The elementary teacher education program at California State University in Sacramento clearly illustrates the evolutionary nature of multicultural teacher education. Driven first by projections of dramatic demographic shifts in the state and later by the realization of these projections, this fifth year program has passed through three distinct phases: Tolerance, Awareness, and Infusion. During the Tolerance phase, which began in 1973, the Bilingual Cross-Cultural Education program was initiated by an isolated group of faculty. The overall teacher education curriculum remained essentially the same, with infusion of multicultural content left to the descretion of individual faculty members. The Awareness phase, beginning in the 1980s, was marked by changes in faculty hiring. Interviews increasingly focused upon issues pertinent to multicultural education, thereby setting the stage for a climate conducive to the infusion of multicultural content. During the Infusion phase, beginning in the 1990s, the faculty implemented an introductory course in multicultural education and agreed to infuse relevant content into all coursework. Infusion, which previously had occurred in a piecemeal fashion, now became the norm--at least as an ideal if not yet in practice.

Conceptualization of the multicultural teacher education program transpired through a series of faculty retreats, beginning during the Awareness phase. During these retreats, the multiple-subject faculty decided to offer a course in the foundations of multicultural education. They also shared and debated various conceptions of multicultural education and agreed upon a guiding definition. Finally, the faculty brainstormed multicultural content and issues and then met in subject-matter groups to discuss appropriate courses for infusion. A product of the retreats was a matrix labeled "Overview/Organizer for Infusion of Multicultural Education within the Multiple Subjects Program."

The first generation of students to take the introductory course has since completed subsequent methods and foundations courses. Faculty have remarked on the increased sophistication of these preservice students' understandings of culture and its role in education.

Infusion endeavors continue, in spite of obstacles common to programs of teacher education in large universities. Such obstacles include: faculty accountability for infusion; structural issues--most prominently, field placements with teachers who model culturally congruent practices; and the size and organization of the multiple subjects program.