Collaboration between Multicultural and Special Teacher Educators: Pulling Together the Threads in the Conversation.

Over the past three decades, increased migration resulting from globalization has dramatically transformed the demographic makeup of nations throughout the world (Ben-Peretz, 2009). Nowhere is this transformation more apparent than in public elementary and secondary schools, where the student population has become increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, language, and economic class. In the United States, for example, students of color already comprise more than 43% of total enrollments, with the numbers trending upward (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009); English language learners (ELLs) account for more than 10% of all students served (National Council of La Raza, 2008), and more than 22% of children 18 years of age and younger live in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). At the same time, the movement toward inclusive education has added further to the diversity of U.S. classrooms. Legislative mandates requiring students with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment appropriate for them has increased the number of learners with developmental needs in general education classes (Pugach & Blanton, 2009). These changes raise questions about the type of preparation all classroom teachers need to successfully teach students with a wider range of backgrounds and experiences than ever before. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) examine this timely topic by engaging a stellar group of scholars in a discussion of how educators across diversity communities might collaboratively address the preparation needs of today's teachers. As the articles in this issue show, the relationship across diversity communities, and in particular multicultural and special educators, is complicated. Philosophically, the two fields have much in common; however, disciplinary and practical differences create serious barriers to the needed collaboration. In my commentary, I aim to pull together the threads in the conversation between multicultural and special teacher educators surrounding issues of collaboration, as reflected in this issue. I begin with a brief discussion of collaborative teacher education a central concept to the dialogue--and then comment on why I think such an approach to preparing teachers for today's schools is compelling and what is at stake if we fail to collaborate. Looking across the articles, I then highlight major tensions between the fields of multicultural and special education that demand candid discussion before the collaboration can take place. Building on insights offered by the authors who write from a multicultural perspective and my own professional experience, I identify a few ideas that have the potential for moving the needed collaboration forward. First, I want to share highlights of my background to help readers understand how I am positioned in this conversation and the perspective I bring to it. I am a Latina from an economically poor background who immigrated to the United States with my family at the age of 6 and attended public schools in New York City as an ELL long before this term was first used by educators. Currently, I am a faculty member in a teacher education program that has an explicit social justice mission. I came to teacher education with an academic background in the sociology of education and experience as a bilingual teacher in a highly diverse and economically poor New York City community. I consider myself a specialist in teaching students who are poor and of racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority backgrounds, and much of my writing addresses issues in the preparation of teachers who are culturally and linguistically responsive. A decade ago, Tamara Lucas and I published a book with relevance to the goal of this JTE issue. In that work, we called on our colleagues, both within our institution and beyond, to "rethink" the preparation of teachers for a diverse student population--although the focus of this work was on students' race, ethnicity, social class, and language--the dimensions of diversity at the center of our expertise (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). …