© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004388864_013
CHAPTER 13
International Novice Teacher Educators Navigating
Transitional Sel(f)ves in Multicultural Education
Teaching
Vy Dao and Yue Bian
Introduction
Multicultural education courses (MECs) are usually required in pre-service
teacher education curriculum (June, 2016; Sleeter, 2001). The courses play an
important role in shaping pre-service teachers’ orientations and practices towards
the increasing cultural and linguistic diversities in the U.S. classrooms (Ukpokodu,
2007). Teacher education communities acknowledge that MECs are critical to the
development of pre-service teachers’ understanding of structural and systemic
challenges that minoritized students face in schooling (Gorski, 2012). However,
there has been little done to understand how teacher educators, especially inter-
national novice teacher educators (INTEs), coming from multicultural and multi-
lingual backgrounds with diverse life and professional experiences, learn to teach
the courses in the U.S. (Foot, Crowe, Tollafield, & Allan, 2014). One way of under-
standing how INTEs learn to teach MECs in the U.S. is through the self-study of
narratives of INTEs as they reflect on their teaching experiences and identity
development across time, cultures, and places (Huang, 2010; Wang, 2005).
Researchers in self-study communities agree that novice teacher educators’
identities can be understood through examining stories told by them about the
struggles they encounter in new teaching places and the ways they confront strug-
gles in the transition process from one working place to another (Hamilton &
Pinnegar, 2015). Many of these studies focus on U.S. contexts but, in so doing,
fail to account for non-American novice teacher educators who pursue doctoral
studies in the U.S. By using collaborative self-study approaches and investigat-
ing our identities as INTEs teaching MECs, we address this gap. As we examine
how our identities as INTEs inform our teaching experiences, we wonder how
we, as INTEs, construct and negotiate our identities while we move from teach-
ing practices in non-U.S. contexts to teaching MECs in the U.S. By investigating
INTEs’ identity development, we look for understanding the nature of this learn-
ing, the trajectories of INTEs teaching MECs, and how they might inform further
research about INTEs’ development as future faculty teaching MECs in the U.S.
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