Abstract

Future teachers need to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to become culturally competent teachers of literacy. When preservice educators are still admitting to a lack of preparedness in working with diverse populations, much is yet to be done. In this study, qualitative measures, such as pre/post-self-ratings, a multicultural survey, class assignments and in-class activities, and field notes, were used to investigate the research question, “How can we better prepare preservice educators to provide effective literacy instruction to meet the needs of diverse populations in the classroom?” Thus, a semester-long intercultural journey helped transform preservice educators’ perceptions of delivering effective literacy instruction to diverse populations. They engaged in the process of identifying their attitudes and perceptions of other cultures, gaining multimodal understandings of literacy to foster culturally responsive pedagogical practices, planning lessons for inclusion of diverse learners in the classroom, and then rethinking and reconstructing teaching plans as they perfected their teaching skills. Our findings revealed that preservice educators’ perceptions were transformed in several ways.