Abstract
AbstractTeacher education programs aim to prepare teachers by building repertoires of knowledge and skills, mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs to develop dispositions necessary to succeed in a teaching career. As teachers prepare to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations, they need to attend to diversity issues and challenges and develop an understanding of cultural differences and the concepts of “otherness”. White preservice teachers must recognize that non-dominant cultures are able to learn and embrace this fact within a pedagogy for successfully promoting diverse students’ academic achievement. How to do it? seems to be the most common question that both Ladson-Billings (2006c, 2021) and Gay (2000/2018) encountered among preservice teachers who prepare to enter the classrooms and teach students from culturally responsive perspectives. The purpose of this qualitative study is twofold: to explore preservice teachers’ development of cultural preparedness through class activities informed by cultural diversity and social justice issues, and, to explore preservice teachers’ funds of knowledge through their educational autoethnography and examine how they use their funds of knowledge to design culturally responsive lesson plans that enhance the development of their asset-based pedagogies. This study will aim both to provide answers to questions related to cultural diversity issues; and to bridge a research gap by providing ways of developing preservice teachers’ cultural preparedness and constructing asset-based pedagogies through classroom activities based on cultural diversity such as reflections, autoethnography, and lesson planning.
Keywords: cultural diversity, rural teacher education, culturally responsive teacher, asset-based pedagogies, autoethnography