Unsettling Conversations

Abstract

Equipping teachers for the full range of diversity of students in today's schools has long been a shared concern among teacher educators. Bilingual education, special education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and urban education are among the several responses to this fundamental educational goal. These responses, however, although critical for moving the project of educational equity forward, have tended to produce conversations within diversity communities in teacher education rather than across them. The aim of this special issue is to open up what we believe to be a long overdue conversation among scholars from different diversity communities within teacher education to begin to think about what is needed if we are to advance teacher education that is responsive to the full range of diversity of students and that takes account of the multiple markers of identity that characterize individuals and groups of students--disability among them. This special issue grew out of a major session that took place at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) titled Diversity Frameworks in Teacher Education: Where Does Special Education Belong? The purpose of that session was to initiate a dialogue among teacher education leaders in multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and special education to begin to unravel the enduring and thorny problem of why, given the longstanding rhetoric of preparing teachers for diversity, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of special education within the larger discourse of diversity of race, class, culture, and language. The roots of that session can be traced back to discussions that began in 2002, during a 5-year joint, federally funded project housed within the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) in the Council of Chief State School Officers, with AACTE as one of the lead partners. In response to the call for special education teachers to become highly qualified under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), teams participating in this project, representing 45 states and made up of higher education faculty in general and special education and their respective counterparts at the state level, started to grapple with the question of what it meant to prepare novice teachers for in this new policy context. Team members began to raise important issues about preparing general education teachers for students with disabilities as an integral part of teacher education reform. With this special issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), we broaden this question for the teacher education community: How can we work together to advance a more complete vision of diversity, one that does not merely attach disability to a long list of social markers of identity, but rather works from the assumption-and indeed the fact--that the children and youth for whom we prepare teachers do not have just one diversity identity, but rather multiple diversity identities that interact with and nest within one another in different and often complex ways. We appreciate the willingness of the scholars whose work appears in this issue--Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Curt Dudley-Marling, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Robert Rueda and Jamy Stillman, and Ana Maria Villegas--to join us in a rich conversation that pushes at the outer margins of the many diversity communities in which their and our work is typically situated. …