Preservice Teachers' Expectations for Schools With Children of Color and Second-Language Learners

Abstract

Current and future teachers in the United States are and will be majority White, monolingual, and female (Cushner, McClelland, & Safford, 1996); the demographic profile of students indicates that they are and increasingly will be children of color and second-language learners (Hodgkinson, 1985; Pallas, Natriello, & McDill, 1989). This cultural and linguistic mismatch between teachers and students is a critical issue for teacher educators. This mismatch dramatically affects future teachers and their students. For example, what happens when a 22 year-old, White, middle-class, monolingual female teacher candidate from a rural university completes her student teaching in an urban classroom, populated with second-language learners and children of color? With her, she brings a certain cultural, racial, linguistic, and economic background as well as expectations for urban life, children, schools, and communities. Her expectations probably are not based on firsthand experiences in urban settings. How does her experiential background affect how she approaches this urban experience and subsequently conducts her classroom? What expectations does she have for urban students and the community, and how do these expectations shape her behavior? Does she prepare curricular materials for gifted and talented children, or do her lesson plans focus on remediation? Does her classroom management strategy indicate that she expects most of her students to be well behaved and naturally motivated, or does she assume that they are difficult or not interested ? Does she make frequent attempts to keep parents informed and conduct regular home visits, or does she avoid parents and after-school activities because she feels unsafe in the school neighborhood? Many future teachers show a preference for teaching children whose backgrounds are similar to their own, perhaps assuming that they are ill prepared to teach other people's children (Delpit, 1995). The literature on preparing teachers for diversity indicates reluctance by future teachers to work in urban schools serving students of color (Wolffe, 1996; Zeichner, 1996; Zimpher, 1989). Haberman (1994) points out that it is not by chance that 70% of the teacher education graduates in Wisconsin do not take jobs (p. 167), explaining that the available jobs are in urban settings where Wisconsin graduates do not want to work. Many of these teachers will spend at least part of their teaching careers in urban classrooms or with children of color. Not only will they find themselves in schools where they differ in language and culture from many of their students; they probably will differ in socioeconomic class as well. What is the cultural, racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic profile of current and future teachers? Approximately 88% to 90% are European-American middle class and two thirds are women ... (and) less than 5% ... claim fluency in a language other than English (Cushner et al., 1996). The majority of teacher education students come from rural or suburban communities; one important reason for attending their teacher education institutions is its proximity to their homes. Zimpher (1989), in her report on the RATE studies, indicated that only 15% of teacher education students indicated that they would like to teach in urban settings. The profile of current and future students in the United States is very different from that of future teachers. In the 1980s, approximately 25% of United States school-aged children lived in poverty; 15% were physically or mentally handicapped; 15% were second-language learners; 14% were children of teenage mothers; 10% had poorly educated parents; and 25% to 33% were latchkey children (Hodgkinson, 1985). Current school populations in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas are already majority minority (Cushner et al., 1996, p. 10). Immigration and birth rates will cause the population of students of color to increase (Hodgkinson, 1985). …