ABSTRACT
The composition of the teacher education student and teacher groups is in sharp contrast to that of public school pupils. Several recent studies have shown that teacher education students are overwhelmingly white, monolingual, from a rural, or suburban community, and come to their teacher education programmes with very little direct intercultural experience. One strategy used by teacher educators to counter the low expectations that prospective teachers hold for some pupils is to expose them, either through readings or by direct contact, to examples of successful teaching for ethnic and language minority pupils. This exposure to cases of success is often supplemented by helping prospective teachers examine ways in which schools help structure inequality through various practices in curriculum, instruction, grouping, and assessment. One type of field experience involves brief periods of volunteer work in social service agencies, and is designed to help prospective teachers confront poverty in a direct way.
