Uncovering the Preconceptions of Preservice Teachers

If you were teaching a high school literature class and could use only six texts, which would you chose? What if knew the class was 70 percent white and 30 percent black? What if these numbers were reversed? What if

the class was 50 percent Hispanic, 35 percent black, and 15 percent Asian? What if you knew that most of that high school's graduates chose military service over college? Would you change the required reading list for each group? Would Native Son supplant Grapes of Wrath? Would d To Kill a Mockingbird, Red Badge of Courage, Tom Sawyer, or Catcher in the Rye make the cut?

For the past five years, G. Williamson McDiarmid has been researching these issues and the implications they have for an increasingly diverse American classroom. His work is part of a major study by the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning (NCRTL).

"I think we've been really focused on diversity because teachers-by their decisions about what they are going to teach, how they're going to teach, and how they organize their classrooms-can advantage or disadvantage various students," says

McDiarmid, professor of teacher education and a co-director of the NCRTL. "It's a matter of enfranchisement: whether the students get to be full members of what's going on in that classroom. You could say that we're not fulfilling our responsibility if we teach in ways that exclude students, particularly if we do that systemically.

"What we're trying to do in the research project is to find out more about how teachers think about these issues and how different opportunities to learn from them affect their capacity to work with diverse learners."

McDiarmid has focused his research work on preservice English and history teachers in an effort to understand how would-be educators approach their subject matter, organize and represent it, and what consideration -- If any -- they give to teaching the material in a culturally diverse classroom.

In one of the studies, McDiarmid selected a group of MSU students who were studying to become high school English and history teachers. He tracked their development over a period of years by interviewing them at regular intervals.

In the case of prospective English teachers, he sought to uncover notions about teaching diverse learners by asking them to select a reading list for an 11th-grade literature class. For every selection, McDiarmid asked for their rationale. Then he would change the circumstances. What if the class was entirely white or black? What books would they choose then? Why? What books would they not teach?

What McDiarmid found was that race and ethnicity mattered. All of the participants were conscious of race and ethnicity as important factors when selecting the reading list.

"A lot of them think that if they can align the color of the students with the color of the writer or main character, the student is going to be more engaged," he says. "But when asked what they would teach in a predominately white suburban school, many responded that white students should read black authors so they would know what it's like to be black in this society."

McDiarmid also discovered that nearly all the prospective teachers he interviewed could be placed into three broad categories related to the subject matter of the books they would choose. The first group chose books with an eye to close analysis of the text by students. The second group looked at texts as a way to teach moral lessons. The third group took a more free-form approach, viewing the teacher as a conductor and the text as an emotive experience for students.

McDiarmid also found that the prospective teachers weren't aware of these different approaches or even of their own specific style-they simply had never thought about these matters.

The findings, McDiarmid asserts, have implications for both teaching and teacher education. While he stops short of endorsing one of these three approaches to teaching literature, it is clear to him that opting for any of them can have an impact-both positive and negative-on student learning.

The findings also underline the need for teacher education coursework. Courses in a single discipline, such as English or history, are not enough. Prospective teachers need formal programs where they can think about and learn ways to bridge the gap between the knowledge they are acquiring in a subject and the diverse students they will teach. They also need a venue where they can deal with their own preconceptions about learners who may be racially or ethnically different from them and explore how those views can help or hinder the learning process. Prospective teachers, McDiarmid says, have to understand how they view the world around them and, just as importantly, how those views can empower or disenfranchise their students, who may come from vastly different backgrounds and hold widely varying beliefs.

"A teacher has to be able to understand how different students think about things in the world that relate to their subject matter. He or she then has to ask, "'Okay, how do I cast my subject matter and organize it in such a way that these different people with quite different levels of preparation can reach an intersection between their backgrounds and the subject matter?'"

McDiarmid received an Ed. D. from Harvard University. He taught English and history in an Alaskan village and was assistant professor of education at the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at the College of Human and Rural Development at the University of Alaska. He has been at MSU since 1987.

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