Position and Imposition: Power Relations in a Multicultural Foundations Class

My students, who are prospective high school teachers, reflect many of the common attitudes held by the larger general population; that is, they tend to be fairly apolitical, individualistic, and nonconfrontational, and most often they view situations and people from a personal point of view. My primary challenge as a White teacher educator is thus to intervene in such a way that my students do not reproduce in their teaching what they have experienced in their schooling. Two of my goals are that students develop the ability to be open and reflective about their learning histories, values, beliefs, and actions on those beliefs; and that they become conscious of the hidden curriculum of schooling (Chan & Rueda, 1979). Because I want my students to problematize (critically examine) the puzzling and contradictory aspects of their views of reality as well as their experiences, I strive to help them discover, experience, and construct powerful alternatives to their past experiences. I want them to become aware of the role that they may be asked to play in perpetuating oppressive structures and practices in the educational system and find ways to take an oppositional stance to an oppressive role. In effect, I try to teach my students to challenge the status quo in the hopes that they, as the teachers of the future, will choose to take a stand in the interests of social justice. Translating theory into practice, however, has proven difficult. While I do not assume that all prospective teachers enter teacher education programs with racist and sexist values, I believe that a great majority of them do and that they tend either to be unconscious of this reality or want to deny it. As a teacher I have observed that a critical