Critical Consciousness and Self-Reflection

In this article, the authors argue that developing per-sonal and professional critical consciousness about racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity should be a ma-jor component of preservice teacher education. They discuss some maneuvers teacher education students use to avoid engaging with racial issues in educa-tion, and suggest some strategies for counteracting them. The resistance strategies include silence, di-version, guilt, and benevolent liberalism. Techniques to offset these and develop critical cultural conscious-ness and self-reflection include creating learning ex-pectations of criticalness, modeling, providing opportunities to practice critical consciousness, and translating conceptual multicultural education into K-12 instructional possibilities. Woven throughout the specific suggestions is the general directive that crit-ical consciousness learning experiences should take place within the context of guided practice, authentic examples, and realistic situations. WE BELIEVE THAT CULTURALLY responsive teaching (CRT) for ethnically diverse stu-dents should be a fundamental feature of teacher preparation and classroom practice. CRT involves using the cultures, experiences, and perspectives of African, Native, Latino, and Asian American students as filters through which to teach them ac-ademic knowledge and skills. Other critical ele-ments of culturally responsive teaching are unpacking unequal distributions of power and priv-ilege, and teaching students of color cultural com-petence about themselves and each other. Our beliefs about the necessity of CRT are based on the premises that (a) multicultural educa-tion and educational equity and excellence are deep-ly interconnected; (b) teacher accountability involves being more self-conscious, critical, and analytical of one’s own teaching beliefs and be-haviors; and (c) teachers need to develop deeper knowledge and consciousness about what is to be taught, how, and to whom. These premises are sup-ported by scholars such as Danielewicz (2001), Ga