Multiculturalism and the Teacher Education Experience

This book explores potential strategies for conducting multicultural education classes for preservice students. It is proposed that effective strategies must confront issues of Whiteness and White privilege as opposed to those that tend to trivialize multicultural experiences in terms of food, fun and fiestas also known as Three F's Multiculturalism. As an alternative, via a collection of articles and essays, the author proposes a set of criteria that defines the preconditions for an optimal learning environment. Criterion focuses on the knowledge, skills and dispositions of preservice students and stresses an awareness of whiteness, dominance and subordination, racism, and denial. Teachers of multicultural education classes must be brought to understand that despite the inevitable hostility from their students and the nearly debilitating discomfort they feel as a result of this, confrontation is necessary and vital to their teacher candidates' development of a multicultural frame of reference and an ability to construct effective multicultural curricula.