Recalculation in Teacher Preparation: Challenging Assumptions through Increased Community Contact

The ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds of students in PreK–12 US schools are becoming increasingly diverse. However, the teacher candidates (TCs) populating teacher education programs are, overall, not representative of this student diversity. To encourage the TCs enrolled in an undergraduate English education program to better understand the diverse communities in which they would teach, I developed and incorporated a Community Inquiry Project into their required coursework. As students completed the assignments associated with the project, they reflected on their experiences. An analysis of the reflections of three participants demonstrates how contact with the people and places of the community influenced their understandings of the community itself as well as of themselves as future teachers. This work draws from critical multiculturalism and contact theory to demonstrate how contact with community members during teacher education coursework can encourage TCs to name and question their own assumptions about others as they cultivate a more contextualized and diverse understanding of students.