Superdiversity and Teacher Education

Supporting Teachers in Working with Culturally, Linguistically, and Racially Diverse Students, Families, and Communities

Guofang Li, Jim Anderson, Jan Hare, Marianne McTavish, Guofang Li, Jim Anderson, Jan Hare, Marianne McTavish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367482619
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000344578
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This edited volume addresses the pressing imperative to understand and attend to the needs of the fast-growing population of minority students who are increasingly considered "superdiverse" in their cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds. Superdiverse learners—including native-born learners (Indigenous and immigrant families), foreign-born immigrant students, and refugees—may fill multiple categories of "diversity" at once. This volume helps pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators to move beyond the demographic backgrounds of superdiverse learners to consider not only their ways of being, motivations, and social processes, but also the ongoing systemic issues of marginalization and inequity that confront these learners.

Challenging existing teaching and learning paradigms in the K-12 North American context, this volume provides new methods and examples for supporting superdiverse learners in a range of settings. Organized around different conceptual underpinnings of superdiversity, contributors identify the knowledge gaps and effective practices in engaging superdiverse learners, families and communities. With cutting-edge research on this growing topic, this text will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students in multilingual education, literacy education, teacher education, and international education.

SECTION II

Research on Teacher Education in a Time of Superdiversity

6
Teacher Education for Diversity Through an Autoethnographic Lens

Antoinette Gagné

The increasing diversity of our student population around the world has led to multiple calls to action to improve teacher education in recent years (e.g., Senyshyn, 2018; UNESCO, 2016). The fact that most teacher candidates have been educated by elementary and secondary school teachers who may not have had a diversity mindset or been responsive to their diverse students makes the need to prepare teachers for today’s and tomorrow’s schools urgent. We need to support new teachers to thrive on shifting landscapes of policitized transnationalism and immigration in superdiverse classrooms and schools. In this chapter, I provide some insight into how one graduate teacher education program in Ontario has evolved to prepare teachers for this new world.

As the province of Ontario has undergone dramatic demographic shifts in the last three decades, it reflects the diversification in the population in many countries. The 2016 census reveals that 29.3 percent of Ontario’s approximately 14 million people identify as visible minorities. In addition, in 2016, 29.1 percent of Ontarians were born outside of Canada and 27.9 percent have a mother tongue other than French or English (Statistics Canada, 2016). Other important milestones include the release of Ontario’s Education Equity Plan in 2017 and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s (OISE’s) updated Guiding Principles on Equity and Diversity in 2018. In 2017, the Ontario College of Teachers also published its initial teacher education Accreditation Resource Guide with an explanation of its intention which matches many of the calls to action for teacher education:

The guide is predicated on the principle that students of programs of professional education and teachers need a strong body of foundational professional knowledge that is evidence-based and practice-informed in order to begin to develop professional judgment and skills in pedagogical decision-making. The guide presumes that all teachers view themselves as learners and understand that the student/learner must be the centre of their work in teaching and learning. The concept that teachers are life-long learners who are beginning the continuum of professional learning underpins the guide. The guide expects that all teachers hold a growth mindset and work from an asset-based approach for their students and themselves.

(p. 5)

Finally, there are about 2 million students in elementary and secondary schools in Ontario, with a quarter either currently or formerly identified as English learners (ELs). In Toronto, the number of ELs is much higher as 46.1 percent of the population is from an immigrant background (People for Education, 2015).

In the next section, I begin by explaining autoethnographic methodology and go on to narrate parts of my 30-year journey as a teacher educator at the University of Toronto. I then propose two conceptual lenses that help to make sense of my deconstruction of one graduate teacher education program that has evolved over several years to prepare teachers for diversity and provide intercultural learning opportunities. In particular, I examine the sociopolitical context and the collaborative efforts of faculty, staff, school and community partners through the overlapping lenses of the Teaching for Equity framework (Grudnoff et al., 2017) and Dimitrov and Haque’s model for Intercultural Teaching Competence (2016), as well as the lens of my own experiences as a teacher educator in this program. Finally, I discuss the complexity involved in preparing teachers for diversity and providing intercultural learning opportunities for future teachers and readers are encouraged to consider how to prepare teachers with a diversity mindset and responsiveness in their unique contexts.

Analytic Autoethnography

Analytic autoethnography is one of several strands which are part of the broader autoethnographic research tradition. Autoethnography is a type of qualitative research methodology where the researcher/author writes reflexively, explores personal/professional experiences and connects these to sociopolitical issues to make sense of them.

I have adopted an analytical autoethnographic approach to critically examine the genesis and evolution of a graduate teacher education for equity and div...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Superdiversity, Emergent Priorities, and Teacher Learning
• SECTION I: Contexts of Teacher Education in a Superdiverse World
• SECTION II: Research on Teacher Education in a Time of Superdiversity
• SECTION III: Engaging Practices for Educators for Superdiversity
• Index