Teaching for Diversity

Framing the Issue

"Unity through diversity is the only true and enduring unity."
-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali;

To offer participants a contextual framework, keynote speaker Ana Maria Villegas discussed four key areas regarding teaching for diversity: demographic trends, preparing teachers for diversity, increasing the pool of teachers of color, and policy considerations.

The first of these, demographic trends, indicate that despite changes in the student population, teacher populations have changed little. High proportions of white (non-Hispanic), monolingual, middle-class females continue to enter the profession and, conversely, low numbers of minorities enter the profession.

Villegas reported that recent data from the National Center of Educational Statistics reveal that K-12 enrollments in 1986 were 16% African American, 10% Hispanic, and 4% Asian and Native American, for a total of about 30%. This figure represents a 16% increase in such enrollments over ten years.

Meanwhile, however, fewer than 15% of the teaching force and fewer than 12% of administrators are representative of those populations. This trend is expected in increase in the future, Villegas said. By the turn of the century, "the representation of teachers of color will drop to a low of 8%, while student enrollment will increase to as much as 40%." This divergence among students and teachers has been influenced in part by retirement patterns of teachers and by immigration patterns of the 1980s that brought more people of color to the U.S.

The second key area Villegas touched on, preparing teachers for diversity, requires that teachers have certain knowledge, skills, and predispositions or attitudes. These attitudes include a respect for cultural differences, a belief that all students are able to learn, and a sense of professional efficacy, an ability to understand one's own cultural background and to empathize with students.

"Although most educators today talk about cultural differences," she said, "many continue to think of students of color as being culturally deficient, and that translates into low expectations for students of color that in turn results in watered-down curriculum. It's a vicious cycle.

Teachers must be aware of the cultural resources their students bring to class and should use these resources to plan, implement, and evaluate instruction. Selecting materials, determining instruction methods, managing the classroom, and evaluating students are all influenced by cultural understandings and misunderstandings. "I don't mean that teachers need a list of characteristics," Villegas said. "They need processes by which they can become familiar with the varied and changing cultural makeup of the populations they serve.

Meanwhile, several obstacles slow or inhibit teacher education for diversity at the college and university level:

generally, teacher educators are, themselves, unprepared for diversity;
often they bring their own biases into the classroom;
curricular revision is poorly rewarded and time consuming;
support for diversity should exist, and often does not, beyond colleges of teacher education and into the entire university community;
there are still few faculty members of color;
scholarship in areas related to diversity is often not respected or rewarded appropriately; and finally,
faculty often are not encouraged or rewarded for working directly with school districts.

In sum, Villegas said, "teacher education is a field that is one of the most poorly regarded in the academy and yet we are charging it with a task that is really a systems challenge."

The third key area, increasing the pool of teachers of color, can be effectively addressed by understanding the reasons for the shortage. Among these, Villegas said, are the generally low status and poor pay associated with teaching; an underrepresentation, as mentioned earlier, of minority faculty and insufficient attention to diversity at the college level; reductions in available federal financial aid for minority students and insufficient recruiting of people of color into teaching; discriminatory or inadequate admissions and testing procedures; and, perhaps most significant, an overall drop in college enrollment among students of color.

Increasing the pool, Villegas reiterated, is not simply a matter of recruitment. Solving this problem requires a comprehensive, systemic approach that begins with the earliest grades and considers the degree to which multicultural content suffuses education in every area. "There is a lot of cultural discontinuity between home and school," she said. "Students of color manage a very different culture at home than they do in school. The absence of teachers of color is a major block to students moving forward. It's another vicious cycle. We need these mentors, these role models, these cultural brokers.

Finally, Villegas discussed six areas related to policy considerations. The first of these, examining the state context, suggests that policymakers examine the ethnic/racial composition of the student population; assess how well students of color are doing in graduating, performing on tests, attending school, and being promoted; analyze not only the ethnic/racial composition of the teaching force but also who collects such data and how; discover what efforts are already in place to restructure or revise teacher education; and, ask whether restructuring teacher education is a real priority and whether the state is willing to examine existing policies and practices.

The next policy consideration is whether all prospective teachers are being prepared to teach a culturally different student population. This requires that education decisionmakers analyze the teacher preparation curriculum for the suffusion of information. They also need to learn what weight accreditation programs give to diversity, whether faculty incentives exist for encouraging diversity in the curriculum, and whether the faculty itself represents a diverse spectrum of the population. In addition, Villegas explained, both minority and non-minority faculty should be expected to teach about diversity-related issues.

Increasing the pool of candidates from which teacher education programs can pull is a third policy issue to consider. Two principal questions to be answered are: "How can the graduation rate of students of color be increased?" and "How can the pool of candidates be widened?" With regard to the latter, Villegas noted that recruiting avenues include community college students, from among teacher aides, from other fields, and teacher cadet models.

Recruiting and admitting students of color into teacher education is a fourth policy area Villegas addressed. Inherent in this is the need to provide financial incentives such as stipends, scholarships, loans, and tuition wavers. In addition, states should provide competitive teacher salaries and working conditions, determine whether admissions criteria give attention to multicultural experiences, and look into ways that colleges and universities might use nontraditional procedures or indicators to lure talented students of color.

In addition to recruiting and admitting students, policymakers should consider a fifth policy issue�retention and the entry of candidates into teaching itself. Retaining students requires a commitment to creating an inclusive college community, offering support service through graduation, increasing the number of faculty members of color, and analyzing the curriculum for cultural responsiveness. Finally, assuring students' entry into teaching requires that state policymakers know not only their state's certification requirements, but also the pass rate for candidates of color and whether there are alternative routes to earning teaching certificates.

"Schools have not traditionally done a good job of educating students of color," she concluded. "This pattern must be reversed. It is a moral issue, but beyond that, it is also an issue of economic survival. Our society cannot afford to lose the many resources we are losing by not bringing in individuals of color."

Next Page: Recruiting Strategies