Learning or Unlearning Racism: Transferring Teacher Education Curriculum to Classroom Practices

In the United States, urban public schools are attended primarily by students from various racial minority groups. Statistically, teachers in these schools are often White and becoming more so annually. Issues of race and culture are critical in today's educational contexts at every level–including pedagogy, curriculum, and teachers. Considering the severity of what these statistics mean for educational quality and teacher quality, research efforts to understand this situation are essential. This article presents the findings of a study about what a group of teacher education graduates learned about race as they prepared to teach in multiracial classrooms. The findings of this study are then used to discuss what the university curriculum may actually produce and what future considerations would be beneficial to enable teachers to teach in a context where their race and culture differ dramatically from their students.