Troubling identities: teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers and teacher educators recognizing and valuing difference. Too often, in teacher education programs, when markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, 'race', or social class are examined, the focus is on developing...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cambridge journal of education 2006-03, Vol.36 (1), p.115-129
Main Authors: Allard, Andrea C., Santoro, Ninetta
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
College Students
Diversity (Student)
Education
Ethnic identity
Ethnicity
Focus groups
Gender identity
Identities
Identity
Interviews
Middle Class
Multicultural education
Negotiation
Preservice Teacher Education
Schools
Secondary education
Self concept
Social classes
Social status
Socioeconomic factors
Socioeconomic Status
Student Diversity
Student teacher attitudes
Student Teachers
Students
Teacher education
Teacher Education Programs
Teacher Educators
Teachers
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Summary:Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers and teacher educators recognizing and valuing difference. Too often, in teacher education programs, when markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, 'race', or social class are examined, the focus is on developing student teachers' understandings of how these discourses shape learner identities and rarely on how these also shape teachers' identities. This article reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnicity and socio-economic status. In a preliminary stage of the research, we asked eight Year 3 teacher education students who had attended mainly Anglo-Australian, middle class schools as students and as student teachers, to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they constructed their own identities around ethnicity and social class. In this article we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation, troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.
ISSN:0305-764X
1469-3577
DOI:10.1080/03057640500491021