Investigating the cultural competence of preservice teachers: comparisons and considerations

Authors

Keywords:

Cultural Competence, Assessment, Preservice Teachers, Diversity, Teacher Education

Abstract

Cultural competence is an important skill for 21st century teaching and learning, and as such it features in various international teacher standards and accreditation documents.  Teachers must be culturally competent so they can cater for diversity in their classrooms, and so they can prepare their students to live and work in a global economy/environment.  Preparing preservice teachers for this role is not a particularly easy task, made more difficult given that diversity among teachers does not always match diversity of students in schools; and cultural competence is a contested concept.  In this paper we consider issues in the assessment of cultural competence from the research literature and focus on findings from one survey with preservice teachers at a regional university in Australia.  Comparing these data with findings from an earlier study of American preservice teachers, we discuss significant differences from the two cohorts in responses to some survey items. Some findings raises issues around the suitability of cultural competence instruments across different contexts.

Author Biographies

Suzanne Elizabeth Macqueen, University of Newcastle, Australia

Suzanne Macqueen is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on issues of social justice in education. She is a member of the Global Education Research and Teaching (GERT) team, focusing on the promotion of and research into teaching for the development of global citizenship. She has published several journal articles and book chapters from her work with GERT as well as her own individual research into equity in education.

Ruth Reynolds, University of Newcastle

Dr Ruth Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia where she has been a program convenor in Social Education in Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary teacher education for twenty years. She has 118 officially certified academic publications to date including nine books in teacher education and primary teaching pedagogy, and eleven books for teachers in teaching Social Education as well as numerous refereed articles, chapters in books and conference papers in the areas of pedagogy, humanities and social science curriculum and pedagogy, peace education and social justice issues. She is team leader of the Global Education Research and Teaching group (GERT) at the University of Newcastle, a group which focuses on teaching global education across disciplinary areas and on researching the success of their various initiatives.

Kate Ferguson-Patrick, University of Newcastle

Kate Ferguson-Patrick is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on cooperative learning as a culturally responsive pedagogy and democracy classrooms in an intercultural world. She is a member of the Global Education Research and Teaching (GERT) team, focusing on the promotion of and research into teaching for the development of global citizenship. The team’s latest research focus is on the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge integration in preservice teacher programs. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters from her work with GERT as well as her own individual research. Her latest book published for Routledge in 2018 was ‘Cooperative learning for intercultural classrooms: case studies for inclusive pedagogy.’

 

Downloads

Published

2020-04-04

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

The Journal of International Social Studies, the Official Publication of The International Assembly (IA) of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) will retain the copyright of all published items. Users are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, and remix, transform, and build upon the materials for any purpose, provided that attribution is given.