It's Not Your Mother's Classroom
By Kitty Green

In America's 100 largest school districts, minority enrollment is as high as 68 percent. The population entering the teaching profession, however, is increasingly white, female, and middle class. Studies have shown that prospective teachers have experienced limited interaction with cultures outside of their own. Preparing teachers to work in such communities is imperative. Clearly, today's classroom is not your mother's classroom.

In many areas, diversity is even more complex due to the added factors of poverty, single-parent, female-headed households, and language differences. Furthermore, research indicates that interaction between diverse groups does not take place on its own; thus, teacher-education programs need to be intentional about projects that develop intercultural competence.

The Education Department at Saint Mary's College has sought to address these issues. All pre-service teachers begin their teacher education preparation with Education 201: Introduction toTeaching in a Multicultural Society. In addition to cognitively exploring multicultural issues and completing 30 hours of field experience in a school, students are exposed to the idea of multicultural service-learning, an approach that engages students in learning with and/or in their communities.

At Saint Mary's, elementary and secondary education students learn to modify the content of
their teaching to adjust to the demands of diverse classrooms. Secondary education students infuse service-learning into curriculum design that focuses on big ideas that span time and culture in an effort to raise cultural awareness and increase student engagement. Still, in spite of field experience in diverse classrooms, student teachers continue to report discomfort and lack of confidence in engaging and motivating minority students in a variety of local schools.

The Education Department has responded to this need with new approaches that seek to
increase student-teacher confidence in diverse schools through the use of multicultural service-learning. Recognizing that service-learning can too easily reinforce inequality without the theoretical under-pinnings provided by a concentrated analysis of power and oppression in the service experience, Education 408: The Theory and Practice of Service-Learning Pedagogy, has challenged pre-service teachers to recognize that, without a multicultural perspective, service-learning can perpetuate racist, sexist, or classist assumptions about others in a "do-good" or "charity" orientation.

Through a combination of reading, discussion, and the implementation of multicultural service-learning in their own classrooms, pre-service teachers have experienced personal exploration of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic reflection at the same time they worked with their students on a service-learning project.

Initially, students had little sense of the existence of white culture or white privilege but they felt some comfort in creating a learning environment that allows for alternative styles of learning; however, they felt less comfort when the task was directly related to cultural issues.

However, pre-service teachers and their students changed during the semester. Teachers still believed that all students can learn; in fact, that belief increased from the beginning of the course. They felt more confident in defining white culture, as well as understanding and recognizing issues of privilege. "I never thought of my own race before, or really cared about it," said one student. "One interesting thing is the importance of investigating my own whiteness. This is an integral part of changing the meaning of being white. I also need to seek out interactions with diverse populations, immersing myself in different cultures."
Another student said, "It has become harder to look over differences students bring to the
classroom. I have developed a deeper respect for not just who my students are as humans, but for their lifestyle and culture, even if they are very different from me."

An English secondary education student described her students' behavior when her class
composed a book of poetry about dealing with death to give to a children's grief center.
"I became more understanding of my students and felt I understood them more as people
during this project," she said. "This makes me think about how strong they are as human beings, what courage they have. Because we shared many of the elegies out loud, we developed a strong sense of community in the class. Some students who had poor work in formal essay writing wrote beautiful poetry."

If teachers are to feel a sense of satisfaction in working with diverse student populations, they
must begin the task through careful analysis of their own culture and the genuine strengths of
their students. The task for teacher educators is to create the context for such intense analysis to take place, so that new teachers can go into the field with confidence to build a future that embraces diversity and builds community.

Kitty Green is an assistant professor of education and has taught at Saint Mary's since 2000.