A culturally relevant teaching course: Reflecting pre-service teachers' thinking

As professors of Culturally Relevant Teaching, we seek to expand pre-service teachers' understanding of cultures through critical examination of personal cultural backgrounds, as well as, of those diverse groups who historically have experienced oppression in US society and its educational system. We share the story of how we develop and implement the course, setting it in the context of our teaching for a social justice-oriented teacher education program in a predominantly White, rural, state university college. We indicate the literature from which we developed the course content and its activities; we analyze pre-service teachers' awareness of their cultural identities; and, describe the implications of this knowledge for teaching as reflected in the cultural autobiographies and narratives pre-service students write at the beginning and end of the course. We hope this study will be helpful to other multicultural educators implementing similar courses.