Abstract
This article centers on one teacher educator’s experiences and observations in teaching a Multicultural Education course to pre-service teachers at a teacher preparation program in the Northwest. The author asserts that, although the course intends to convey the positives of asset-based teaching and the negatives of deficit-based thinking, it is possible both the teacher educator and implicit messages within the course structure itself send the opposite message to pre-service teachers. One example of this contradiction lies in the language of the course description. In centering the course on “the development of cultural competence,” the implied assumption is that pre-service teachers are somehow culturally incompetent upon entering the classroom. Thus, teacher educators’ efforts to encourage asset-based perspectives may be read as hypocritical by the pre-service teachers. After examining how such a mismatch between theory and practice occurs, the author offers ideas towards helping other teacher educators emphasize asset-based teaching with their pre-service teachers.
DOI
10.15760/nwjte.2015.12.1.9
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25446
Recommended Citation
Hollar, James
(2015)
"Engaging Asset-based Education: Practicing What We Preach in Multicultural Education Course,"
Northwest Journal of Teacher Education: Vol. 12
:
Iss.
1
, Article 9.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15760/nwjte.2015.12.1.9