ABSTRACT
Introduction The cultural gap in the United States between school children and their teachers is wide and growing. Students in public schools are more culturally and linguistically diverse, and demographics forecast such diversity to continue for the foreseeable future (Assaf & Dooley, 2006; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Sleeter, 2001; U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Meanwhile, as a demographic group, public school teachers are typically White, monolingual, of middle-class background, and from suburban or rural home contexts (Taylor & Sobel, 2001, p. 488). The demographics point to a growing disparity in life experience and values between schools and students. Many teachers bring a monolingual and dominant culture perspective to the task of teaching and cite their lack of experience with diversity as one area for which they feel unprepared as they move into classrooms (Sleeter, 2001). How, then, does a teacher move from a life history defined by the majority culture and dominant language to understand and interact with a classroom reality of cultural hybridity, multilingualism, and diverse home life experience? One proposal is that teachers should engage in reflective and personally transformative activity to embrace “otherness” and recognize the diversity inherent to all cultural frames including their own (Merryfield, 2000; Scahill, 1993; Suarez, 2002).
