Multicultural teacher education and pre-service teachers' construction of the moral self

For years, multicultural teacher educators have labored to cultivate pre-service teachers' readiness to work with culturally diverse students. They seek to understand how pre-service teachers' reasoning about inequality, difference and diversity mediates their conceptions about working with diverse student populations and their commitment to educational equity for students from historically marginalized social groups. Following this literature, the present study explores these questions by investigating how pre-service teachers make sense of their own life experiences with social privilege and marginalization, as well as their work with low-income minority students through a service-learning project.;This case study was conducted in several sections of a semester-long social foundations class offered by the teacher preparation program at Midwest University (a pseudonym) as required credit for all pre-service teachers. It employed a mixed methods approach that included the collection and analysis of survey, interview, and observational data. Drawing on cultural toolkit theory (Swidler, 1986, 2003) from cultural sociology, I look at how pre-service teachers construct moral meanings to make sense of their privileged and marginalized social positions, how they reason students' behavior, attitude, aspiration and academic performance, and how they negotiate competing ethical considerations while managing to establish productive relationships with the students. My analysis highlights the multiple and competing schemas that pre-service teachers simultaneously enact in their reasoning processes and the role of their images of the moral self in their efforts to fulfill competing ethical considerations involved in their work with students.;Research findings suggested that pre-service teachers enacted a moral notion of the self to justify their privileged and marginalized social positions. They tended to take an individualistic view on the moral meanings of their experiences of privilege and marginalization by interpreting these experiences as opportunities of making them better people. In their reasoning about students' characteristics, it was found that pre-service teachers used multiple interpretive frameworks that involved considerations of causal significance of both individual and structural factors as they sought to understand the ways students thought and behaved. Moreover, pre-service teachers' relationships with students and their conceptions of student needs were significantly mediated by their images of the moral self.;The present study suggests that in order for teacher educators to better prepare future teachers for working with culturally diverse students effectively, it is important to understand the moral underpinning of pre-service teachers' interpretations about their own life experience as well as children from marginalized social groups and incorporate their perspectives into curriculum design to better help them unpack their experiences.