MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

the degree to which the teacher prepara-tion program cultivates the appropriate awareness, skills, and dispositions to teach diverse students. This case study captures how a team of diversity researchers constructed an instrument to gauge future teachers ’ pre-paredness, willingness, and comfort with teaching diverse students. A review of the literature before development began pro-duced a few similar surveys, beginning with the Cultural Diversity Awareness Inventory, created by Gertrude Henry (1986). Henry’s questionnaire was designed to be used as a self-assessment of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward culturally diverse children. While the items on that questionnaire could help reveal bias about racial and ethnic diversity, it does not ap-pear to address other types of diversity such as gender, religion, age, or sexual orientation. This is important because each type of diversity creates its own culture. A few years later, Henry’s survey was administered again with few changes by Larke (1990). Thirteen years later, it was modified slightly and administered again by Milner, Flowers, Moore, Moore, and Flowers (2003). The research team for the current study found that this cultural diversity awareness inventory had not changed appreciably since 1986. To a large degree, it was still asking the same questions. Meanwhile the world was changing. Given that this previous survey was now 20 years old, we believed it was time for a more contemporary survey. The demographics of today’s classrooms are very different from those of two decades ago. Teachers being prepared now must be ready for these new changes, and pos-ses the awareness, skills, and dispositions appropriate to teach diverse students of this new century successfully. They need to understand a broader definition of diver-sity, and they need skills such as culturally responsive teaching strategies