Studies in Educational Evaluation Studies in Educational Evaluation 28 (2002) 3 IS-328 www.elsevier.com/stueduc TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH LATTICE AN INTERNATIONAL-INTERCULTURAL PROJECT Elena C. Papanastasiou* and Paul F. Conway** ‘University of Kansas, USA *‘National University of Ireland, Cork, Ireland Introduction There has been a large increase in the number of students from minority cultures in the United States’ K-12 classrooms over the last century, one reflection of the changing demographics of the last one hundred years (Evans, Torrey, & Newton, 1997). Consequently, the problem of teaching “other people’s children”, as Delpit (1987) put it, is endemic to an immigrant society such as the United States (Conway, Goodell, & Carl, in press). The projections for the first few decades of the 21”’ century predict that this diversity will increase even further (Ball, 2000). Therefore, US students today need to experience multicultural education in order to be able to participate socially, politically, and economically in an increasingly multicultural society (Gibson & Follo, 1998; Sleeter & Grant, 1988; Williams-Carter, 1999). However, many teachers in the USA have not had sufficient training or background in multicultural education (Zeichner, Grant, Gay, Gillette, Valli, & Villegas, 1998). In a survey that was conducted in 1994, only 19 states (37.3%) required prospective teachers to take courses in multicultural education in order to obtain teacher certification (Evans, Torrey & Newton, 1997). What is even more worrisome, according to some commentators, is that even though the students in schools are increasingly more diverse, the majority of their teachers continue to be white, female, and of Caucasian descent (Garmon, 1996; Zeichner, 1999). These demographic patterns led Rego and Nieto to ask: 0191-491X/02/$ - see front matter 0 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: SOlSl-491X(02)00041-X