Cultural Difference and Teacher Identity Formation: The Need for a Pedagogy of Compassion

Experience is initially always the experience of negation: something is not what we supposed it to be.

We are beginning to appreciate that preparing beginning teachers for culturally diverse classrooms raises some surprisingly difficult questions for teacher education. In the first place, we lack much experience in educating for difference. The curriculum of teacher education has traditionally been structured around an array of commonalities of normal child development, learning theories, provincially mandated programs of studies, instructional planning procedures, and the identification and measurement of expected outcomes. It is a curriculum of sameness, aided and abetted by Lacan's “discourse of the university,” which demands a knowledge that is both certain and able to be exchanged from one who knows to one who does not. Given this tradition of conformity and the expectation of certainty, what are we to now say about cultural diversity in the preparation of teachers?

A second difficulty emerges when we actually try to address cultural difference in the teacher education classroom. Here we find that the absence of secure knowledge awakens the ambivalences of cultural identity among students in a context that is already fraught with the uncertainties of forming identities as teachers. Britzman has characterized the process of becoming a teacher as a time of “biographical crisis,” saying that learning to teach “is not a mere matter of applying decontextualized skills or of mirroring predetermined images; it is a time when one's past, present and future are set in dynamic tension” (Practice 8). For the student teacher faced with the fact of having to prepare to teach in contexts of cultural difference, the desire to teach and to be seen to be a teacher now becomes entangled with issues of cultural identity. We have found that this entanglement produces a highly charged emotional response from some stude