Behind Cultural Competence: The Role of Causal Attribution in Multicultural Teacher Education.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between achievement motivation and multicultural teacher education, this study explored the relationship between causal attribution of cultural awareness and cultural competence among preservice teachers. Participants were 793 preservice teachers from two large public universities who reported their causal attributions of cultural awareness and their cultural competence. Canonical correlation analysis results showed two significant relationships between causal attribution and cultural competence. Personal control over the causes of cultural awareness was found to be positively related to praxis, i.e., behavioral outcome; whereas attributions to internal and stable causes were positively associated with knowledge as major components of cultural competence. The findings indicate the importance of addressing causal attribution and moving beyond negative emotions in enhancing preservice teachers’ cultural competence in multicultural education. Implications for multicultural teacher education and future research directions are discussed. As a means to address the mismatch between the increasingly diverse student body and homogenous teaching force, multicultural education has become an important component of teacher preparation programs in the U.S. for nearly four decades. As early as 1970s, The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) defined multicultural education as “Preparation for the social, political, and economic realities that individuals experience in culturally diverse and complex human encounters” (1977, p. 4) and established it as a specific criterion to evaluate teacher preparation programs. Preservice teachers are anticipated to acquire cultural competence to successfully work with students from diverse backgrounds. The conceptual background for cultural competence derives from a combination of counseling psychology and healthcare professions that have taken a lead in operationalizing and measuring this construct. Despite the unsettled controversy over the definitions of cultural Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 36, 9, September 2011 2 competence, studies and theories have consistently revealed two core components of this construct, namely, knowledge and praxis (e.g., National Center for Cultural Competence, 1998; NCATE; 2008; Sue, 1982; Yang & Montgomery, 2010). Knowledge refers to the amount and depth of multicultural and diversity knowledge necessary for preservice teachers to be culturally competent. Many researchers and theorists in multicultural education have repeatedly argued the importance of knowing and understanding multicultural and diversity issues illuminating the dire consequences of ignorance of diversity knowledge to teaching and learning (Banks, 2005; Diller, 2007; Howard, 2006; Nieto, 1992). According to these scholars, understanding racism, prejudice, and White privilege, knowing cultures and cultural differences, and being aware of stereotypes and biases are essential to cultural competence. Praxis, on the other hand, refers to the application of skills, strategies, and pedagogical practices to help teachers successfully work with students from diverse backgrounds. It covers a wide range of behavioral outcomes from culturally-responsive pedagogy (Cochran-Smith, 2004) to a repertoire of skills necessary for teachers to be prepared for meeting the educational needs of students from diverse backgrounds (NCATE, 2008). Along with consensus on the two core components of cultural competence, there is a considerable agreement that cultural competence is a developmental process that grows over an extended period, requires a long-term commitment, and goes beyond cultural awareness (e.g., Bennett, 1993; Brach & Fraserirector, 2000; Denboba, 1997). Preservice teachers usually have more or less cultural awareness as a result of multiple factors such as increasing diversity, globalization, and multicultural courses. Cultural awareness necessitates recognizing the importance of cultural differences; whereas cultural competence is considered to be a higher level ability to work with people from different cultural backgrounds (Winkelman, 2005). The role of motivation in developing cultural competence among teachers has become an increasingly important topic in multicultural education (e.g., Kouli & Papaioannou, 2008; May, 1994; Salili & Hoosain, 2007; Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995). For example, in a multicultural physical education class, students with task orientation and class climate highlighting mastery goal orientations were found to have stronger sense of ethnic belonging and more success in acculturation (Kouli & Papaioannou, 2008) than their counterparts. As a dominant conception in motivation, attribution theory has been in full fledge and widely applied to a variety of fields such as academic achievement, sports performance, and school violence, etc. However, causal attribution in multicultural teacher education seems to be much less studied. Researchers argue from an interpersonal attributional stance that the major setbacks hindering preservice teachers’ cultural competence include institutional hierarchy and bureaucracy, lack of time and power in the teaching profession, and lack of teachers of color (Fuller, 1992). However, the intrapersonal attribution is unknown and it remains unclear whether the reasons preservice teachers attribute Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 36, 9, September 2011 3 their cultural awareness relate to their efficacy beliefs in cultural competence. While interpersonal attribution serves to examine how multicultural education experts or educators attribute preservice teachers’ cultural awareness, intrapersonal attribution can help us understand how preservice teachers examine themselves regarding their cultural awareness. According to Weiner (2000), people are scientists trying to understand themselves and the environment and base their future behaviors on the knowledge derived from the causal attributions of their past performance. The way people make causal attributions serves as a motivational factor in guiding future behavioral reactions or outcomes. Attribution examines the cognitive explanations when observing an outcome and validates them by relating those explanations to observable characteristics of that individual. Once the attributions are made, they serve to predict affect and future outcome (Petri, 1991; Weiner, 2000). In multicultural education setting, preservice teachers may attribute their cultural awareness to various causes such as multicultural training, cross-cultural experiences, and friends from different cultures. The causal attributions preservice teachers make about their cultural awareness, according to Weiner’s intrapersonal attribution theory (2000), will serve to predict preservice teachers’ knowledge and praxis in multicultural and diversity issues in their prospective classrooms. However, whether this is true has not been investigated empirically in previous studies. Theoretical Framework Weiner’s intrapersonal attribution theory (2000) does not concern so much of the content of causal attribution as the pattern of accounting for the underlying properties or characteristics of a major cause on three dimensions: stability, controllability, and locus of causality. Causal stability refers to the duration of a cause. Some causes such as chance are perceived as temporary and changeable, whereas other causes such as talent are considered as stable and constant. For instance, preservice teachers may attribute their cultural awareness to stable causes such as intercultural marriage, friendship, or interest in other cultures, or unstable causes such as crosscultural travel trips, an encounter with a stranger from a different culture, or an intense preparation for a test on multiculturalism. Locus of causality refers to the location of a cause either within or outside of a person. For example, ability, effort, mood, indifference are considered personal causes, whereas task difficulty, instructor quality, and luck are considered external sources of causality. In the case of causal attribution of cultural awareness, luck of a previous cross-cultural exposure apparently has an external locus. Finally, controllability refers to the extent a cause is subject to volitional alteration. For example, one can change causes such as effort, whereas other causes such as luck and aptitude cannot be willfully changed. Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 36, 9, September 2011 4 Controllability was further split into personal and external control, in that some cause can be controllable by others while uncontrollable by the person, and vice versa (McAuley, Duncan, & Russell, 1992). For example, if a preservice teacher ascribes his or her cultural awareness to the discovery learning method taught by the instructor, this cause could be under external but not personal control. According to Weiner (2000), the major causal properties constitute two major determinants of motivation, namely, expectancy and value. Expectancy refers to the subjective chance of future success while value refers to the emotional consequences of an outcome. Stability is positively linked with expectancy, in that if a cause is considered stable, the same outcome will be anticipated again in the future. In this case, if a preservice teacher attributes his or her cultural awareness to a stable cause, he or she is likely to anticipate a steady increase in cultural awareness, which may eventually lead to high levels of cultural competence. Locus and controllability, on the other hand, relate to affective states or the value of the outcomes. Locus influences feelings of pride and self-esteem, and controllability jointly influences feelings of guilt or shame with locus of causality. Applying to the causal attribution of cultural awareness, it is expected that preservice teachers who consider the causes of th