Preparing preservice teachers to teach multicultural literature

Several years ago during a final field experience a prospective teacher wrote:This statement was made by one of our “top” students. A student who had excelled during her academic undergraduate education and one who received an uncontested “high rating” as a prospective teacher educator from her supervisors and cooperating teachers. The student is not a “bad” person. However, her journal entry reacquaints us with the notion that understandings of race, culture, and ethnicity are ever present in our consciousness. Until recently, it has been considered “polite not to notice” incidents of racism in education (hooks and West, 1991). As bell hooks (1992) has observed in similar instances, “For my colleagues, racism expressed in everyday encounters…is only an unpleasantness to be avoided, not something to be confronted or challenged. It is just something negative disrupting the good time, better not to notice and pretend it’s not there” (p. 61). However, racism is here as an ugly unfortunate part of life in American society. Racist acts, unintentionally committed by well-intended folk, are a part of the lived reality, in and out of school, for culturally and linguistically diverse children. How can we better educate preservice teachers to understand the relationship among language, culture, and literacy as they prepare to teach all of our children?