Messages to Teacher Educators from the Margins

Abstract

At a recent annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), one of the nation’s most prominent African American scholars conceded to me that trumpeting the battle cry for racial and ethnic diversity in the teaching force is at a near loss. She stated, “In some cases the opposite is true—the teaching force is becoming less diverse year after year. And in some cases, the increase in teacher diversity is only slight.” She concluded, somewhat somberly, that teacher educators should redirect much of their energy to take to scale some of the promising work under way to explicitly and directly better prepare a White national teaching force to teach in diverse classrooms and schools. She stated, “We should be honest that most teacher educators are preparing White teachers for diverse classrooms and schools, and we should be exact in doing so rather than imagining we are creating a diverse teaching force.” When she heard me gasp for air as if I had the wind knocked out of me, she kindly and sympathetically stated, “We do not have to totally abandon the idea because the children in these classrooms depend on us to give them an experience with teachers who look like themselves.” This is a scholar who has dedicated so much of her work to the struggle to diversify the teaching force, yet her deduction seemed somewhat resolute and distressing. Although she stated we should not abandon the work, her words delivered a jolting blow for American education and for what Banks (2006) referred to as the demographic imperative: “The significant changes in the racial, ethnic, and language groups that make up the nation’s population” (p. 155).