Establishing a Learning Community as a Site to Explore Our Multicultural Selves

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss how two teacher educators collaboratively taught a multicultural education course designed around our principles of a learning community. The learning community included preservice teachers with very diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. We discuss how the diversity became a resource and an opportunity for the students and teacher educators to explore their assumptions, beliefs and biases, and arrive at new understandings. We describe the learning approaches we incorporated to establish an intellectually safe classroom environment that allowed and encouraged open dialogue about sensitive multicultural issues. The chapter includes a discussion of the systematic inquiry we conducted into our teaching practices and our students’ learning. The results of the study show how students framed and reframed their conceptions of multicultural education and developed the skills of collaboration, risk taking, inquiry, and reflection.