ABSTRACT

This volume represents the sustained and creative efforts of a team of teacher educators who have concretely taken up the challenge of finding better ways to prepare future early childhood teachers to work effectively with a rapidly diversifying U.S. student population. While it is common for teacher education programs to include issues of language and cultural diversity in university coursework, many programs do little more-even if students are completing their practice teaching assignments in communities with large numbers of students who are emergent bilinguals, heritage speakers of alternate English dialects, or who come from refugee and immigrant backgrounds. Many teacher education programs “talk the talk” but many fewer “walk the walk.” The research reported in this volume is remarkable because the faculty of the Community as Resources in Early Childhood Teacher Education (CREATE) program have allowed us to look over their shoulders as they identified a shared set of theoretical premises about conditions supporting the learning of young culturally and linguistically diverse students. We then follow their progress as they worked to iteratively redesign their teacher education program to better support teachers in building the dispositions and skills to enact these premises with young emergent bilingual children and their families.