Abstract

Multiculturalism in teacher education, a phrase that I use to describe the ways in which we think and talk about preparing teachers to teach all students, acts as a focused beam that casts a searing light on the tensions inherent to teacher education generally. The good teacher is now a multicultural teacher, and, as such, operates as a site for the investigation of racialized discourses in teacher education. The primary narratives that form the description of the discursive field are the narratives of professional knowledge, the disposition of the teacher, and the characteristics of the secondary school student. Taken together, these provide a kaleidoscopic view of the ideal person teacher education seeks to create. In this paper, I discuss the narrative of professional knowledge as it takes its shape from the texts produced within a secondary teacher education program in the United States. In making the narrative of professional knowledge explicit, I hope to open venues for better understanding our imaginative boundaries in multicultural education.