discussed the themes collaboratively and referred back to the original data. The tentative themes were reviewed and refined throughout the process (Schreier, 2014) until agreement was reached on a stable set of categories.

Expected Outcomes

We use five cases from our data to illustrate the broad variation of understandings and experiences within this cohort of engaging with diversity and the impact on their imagined future selves as teachers. The cases include Hannah, a young female preservice teacher, who was not born in Australia but who grew up “in a country where there are now eleven official languages”. Her engagement with diversity from childhood was broad as the school she attended “was multilingual/multicultural, not only from various backgrounds within the country, but internationally as well”. Further, the country in which she was living “went through massive sociopolitical changes ... Adapting to other cultures and languages became a necessary way of life”. She described moving to Australia as a “culture shock” and found it “odd that one has to formally be taught how to adapt to a multicultural group, how to think from another person's cultural perspective”. While her experiences with diversity were sustained and broad, Hannah was also aware that she lacked knowledge of Australian Indigenous culture and that she “would need to curb being overconfident in her intercultural capabilities”. At the other end of our continuum, we present Ben, an older male, born in Australia, who could recall few experiences with diversity, either growing up or in adulthood, and acknowledged that his friendships with people from different backgrounds “ tended to trail off quickly” and his “lasting friendships come from similar backgrounds” to him. We discuss our five cases in relation to the constructs of ethnorelativism and ethnocentrism and the impact that engagement with diversity has on their developing selves as teachers. We will close with some provocations for teacher education to consider how preservice teachers can be better prepared to become culturally responsive practitioners that actively engage the diversity of learners in their classrooms.

References

Bennett, M. J. (1986). Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R. M. Paige (Ed.). Education for the intercultural experience (pp. 21-71). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. Bennett, M. J. (2004). Becoming interculturally competent. In J. Wurzel (Ed.) Toward multiculturalism: A reader in multicultural education (2nd ed.), (pp. 62-77). Newton, MA: Intercultural Resource Corporation. Cruickshank, K. (2004). Towards diversity in teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 27(2), 125-138. Darling-Hammond, L. (2012). Powerful teacher education: Lessons from Exemplary Program. San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Florian, L. (2012). Preparing teachers to work in inclusive classrooms: Key lessons for the professional development of teacher educators from Scotland’s inclusive practice project. Journal of Teacher Education. doi: 10.1177/0022487112447112 Florian, L 2015, 'Conceptualising inclusive pedagogy: The inclusive pedagogical approach in action'. In JM Deppeler, T Loreman, R Smith & L Florian (eds), Inclusive Pedagogy Across the Curriculum. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 11-24. DOI: 10.1108/S1479-363620150000007001 Hamman, D., Gosselin, K., Romano, J., & Bunuan, R. (2010). Using possible-selves theory to understand the identity development of new teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(7), 1349-1361. Hammer, M. R., Bennett, M. J., & Wiseman, R. (2003). Measuring intercultural sensitivity: the intercultural development inventory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27, 421-443, doi: 10.1016/S0147-1767(03)00032-4. Han, J., & Singh, M. (2007). Getting World English Speaking student teachers to the Top of the Class: Making hope for ethno-cultural diversity in teacher education robust. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 35(3), 291-309, doi: 10.1080/13598660701447239 Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American psychologist, 41(9), 954. Mayring, P. (2004). Qualitative content analysis. In U. Flick, E. von Kardorff, & I. Steinke (Eds.). A companion to qualitative research (pp. 266- 275). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. John Wiley & Sons. Santoro, N. & Forghani-Arani, N. (2015) Interrogating practice in culturally diverse classrooms: what can an analysis of student resistance and teacher response reveal? European Journal of Teacher Education, 38(1), 58-70. Schreier, M. (2014). Qualitative content analysis. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, 170-183. doi.org/10.4135/981446282243.n12 Tangen, D., Henderson, D., Alford, J., Hepple, E., Alwi, A., Abu Hassan Shaari, Z., & Alwi, A. (2015). Shaping global teacher identity in a short-term mobility programme. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-16. Yuan, E. R. (2016). The dark side of mentoring on pre-service language teachers' identity formation. Teaching and Teacher Education, 55, 188-197.

Author Information

Denise Beutel (presenting / submitting)

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Donna Tangen