Using Life-based Literary Narratives in Multicultural Teacher Education

As educators of both preservice and in-service teacher education students, 1 of the key questions we ask ourselves is how to prepare White students in rural areas of the United States to meet the needs of increasingly diverse populations of students. In this article, we discuss the conflicting research on how to meet goals of multicultural teacher education and explore the potential of using narratives in preservice and graduate classes. We argue for the inclusion of what we term life-based literary narratives to bring experiential qualities to multicultural theories and to develop students' narrative imagination-the ability to reflect on experience, question assumptions, and actively empathize with others. We describe texts and processes used in the classes we teach that foster the development of these abilities. The goal is to enable our students to learn to listen to and hear the stories of others, to experience lives different than their own, not through abstract reasoning, but through developing emotions and empathic understanding, through examining hearts and minds. Life-based literary narratives show promise in assisting students to envision multicultural education as a transformative process for social justice and to see themselves as agents of social and educational change.