Toward Praxis: Multicultural Teacher Education

Much research suggests that teacher education programs generally fail to equip teachers with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to engage in multicultural education. While many proposed reforms of teacher education overlook relationships of culture, power, knowledge, and ideology, a new critique is emerging among multicultural teacher educators that draws on these constructs to challenge the functionalist approaches that predominate in colleges of teacher education. These calls have been grounded in theoretical activity that discusses the possibilities of merging critical and multicultural theories in order to reconceptualize multicultural teacher education. In this paper, we aim to discuss how critical multicultural teacher education (CMTE) is a theoretical perspective that holds promise for transforming multicultural teacher education to challenge inequities and enact social change