Bill Doody, professor of education at the State University of New York at Potsdam, describes how his teacher education students are paired with experienced teachers in multicultural classrooms and receive firsthand training in working with students from a variety of cultures. Excerpted from a videotaped interview (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1997).
"We are having our students work with teachers in the public schools setting where there is a multicultural population. While we have classes at the school where students study multicultural issues of diversity, in terms of preparing someone to be a future teacher, there's no substitute for experience of a different culture. There's no way to explain what their culture is to someone either through a text or by any other means other than to actually have the teachers working in the future teachers working in the classroom and dealing on a dialing basis with issues that parents bring up, dealing with topics the children bring into the classroom with them because of their culture and background, and having the future teacher work with an experienced teacher in trying to adjust on a continuing basis to those things as they arise."
This Critical Issue was researched and written by Carla Cooper Shaw, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois.
Date posted: 1997