A Study of Student Teachers' Perceived Resistance to Teaching Multicultural Education: Will the Pedagogy Be "Colored That I Teach?"
Open Access
- Author:
- King, Donna Ruth
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 01, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Jamie Myers, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Keith B Wilson, Committee Member
Ladislaus M Semali, Committee Member
David Mc Bride, Committee Member
Dr Ron Jackson Ii, Committee Member - Keywords:
- cultural pedagogy
cultural workers
liberation
multicultural education
liberatory praxis
historical dissonance - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT Why teach? This inquiry into the underlying values for teaching through specific “praxis” writings and curricula preparation can engage pre-service teachers in the examination of their teaching philosophy, their negotiation of cultural positioning, and their roles as cultural pedagogues. This dissertation examined the need to create pedagogical spaces to combine the use of technology, literary practices, and theoretical frameworks of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) to solve the dilemmas of cultural pedagogues. Thus, this study explored the cognitive awareness of teaching as a cultural activity with emancipatory consequences. This study that questions how and why the conceptualization of teaching multicultural education, including a review of the perspectives of scholars in the field of education, can indicate how literary practices are related to indicators of cognitive dissonance. Learning and teaching controversial subject content and a cultural context within multicultural education promotes “resistance” which needs to be examined further for the existence of the invisible undercurrents of cognitive, historical, and cultural dissonance(s). This perceived resistance and the ‘officialized’ conceptualization of theories of resistance have been indoctrinated into teacher preparation and practice through the ideology of the deficit model of education, resulting in the disempowerment of educators. Henry Giroux (2001) talks about “theories of resistance education,” in which dissonance can be framed as “oppositional resistance.” This ‘official’ view of education creates a suboptimal view of teaching framed with pedagogies of hopelessness, impossibility, and marginalization. The purpose of this research project was to explore a praxis teaching/research inquiry done with pre-service teachers at Penn State University. The teachers reflected on their own unique cultural stories and the history of their education when writing their individual statements of their teaching philosophy. The application of their lesson planning and their development as English pedagogues was enhanced through their participation in the National African American Read-In Day (AARI). Their experiences of teaching an MCE lesson and the reflections on their AARI teaching experiences became part of a methods course for pre-service teachers at Penn State during the Spring 2008 semester. The research project was a supplemental teaching project, with the goal of the students learning more about African American literature and teaching multicultural education. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate how a culturally appropriate planned teaching module, when combined with a web-based e-curriculum, could serve as a planned cultural activity designed to emancipatory consequences in teacher preparation and practice. The project involved pre-service teachers enrolled in a Language and Literacy methods course LLED 411 titled Teaching Language Arts in Secondary Schools, which analyzed how classroom literacy events connect theory, practice, and identity. Using the AARI day, their lessons involved engaging multicultural texts through the use of curriculum development as an inquiry into these socially constructed practices. They connected theory and practice, concluding with their teacher reflections about how “teaching as cultural workers” engages critical reflection on the ‘official’ representations of teachers’ racial and cultural identities, relationships, and values in traditional teacher education practices. In the Spring 2008 semester, a class of 13 pre-service teachers (2 males and 11 females) participated in this praxis project. They developed and taught lessons on African American literature for the local high school’s AARI activities. This group of all White pre-service teachers taught these lessons to a predominately White high school population. In the next section I describe how to utilize theories of multicultural education and ‘cultural pedagogy’ to prompt pre-service teachers’ analyses of how ‘official’ educational texts (e.g., standardized curricula and “traditional” pedagogical styles) reflect the dominant racial and cultural identities of teachers. However, in this cultural exercise, the pre-service teachers were teaching African American literature, some context of which are deemed as “unofficial” educational texts (e.g., non-standardized curricula and “cultural” pedagogical styles) to a majority classroom and then reflecting upon their experiences as English educators and cultural pedagogues. This dissertation argues how student teachers’ rethinking of traditional practices and their uses of critical pedagogy theory (Giroux, 1998) and emancipatory education (Freire, 1993) helped to transform their knowledge of literacies, identities, relationships, and values. Because the pedagogical goal of the project was to have the teachers engage in an inquiry into their cultural identity as the basis for connecting theory and practice, the knowledge of their own “cultural” and “societal” identities were integral to this AARI cultural activity. Thus, what is important to note is that the 13 teachers and myself, the researcher, can be represented in several ways: 1) two males and nine females, 2) two students who did not attend the AARI activity with their groups, but still participated in the online activities and research activities, and 3) being instructed by an one African American graduate teaching assistant and researcher (myself). These aspects of identity were significant to this study and to their work as future educators who were almost exclusively White, middle class, female students seeking secondary English teacher certification in a large Midwestern public university.