Color-Blind Racial Attitudes and Multicultural Teaching Efficacy among Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: Implications for Teacher Education

This study was to examine early childhood preservice teachers’ color-blind racial attitudes and its association with their sense of multicultural teaching efficacy. A total of 66 preservice teachers enrolled in an early childhood teacher education program at a state university in the Northeast US participated in this study through online surveys. Results indicated a mean Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) score of 2.70, reflecting an average endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes among preservice teachers. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed that racial privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racial issues were positively correlated (all p < .01). Additionally, CoBRAS scores were negatively correlated with the Multicultural Efficacy Scale (r = -.42, p < .01), indicating that higher color-blind racial attitudes were associated with lower multicultural efficacy. Linear regression analysis showed that 24.7% of the variance in multicultural teaching efficacy could be explained by color-blind racial attitudes (F = 6.227, p < .001), with racial privilege (t = -3.45, p < .001) as the only significant predictor. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a relationship between the endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes and the level of multicultural efficacy among preservice teachers. This underscores the importance of promoting multicultural education through efforts to reduce color-blind racial attitudes in teacher education programs to promote culturally responsive teaching practices and improve student outcomes.