Teacher Preparation and Diversity: When American Pre-service Teachers Aren’t White and Middle Class

The majority of American educators are White, middle class, and female. Most textbooks and articles for pre-service teachers assume their readers reflect these characteristics. However, as the K-12 student population becomes increasingly diverse, so do the pre-service teacher candidates at our Southern California public university. This article describes a prerequisite education course on diversity, showing how its original assumption that students needed to be convinced of the importance of diversity changed to a focus on improving the academic achievement and opportunities for linguistically and culturally diverse K-12 students.