ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the teacher in class, race and gender socialization and indicated the crucial need to help trainee teachers to break through stereotypes of class, gender and race. A key task of teacher education is to break this cycle of reinforcement by helping students to identify them, to recognize their source and to devise ways of combating the negative effects. And, of equal importance, students must be helped to recognize their own assumptions and prejudices. There are three main categories into which these underlying value systems, with their representative attitudes and expectations, may be placed: social class, gender and race. The process of learning the culture or subculture is known as socialization, and it is a process which can bring individuals together in behaviour and opportunity — or differentiate them. The teacher education course can provide them with the practical understanding and the theoretical and conceptual underpinning to do so.
