Prospective Teachers' Perspectives on Teaching Diverse Children: A Review with Implications for Teacher Education and Practice

I am a teacher educator who aims to prepare prospective teachers to work effectively with all children regardless of their life experiences, language backgrounds, skin colors, or family socioeconomic status. In my work, I have observed that prospective teachers often turn to experiences from their own pasts for clues on how to interpret and respond to the contemporary behaviors of the children whom they teach. My White, middle-class, English-speaking university students often believe that their particular personal experiences from their own suburban midwestern childhoods are directly transferrable to the situations they encounter in teaching children unlike themselves living in another time and place. Reliance on these experiences frequently leads to prospective teachers' failure to support or to increase the learning and achievement of the increasingly heterogeneous student population with which they work. As I pondered the dilemmas of new teachers at my university and the challenges that they pose for me as a teacher educator, I sought information regarding the perspectives of other new teachers about the children whom they will teach. I searched for the responses of other teacher educators who had also taken these perspectives into account in their programs of teacher preparation.' The following questions guided my investigations: Who are prospective teachers in the United States and what are their perspectives on the diverse children they teach? How have other teacher educators developed campus and classroom