Culturally Responsive Teacher Education in the United States
Authors: Soodjinda Daniel , Hansuvadha Nat , Grenot-Scheyer Marquita 
Published: February 2016

By 2060 people of color will make up 57 percent of the nation’s population, and in K-12 schools, classrooms have steadily become more diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and ability. Despite this increase in diversity, teachers today still struggle with viewing the culture, background, and life experiences of students as a resource, and instead have reduced these students’ home lives to stereotypical notions of race and ethnicity. This translates into superficial pre-packaged “diversity” attempts that link curriculum to “culture” and leads to a focus on a cultural “heroes and holidays” approach that neglects the rich cultural homes of students. On multiple levels this is problematic because the opportunity gaps between persons of color (POC) with white students continue to exist. Teachers, school leaders, and policymakers operationalize these gaps through a deficit lens—blaming students, their homes, and their communities. Thus, to address this gap, which views students’ assets as a deficit instead of a resource, teacher preparation programs must unpack, abolish, and reframe the ways in which they treat “diversity” in their curriculum by legitimizing, normalizing, and centering culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) throughout their program, instead of treating it as an add on. The criteria of CRP includes educational settings where: (a) students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order (Ladson-Billings 2014, cited under CRTE Books and Journals: p. 160). Those involved in educator preparation understand that a caring and competent teacher for each and every student is of paramount importance. While agreement is general regarding the qualities of an effective and caring educator, the same is not true regarding how to develop, prepare, support, and evaluate these educators. In this article, Culturally Responsive Teacher Education (CRTE) is defined as an educator preparation model that results in educators who can effectively teach all students. The simplicity of this definition does not reveal the underlying complexity of the actual endeavor, and this article provides the reader with resources to unpack this multifaceted framework. As challenging as the complexity of teacher preparation may be, schools need teachers and other educators who are well prepared for the increasingly complex and diverse student population. Further, diversity extends beyond race, language, and socioeconomic status to be inclusive of ability, as more and more students with disabilities are educated alongside typical peers in general education classrooms. Students with disabilities are not defined by a single social construct or identity marker of diversity. Rather, disability exists within the larger framework of demographics, which includes race, culture, language, and social class. It is essential for those responsible for educator preparation to think about the whole enterprise of our work, including the beliefs and values of the candidates we prepare, the nature of their content and pedagogical preparation, the ways in which they collaborate to support student success, their understanding and use of various instructional strategies, and their understanding and use of assessment and evaluation practices. Therefore, CRTE comprises five facets: dispositions, content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, collaboration, effective instruction, and formative and summative assessment and progress monitoring. This bibliography begins with a list of seminal books as well as foundation and policy reports, which are followed by a discussion of CRTE with citations and annotations related to the five dimensions of CRTE.