Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress International Special Education Conference Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity? 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland

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Student teachers and cultural
diversity in an Australian regional university

Dr. Gaelene Hope-Rowe
La Trobe University, PO Box 199, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
g.rowe@latrobe.edu.au

ABSTRACT

This article examines student teachers’ discursive constructions of difference, cultural diversity and race as they write and talk about their cultures and identities in relation to teaching and learning in the first year of a Primary Teaching Degree in a regional Australian university.

The qualitative case study which informs this paper considered the discursive resources that students bring to teacher education from their past experiences and contact with cultural differences in communities, families and schools. It examined various discourses around cultural diversity that are available to them in the teacher education course and how their discursive practices are mediated and reconstructed in the particular university context. A major goal was to explore how universities in largely homogeneous settings might firstly work with the resources that students bring to teacher education and secondly, assist students to consider the implications of cultural and linguistic   diversity for teaching language and literacy.

Student teachers and cultural diversity in an Australian regional university

...For the role-play of the mock staff meeting, I was to be a parent who believed that whole language was the most beneficial way to teach students and was to put up arguments to back up this opinion. I was really against this opinion as I think that the children personally learn their language at a faster rate when they are taught to recognise first the single letters and then to progress into words rather than being thrown in at the deep end to be faced with the whole language approach.

When this argument came around it was easy to see that it was going to be an argument between two people, Robbie and Ashley. Both these people had different ideas and presented them well.... One of the arguments that I believe came up and caused quite a stir, even in me, was the problems associated with cultural differences within the classroom. The problems associated with teaching content but also concerns about methods.

At this moment in time a politician by the name of Pauline Hanson has presented some views that I personally agree with and also have some strong opinions on. I am totally against people coming into this country and not being able to speak any English if they are intending to live here. Aren’t they coming here to be Australian? I stated that I could fix the immigration problem in this country by blowing all the Asians up, then the kids wouldn't be a problem. You did not like this and from this period on I did not really take much notice in the class because of the fact I was thinking about how I could have phrased this comment to suit the argument, rather than cause a scene within it. An enjoyable class that showed that we can all have different ideas and feelings.                                                                 (Jason, Dec, 1996)

Aren’t they coming here to be Australian?

In a university classroom in a provincial city in Victoria, as part of a language and literacy elective subject, fourth year primary teacher education students were encouraged to articulate and to argue their personal theories of and approaches to teaching and learning. To facilitate the discussion and debate students were involved in a mock staff meeting. During the role-play students were asked to assume various roles as whole language teachers and skills based teachers, concerned parents, curriculum consultants and the school principal. My aim, as their lecturer, was to encourage student involvement in their learning, through discussion, and at the same time to demonstrate various oral language strategies, which they could use in their teaching. I expected that students would raise issues in relation to theories, teaching approaches and methods they had encountered in previous three years of the Primary Teaching Degree course. Throughout the subject students wrote about their own learning and issues in relation to teaching and learning language and literacy. The account above is from a student’s reflective journal.

The journal entry disturbed me greatly. These students were in their final year of pre-service education and, although we often had open, and sometimes heated arguments before, this was the first time I had encountered such explicit racism. I found it confronting to think that student teachers, expressing overtly racist and violent views were about to enter the teaching profession. In the account Jason espoused his views on Asian immigration as he aligned himself with Pauline Hanson, the political leader of the One Nation Party at the time. Perhaps his attitudes were a result of ignorance, which breeds suspicion and intolerance. However, it has been argued that to attribute racism to individual ignorance may negate influences embedded in the social structures and institutions of Australian society.

When I reflected on the student’s espoused views I found it helpful to consider the incident in relation to the university course content and implementation and my role, as a teacher educator. I also began to question whether and how it was possible to raise issues of diversity and to achieve goals of cultural tolerance and inter-cultural understandings and whether this situation is even more challenging in universities located in predominantly white communities in rural and regional locations.

The qualitative case study which informs this article was conducted with student teachers in the first year of a primary teacher education course where the population remains predominantly white Anglo and Celtic Australian. The pseudonyms,‘Central City’ and ‘Goldridge’ are used to name the University and the provincial city respectively.

Aims of the study

I had three aims for the study. First, I aimed to investigate first year student teachers’ awareness and understandings of difference and cultural diversity, including their perspectives of multicultural Australia. I asked students to write and talk about their identities and cultures and past experiences of cultural diversity in homes, communities and schools. They also spoke about their more recent contact and experiences with cultural diversity in Goldridge, and through university coursework and school-based field experiences. Secondly, I aimed to investigate student teachers’ views of the needs of learners with diverse cultural and linguistic resources and implications for language and literacy learning and teaching. I asked students to recall and reflect on their memories of learning (and teachers of) language and literacy and to consider implications for teaching diverse student populations based on their past experiences and more recent understandings gained through coursework and field experiences. Thirdly, I aimed to investigate student teachers’ knowledge of, attitudes towards and concerns in regards to teaching in multicultural classrooms.

Introducing the researcher

While my personal identity and position as lecturer are not the focus of this article,   a brief introduction serves to contextualise my views on teaching   and some of issues associated with working   at Central City university.   I was born, raised and educated in rural and regional Victoria and, have spent my teaching and professional life in and around Goldridge where,   while some changes have occurred in more recent years, the population has remained largely ethnically homogeneous. I entered teacher education with similar socio-cultural resources and past experiences as many of the student teachers I currently teach. My professional experience has involved eight years as a primary and junior secondary teacher in and around Goldridge and five years as a curriculum consultant for Catholic schools in the region. In a sense I am an ‘insider’ in this particular educational community.   I have been a language and literacy teacher educator and researcher at Central City University for fourteen years and this experience has added to what were essentially hunches about student teachers’ and teachers’ lack of awareness and concern for issues of cultural and linguistic diversity and implications for teaching and learning.

Two key beliefs have informed my teaching. First is a belief that teachers’ and student teachers’ past experiences, prior knowledge and competencies, and cultural and linguistic resources mediate the ways in which they come to understand, interpret and respond to curricula. Secondly, the development of pedagogical practices must value, affirm and utilise students’ past experiences, prior knowledge and cultural and linguistic resources. However, while these two premises have been well acknowledged in regard to the schooling of student populations, they are less apparent in teacher education and, in recent times of diminishing university resources, I would argue that they have become increasingly difficult to achieve. For example, diminishing resources have lead to, the ‘rationalisation’ of subject offerings, more lecture mode university classes and reduced fieldwork.

As a lecturer in language and literacy I claim to present students with various theories and approaches and to assist them to develop a repertoire of skills and techniques for   teaching   diverse student populations. I also espouse that, in adopting and adapting classroom literacy practices, to treat ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences as simply matters of individual differences, or to treat culturally diverse groups in a homogeneous manner, does not address the critical issues of literacy learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and multicultural appreciation and understanding for all students. However, when I reflect on such issues, I am aware that the educational decisions I make are influenced partly by the university course structure and the curriculum design, content and pedagogy, and partly by my identity and past experience as well as a particular student population.

Multicultural Australia: A metropolitan and regional divide

Statistically Australia is and always has been a multicultural society. The cultural and linguistic diversity of the original Aboriginal population, differences in ethnic origins, languages and cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century settlers, diversity in cultures and languages brought to Australia through post-world war two European immigration, and more recent Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and African immigration is testament to this fact. The diversity of people and various cultures through original settlement or settlement via immigration, has had a striking impact upon the profile of Australia as a nation. Just as immigration has had a striking impact upon the profile of Australia as a nation, the composition of Australia’s immigration intake has become progressively more diverse.

Currently about twenty-four percent (24%) of the population of Australia was born overseas, including fourteen percent (14%) from backgrounds other than English countries. Just 0.5% of the population are Indigenous Australians. Ten percent (10%) of Australians speak a language other than English at home and the recent census recorded greater diversity in languages. Similarly, religious affiliations reflected increasing diversity and there appears to be an increasing minority who are followers of non-Christian religions.

On the other hand, in comparison to Australia and the state of Victoria there is a considerable lack of diversity in the rural provincial city of Goldridge, with over ninety (90%) of the population who are Australian born and a higher percentage of people who reported that they spoke English only (94%). The population of Goldridge has remained largely ‘monocultural’ and monolingual, although the census figures reflect the same diversity in religious affiliations (70%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1986,1991, 1996, 2001).

It is important to acknowledge that, the pattern of migration destinations in Australia, over the past 10-15 years indicates that, while diversity is a feature in metropolitan locations such as Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, parts of regional Australia are distinctive for the relative absence of ethnic diversity.‘As a consequence the birthplace make up of these cities and the rest of Australia is diverging’ (Birrell & Rapson, 2002:10). Birrell and Rapson (2002) also suggest that the settlement patterns of migrants that has led to different degrees of diversity, may have contributed to a distinct political divide between metropolitan and regional Australia and differences in the responses of people in various locations. They argue that resistance to multicultural images is largely based in regional Australia.

Introducing the students

At the time of this study, ninety percent (90%) of the almost four thousand (4,000)   students enrolled at the Goldridge Faculty of Central City university were born in Australia and seven percent (7%) were born overseas. Of the seven percent of students who were born outside of Australia there were 46.6% from Asian countries, 17.7% Anglo-Celtic, 17.7% European (including Canada and U.S.), 13.3% from the Pacific Region (including New Zealand) and 4.6% from African countries. Of the total student cohort in the Goldridge Faculty 93.8% spoke English only at home. Of the seven percent of students born in countries other than Australia, just under half (48%) were overseas or international students.

One hundred and fifty (150) students were enrolled in the first year of the Bachelor of Teaching Degree course, 70% were female, 30% were male and 28% were enrolled as mature aged students (23 years of age, and older). In that year 90% came from rural farming communities, small towns and provincial cities (including Goldridge) in regional Victoria. Fewer than 10% came from suburban and metropolitan areas. In accordance with past enrolments, and consistent with descriptions of pre-service students in universities in other parts of Australia, and in international contexts, the cohort of first years was predominantly white, middleclass females, who are predominantly monolingual (eg. AACTE, 1990; Australian College of Education, 2001; Dilworth, 1992; Fuller, 1992; Goodwin, 1991; Logan et al, 1990; Research About Teacher Education Project, 1990). The majority came from working class and middleclass homes in communities where the populations were mainly Anglo and Celtic in origin.

Of the students who enrolled in the course the year this study was conducted, only 3% of the students spoke a language other than English at home. In that year there were fourteen (14) international/ overseas students from the Maldives, and one student from Taiwan, which meant that less than ten percent (10%) of students were from diverse cultural and linguistic groups. The students from the Maldives lived in shared accommodation, as a group, and spoke Divehi at home and read Hindi for prayer. They would return to the Maldives after three years of teacher training.

Data collection and selection

The written autobiographies of the cohort of one hundred and fifty first year student teachers and interviews with thirty students formed the primary sources of data. In addition I collected and analysed university documents as data about the particular institutional context and pre-service teacher education course. I employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) techniques to examine the discursive practices of the group of student teachers on entry to the Bachelor of Teaching Degree course and the discourses which were made available to them through first year experiences of formal university studies and school-based fieldwork.

What student included in their written autobiographical pieces as their discursive construction of their identities and past experiences and was read as the discursive resources they bring to teacher education. What students spoke about in interviews   was read as the resources that were available to them explicitly, through university course work and field experiences, and implicitly, through the university environment.  

Writing about themselves

The autobiographical task was constructed in two main sections. In the first section students were asked to construct a profile, in the form of a semantic network,   concept map or timeline, of their identities including aspects such as age, gender, ethnicity and/or race, cultures, religious affiliations, socio-economic class, language(s) spoken and written, and language(s) learned outside of home. They were encouraged to highlight aspects of their identities which they considered to be most and least significant. By researching and writing about their histories and cultures I anticipated   that they may begin to understand the part played by personal, social and cultural factors in their identities and how their identities may influence their perspectives of teaching and learning and of themselves as teachers (Hickling-Hudson, 1997; Knowles & Holt-Reynolds, 1991). In addition, by developing their own levels of social and cultural awareness they may become more sensitive to the effects of such factors on children they are preparing to teach (eg. Darling-Hammond, 1997; Rosenberg, 1998). At the very least the cultural and linguistic profiles may prove to be a useful starting point for talking about diversity (eg. Allen & Labbo, 2001). In the second section students wrote about their past histories of learning and, by association,   teaching,   language and literacy.   In this article I focus on data from section one in order to consider the discursive resources that students bring to teacher education for talking about diversity.

The omission of cultural and linguistic profiles from many students’ writing, and the simplistic constructions in those that were included, indicates students’ lack of conscious awareness of their cultural identities as anything other than rural or country. It may be that students do not see themselves as part of multicultural Australia or do not understand why it should be a consideration in predominantly white settings (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Epstein, 1993; Gillespie, Ashbaugh & DeFiore, 2002; Rosenberg, 1998). In addition, students had limited contact with cultural diversity in families, communities and schools, and through experiences such as overseas travel. The discursive resources that first year student teachers brought to teacher education were limited. Students’ normative constructions of aspects of culture such as peoples’ beliefs, assumptions, perspectives and lifestyles were associated with living in rural communities, small towns and provincial cities in regional Victoria. A sense of ‘place’ and community were common across students’ constructions of aspects of their individual and collective identities and religion, sport, clubs and class were significant aspects of identities and cultures.

What the University provides

Analysis of Central City university documents revealed contrasting and competing discourses around teacher preparation and implications for teaching students with diverse cultural and linguistic resources. While examination of the Bachelor of Teaching Degree course documents suggested that minimum requirements stipulated in accepted national and state accreditation guidelines (eg. Australian Council of Deans, 1998; Department of Education, Victoria, 1999) were met, various readings of subject outlines for the particular course revealed a lack of explicit statements on cultural and linguistic diversity.

For example, in the course documents where and how claims such as: ‘preparing teachers to teach diverse student populations’, ‘including multiple perspectives on teaching and learning in relation to diverse students’, ‘addressing issues associated with the provision of schooling in a multicultural society’, and ‘ some supervised teaching experience in schools where significant cultural and socio-economic diversity exists’ were incorporated in curriculum design and implementation,   and field experiences was not clear. Course accreditation requirements   were   simply met by instituting a short add-on unit in multicultural education,   and an elective unit in ESL for final year students. Similarly, there was a mismatch between the discourses in various official and semi-official documents of the wider university and the particular teacher education program. Again it was   difficult to see how university claims for, ‘internationalisation of curricula’, and ‘preparing graduates for employment in international contexts, particularly in regional and rural settings’, were   made explicit in the teacher education course documents.

Talking about themselves, families, communities and schools

The majority of students who were interviewed considered that the major influences in shaping their identities were growing up in ‘close-knit’ families and living in country towns and regional provincial cities. Past contact with cultural diversity in these communities was limited to indirect experiences with groups of Italian, Greek and Aboriginal people, and significantly fewer numbers of Chinese, ‘Asian’ and Indian migrants. Students considered that, while culturally diverse people did not necessarily ‘blend in’ to the communities and schools, they did not bother anyone as they kept to themselves.

Italian and Greek migrants seemed to be more widely accepted because they were not visibly different. Accounts of the more recent arrival of Chinese people into small towns, ‘to set up take-away Chinese food shops’ and Asian and Indian doctors in rural areas, indicated that they were regarded as providers of commodities and services who contributed to the community but did not impinge upon it. That they were visibly different kept them separate to the community or contained and visible in specific places and engaged in particular activities. While the Chinese, Asian and Indian people did not blend in to the communities, in students’ accounts they also did not enter their life worlds. It seemed that, if differences are ‘natural’ then they are beyond history, permanent and fixed, and therefore do not require further comment (Hall, 1992).

The majority of students’ perspectives on Aboriginal people were gained through information which had been passed on through family members rather than through direct experience. Their accounts included constructions of Aboriginal people as ‘unmotivated’, ‘uneducated’ and ‘welfare dependent’. In contrast to the Italians, Greeks and Chinese, the Aborigines in these communities were criticised for their supposed lack of work ethic and for their sub-standard living conditions.

I heard about groups of Aboriginal people on the streets of River Flats. And they all stuck together and then, then they’d get drunk. They hung around street corners...well you had to be careful around the pubs ‘cos you could get beaten up in the pubs, and stuff. They do petty crimes for money too, burglary, breaking and entering, stealing stuff in shops.

They can corrupt a whole town. I can remember people talking about it...But if a Chinese family moved in and started a Chinese take-a-way, like in our town, it wasn’t so bad. They were actually well educated, I think one had a pharmacy degree, that’s the story. The Aborigines would have just sat around all day.

Poor hygiene and living conditions were also attributed to problems with alcohol and, because of the alcohol and welfare payments, there was unwillingness for Aborigines to ‘help themselves’.

In these stories there was no naming of who or what has a part to play in this sequence of events apart from the victims themselves. Problems were conceptualised by most students through cultural deficiency perspectives where the main causes of difficulties were located in families and communities, and not the broader society and institutions (Sleeter, 1993).   I do not suggest that all students spoke in these ways about Aborigines, some said very little and others expressed some sense of caring about Aborigines and apologised for what they were saying.

In general, students expressed approval of ‘multicultural Australia’. However,   approval was most often associated with the ‘celebration of culture’, such as different food, music, dance and cultural festivals, rather than approval of other forms of ethnic and cultural difference and an awareness of the impact of cultural and ethnic diversity upon Australian society. As one student explained:

At primary school we’d have multicultural lunch day. We never really learnt anything for the day; we just got to eat fried rice for lunch. I guess that was the Chinese bit.      

Many students expressed vague and simplistic notions of cultural diversity/multiculturalism   and, in terms of ‘multicultural Australia’, the majority favoured assimilation or integration as the desired societal outcome of people with different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures and languages living together. The concepts of multiculturalism did not seem to be relevant to their lives because they had lived in largely ‘monocultural’ settings where it was possible to ignore one of the most obvious features of Australian society. A key theme of ‘sameness’ ran through their accounts of past experiences in communities and schools:

…[E]veryone was just the same, everyone thought the same, no one did their own thing, so I guess that’s where I got my values from. I’m the same as them. I was the small, country town type of person so there was always a limited group of people. I was always at the same school, always at the same primary school and always at the same secondary school, so it was always the same group of friends. We were all the same. Nothing much changes in these types of communities.

Contact with cultural diversity: Goldridge and Central City university

In students’ accounts of living and attending university in Goldridge there was also a theme of ‘sameness’. While more recent experiences had brought them into contact with greater diversity,   the essential white-Anglo and Celtic Australian nature of their experiences had remained. For the majority of students, the limited cultural diversity in Goldridge existed ‘outside’ the general population. In the same way,   within the university environment , students experienced more contact,   but still largely indirect contact, with the overseas student population, which existed ‘outside’ the mainstream student body. At Central City University, most students did not interact to any great extent with individuals or groups outside the mainstream and therefore, had acquired only limited perception of the generalized ‘other’:

There isn’t much blending of the cultures. We stay with our group, they stay with theirs. There are programs I think that try to blend them in. That International Office runs special events, but it’s just for them to get together. We aren’t invited at all and I don’t really know what they do. The ones from Norway, they blend in. They try to blend in as quickly as they can.

The people who run the Student Union try to get more involvement between cultures but I don’t think anything has worked. They’re here for the education and that’s it, their main focus…just here to study. They don’t need to fit in…always in the library, even on weekends. They don’t play sport or go to nightclubs on weekends. They work hard to get their study over and done with, then home.   

Students’ responses to the presence of overseas students ranged from antagonism to ambivalence to initial curiosity and some empathy. Students who had had more direct contact with diversity through university housing largely expressed resistance to the presence of international students. In these situations there was seen to be a lack of smooth blending of overseas students because of the differences in lifestyles and living habits as one student explained:

You have to learn to live with it in the units and, if you get stuck with someone from a different culture, or well, Asian. You have to put up with the fact that they might like to cook spicy food, hot food that may smell…but you might cook food they don’t like I suppose…I’ve heard from a girl in another unit that there have been some shocking experiences, with them and they are just rude. She will be cooking a meal and they will be peering over her shoulder and watching her every move and they would be so close that it would be unhygienic and she watches their practices of washing dishes and that they don’t do it properly... they are much different to us in the way they live…one boy goes to his room all the time. He’ll come out to the kitchen and grab something and go to his room, he won’t sit and eat with us, which I find sometimes a little unsociable.  

Students’ constructions of difference in schools during their first school experiences   in and around Goldridge were largely related to socio-economic differences, ability levels, physical and intellectual disabilities (special needs), and religion. They primarily expressed difference and diversity as ‘individual differences’ which were considered as a natural part of social reality. Differences were common and in some way neutral and many students appeared to hold an implicit framework for equity and fairness which involved minimising differences or treating different learners the same.

Their contact with and awareness of cultural diversity was limited to a small number of students who were considered to be visibly different, and were often referred to as ‘black’,   or different in terms of their religious practices. Again, the theme of ‘sameness’ permeated their accounts of experiences in schools and in, in their perspectives of classroom practices students advocated practices which involved minimising differences, or treating different learners as the same in an effort to help them ‘blend in’ and to treat them all equally:

I was told by my teacher to be aware, and be careful of what you say . . . but just be aware that she was an Aboriginal and her background, and her parents. You didn’t want to do or say the wrong thing. At the same time not to make her feel different to the other students, to help her blend in. It was a matter of treating them all the same so no one noticed they were different.

You shouldn’t pull kids out and label them as different. Being multicultural isn’t a bad thing, but you don’t need to advertise it. You want the kids to get along, so don’t point out the differences.  

In summary, throughout their accounts of past experiences in families, communities, and schools and recent experiences in Goldridge and at Central City university, students’ discursive resources for talking about and analysing differences were limited. It could be contended that deficit discourses predominated in the majority of students’ accounts.

Teaching in multicultural schools: A matter of choice

The vast majority of student teachers anticipated working in white, ‘monocultural’ classrooms, at least at the beginning of their careers. Cultural and linguistic diversity was regarded as a deficit by a significant number of students and few considered such diversity as offering opportunities and adding to the richness of classroom experiences. Cultural and linguistic diversity was considered a problem and something they would need to ‘cope with’ and ‘overcome’ as teachers. In any case they anticipated   that they would not be teaching in schools with diverse student populations which, they argued,   would be a matter of personal choice:

It would be a real battle with kids from different backgrounds. Teachers have to sort of just incorporate them into the class as normal kids and that, but it would be difficult. It would be very hard for the teacher because she would have a lot of needs, such widespread needs, where as in normal English speaking schools the needs wouldn’t be so widespread …maybe you’d have to give them a bit of leeway…you shouldn’t have the same expectations for them as the English speaking kids. I wouldn’t mind a bit of relief work but I wouldn’t want to end up in a school like that permanently!

Their perception of their future was reinforced by the nature of the teacher education program and process they had undertaken in the first year of the Bachelor of Teaching Degree course and where most gained school-based field experiences. With the exception of limited attention to issues of diversity which were raised through isolated and discrete topics, course and subject outlines seemed to be based on an assumption that teaching would be conducted in largely homogeneous classrooms. As a consequence, neither subject nor pedagogical perspectives were formed in relation to difference, cultural diversity/multiculturalism or multicultural education. The mainstream values, beliefs and attitudes which student teachers had acquired from previous societal interactions in almost exclusively Anglo and Celtic Australian environments were strengthened. It was possible to graduate as a teacher with minimal attention to cultural diversity.

Findings

The findings suggest that most student teachers lacked contact with cultural diversity during their earlier life experiences and had little formally acquired knowledge. This situation continued throughout the first year of teacher education and most students remained detached. Many of the perspectives which emerged regarding difference and cultural diversity were negative. From their perspectives, in educational contexts, students with diverse cultural and linguistic resources should assimilate or ‘blend in’ as quickly as possible.

The most reasonable conclusion regarding cultural and linguistic diversity is that they were, at best, ignorant, and at worst unashamedly racist. In constructing their perspectives of teaching and the roles of teachers, student teachers were drawing on their past experiences of teaching and learning in largely ‘monocultural’ schools and communities, and, to a lesser extent, their more recent school-based field experiences with largely homogeneous student populations. Therefore the discursive resources they brought for talking about teaching in diverse settings were limited. However, while reading individual interview transcripts for recurring statements, themes, and wordings I began to consider the corpus of interview data in terms of students’ collective discursive resources. Viewed in this way the data permits a more optimistic outlook. Similarly, while the silences of many most certainly demonstrates a lack of awareness, apathy and seemingly total indifference towards teaching children with diverse cultural and linguistic resources, the accounts of the small number of students who could analyse past experiences and teaching practices, and make connections to new situations and contexts permit a more optimistic outlook.

Conclusions and implications

There are a number of implications regarding student teachers’ perspectives on cultural diversity and on teaching diverse students which emerged from the case study. While some call for action at governmental and teacher education sector levels, others are implications for teacher educators in universities with largely ‘monocultural’ student populations.

Some implications are:

• The importance of student teachers’ identities and prior experiences

To minimise the importance of students’ identities and prior experiences with cultural diversity would assume that past experiences are unimportant or irrelevant to the type of teachers they will become. Simply to assume that students enter teacher training with the experiences and values they will need to become effective teachers in a multicultural society, and that teacher education programs will be sufficiently powerful to change all students in ways that will enable them to act effectively with diverse learners, is at best naïve and at worst irresponsible.

Effective teacher education courses, therefore, should help student teachers to explore and to clarify their own ethnic and cultural identities as a starting point for perspectives and interpretations of diversity, and in order to develop more positive attitudes towards diverse groups.

• The need for opening up discourse on difference, cultural diversity and race in university classrooms

Teacher education has a major role in opening up discourse around difference, cultural diversity and issues associated with multiculturalism,   immigration and racism. If student teachers lack familiarity with non-mainstream groups they must be challenged to consider the ‘other’ dimension or they may perpetuate prejudicial perspectives in their professional practices in the future.

By starting with more familiar aspects of difference such as gender and class, and ‘cultural groups’ such as persons with disabilities, the elderly and gay people, students may begin to explore issues associated with diversity and difference, and to develop some empathy before they make links with racial injustice and inequity (eg. Epstein, 1993). With the particular student cohort in this study gender and social class may have been excellent vehicles for understanding diversity because it is grounded in the experiences of a largely female group, where a significant proportion have also worked their way up from working class origins through ‘educational opportunities’.

•   The significance of challenging racist views

Teacher education must be regarded as an important site for examining social justice and equity issues and attitudes and beliefs concerning multiculturalism and racism. Although most student teachers may have learnt that it is no longer socially acceptable to make racist remarks or engage in racist behaviour,   this may not necessarily translate into acceptance of cultural diversity. In largely homogeneous contexts it may be that individuals are rarely placed in a position where they reveal racist perspectives.

In Australia,   racism is inextricably linked to the history of colonisation and migration. For many Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, the process of colonisation has been perceived as invasion and racism has continued to affect the lives of most indigenous Australians in the two centuries following white settlement (Conference of Education Systems Chief Executive Officers, 2000). That there is and perhaps always has been ‘latent or convert’ racism towards Australia’s indigenous population needs to be investigated and challenged,   particularly in important and influential sites such as teacher education. If racist discourses are ignored then the constitutive nature of discourse works against the attainment of various educational sector multicultural policies (examples cited below), and, more importantly, the objectives   of Australia’s Reconciliation Program.

• The need for systematic and on-going auditing of teacher education courses

This study suggests that teacher education is in need of systematic attention,   and that Australian national and state governments need to investigate the content and provision of teacher education courses and how and why teacher education courses are accredited and by whom.

Various government and education systems’ projects in Australia have resulted in policy guidelines on multicultural education,   anti-racist education and managing cultural and linguistic diversity in schools (eg. Conference of Education Systems Chief Executive Officers, 2000; Department of Education MACLOTE and ESL Victoria, 1997; Department of Education,   Employment and Training, 2001). However,   although the role of teacher education is acknowledged   in such documents, there is an absence of Australian studies which seek to audit and evaluate teacher education courses for multicultural education (and anti-racist education) components, and perspectives on cultural and linguistic diversity across the curriculum. Similarly, while generic and subject specific guidelines for pre-service teacher education courses have consistently included graduate teacher attributes which recognise the importance of the central role of cultural and linguistic diversity in preparing teachers for teaching student populations in the twenty-first century,   compliance with the guidelines is ultimately with individual universities and administrators, and particular accreditation boards. As part of a systematic review of courses, program components and field experiences require close attention.

• A need for the review of program components

While still allowing for flexibility and local decision making in the design, implementation and evaluation of teacher education courses, governments need to specify, if not mandate, what are considered ‘core studies’, ‘essential’ and ‘substantial’ course components in order to effectively prepare graduates for teaching diverse student populations. There is a need for substantial, if not compulsory components of multicultural education and,   if governments and education bodies are committed to preparing teachers who have an understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity,   then there should be substantial components of English as a Second Language.   In addition, multicultural perspectives and culturally sensitive teaching methods need to be made explicit across various Key Learning Areas (KLAs) and, in Australia,   essential elements should focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives.  

• A need for the review of field experiences

Student teachers should be encouraged and assisted to undertake field experiences with diverse student populations and/or in diverse community sites. While it may be unrealistic to require all students to undertake experiences in diverse settings, those who are open to, and express a desire to teach in multicultural settings should be given specific assistance. During field experiences, teacher educators need to play a major role in student teachers’ knowledge,   skill and experience construction. For example, collaborative action research projects and narratives can be important ways helping students understand their teaching of diverse learners.

When student teachers become cultural researchers there is the potential for them to see cultural and community resources as educational resources and possibilities for study, rather than learning deficits, and to link cultural and community studies to their own personal and professional growth.

• The importance of emphasising studies in language and literacy as important sites for considering diversity

Studies in language and literacy should be considered as core compulsory components of teacher education courses,   and an important site for considering issues of cultural and linguistic diversity. In order to improve the underperformance in English literacy among some groups of students in Australian schools student teachers must learn how to: create an atmosphere of tolerance; hold high expectations of all students; make sensitive and careful selections of materials; and make informed choices of culturally sensitive instruction and student-teacher interactions that welcome,   respect and acknowledge all learners.

Therefore, students should critique current theories and approaches, such as those which take a strong socio-cultural orientation and make explicit links between language, literacy and culture (and language and power) in theory, curriculum and pedagogy,   in order to assess their relevance for learners with diverse resources. Current and challenging concepts which foreground the growing significance of cultural and linguistic diversity and new communications technologies,   such as those proposed in the multiliteracies project (New London Group, 1996), should be raised and debated. In addition, students should begin to develop understandings of social critical approaches and pedagogies of critical literacies, and influential models of learning such as the four processes of reading (Freebody & Luke, 1999).

• There is an urgent   need for evaluation and direction in monocultural settings

Given the lack of attention to the implementation of multicultural teacher education in Australia it is not surprising that few studies have focused on universities in largely ‘monocultural’ settings. Furthermore, a lack of direction regarding multicultural education in predominantly Anglo and Celtic schools and diminished urgency of considering diversity in largely ‘monocultural’ schools may have rendered issues of diversity as irrelevant or inappropriate in particular locations.

Each university will vary according to the resources it has in faculty experience and the diversity of populations accessible to students. In largely homogeneous settings teacher educators must do what they can to achieve a presence of the absent (Rosenberg, 1998) and to ground cultural and linguistic diversity in direct experiences.   Some practical examples are as follows:

- Overseas students, university staff and community members with diverse cultural and linguistic resources may be encouraged to participate in teacher education programs in order to raise issues of diversity. Valuable learning can happen when students and staff teach each other within teacher education programs.

-   Mentoring and tutoring programs between student teachers and   students, and case studies of the language and literacy practices of students with diverse cultural and linguistic resources can also be valuable and practical ways of raising awareness of diversity and enabling student teachers   to see links between language, literacy and culture.

- Vicarious experiences through literature,   film, TV sitcoms, commercials and advertisements,   multimedia and popular culture,   art and music may also serve to raise awareness of implicit messages around cultural diversity,   race and racism.

- The use of multicultural literature,   and understandings of the histories and cultures that support them, together with understandings of their use in schools, may assist in making links between language, literacy and diversity.   Multicultural literature   may assist for example, to develop cultural knowledge; to make links between language, literacy and culture; and to develop literacy practices such as critical literacies.

-   There should be a course component on anti-racist education designed to raise awareness and develop knowledge and understandings of issues surrounding topics such as: the history and impact of racism; racism in Australian schools; and the roles of teachers, schools and education systems in countering racism.

Concluding comment

My work at Central City University in Goldridge has been self-reflexive and filled with conjecture and detours. I also face the problem that many teacher educators do. How do we as teacher educators prepare students for cultural diversity when we ourselves have never taught in such schools and communities, and universities?

I constantly grapple with the difficulties I have in raising issues of diversity in teaching and to encourage student teachers to consider children’s cultural and linguistic resources in teaching language and literacy. However, this is important work for mainstream teacher educators, and it is largely unchartered terrain in universities with largely homogeneous student populations and teaching staff (eg. Cochran-Smith, 1995-2002; Epstein, 1993, O’Shannessy, 1996; Rosenberg, 1998).

Teacher educators who undertake this work are well aware that there are no ready-made or easy answers and the only certainty may be, ‘… uncertainty about how and what to say, whom and what to have students read and write, about who can teach whom, who can speak for whom, and who has the right to speak at all about the possibilities and pitfalls of promoting a discourse about race and teaching in pre-service education’ (Cochran-Smith, 1995: 546). While it may be possible to raise students’ awareness, or to enhance their dispositions for teaching in multicultural settings, such work barely begins to address the problem of preparing them to successfully teach children with diverse cultural and linguistic resources. However, I do not approach teacher education and research with a ‘corrective’ attitude, rather I seek to examine the perspectives of   student teachers in order to recognise how their past experiences,   prior knowledge, attitudes and competencies may mediate how they respond to teacher education.

I am surprised and disturbed by many of the student teachers’ accounts of, for example, living in shared accommodation with overseas students. I worry about how to raise awareness and develop their dispositions to effectively teach indigenous students when they have such negative perspectives of Aboriginal people. Yet I am compelled to continue to review, and develop course content, university and school/community-based field experiences to find better ways of working. With an increasing number of overseas students studying at the university and a small but increasing number of diverse learners in local schools, and schools in rural and regional areas there is an even greater need.

While there are common issues around the world in relation to the increasing diversity of populations of students in schools and yet still largely homogeneous teaching populations, there is a need for further   research across contexts which might lead to the development of effective and appropriate teacher education courses and processes for induction into the profession in a changing world. At Central City university there is more to be done than raising the flags of the countries of origins of overseas students to signal national days and events (it is university practice to hoist the flags on the flag-pole at the central roundabout to celebrate diversity).

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