Unearthing the muted voices of transformative professionals: A qualitative study of African-American candidates learning to teach children from diverse student populations in urban school

This feminist qualitative study addresses the marginalization of preparing teachers for diversity and the marginalization of minority teacher candidates' voices within the teacher profession. It begins to fill the critical gap in the teacher education research literature on preparing teachers to teach diverse student populations by documenting the everyday realities of African-American teacher candidates within a teacher education program committed to social justice, caring, and educational equity. Analyzing four teacher candidates' experiences within the framework of the general education literature, the African-American Intellectual Tradition and Multicultural Feminisms provides a means to answer the overarching question: How are African-American teaching candidates making sense of learning to teach diverse student populations? Data included in-depth interviews, participation observations, and document analysis over a two year period.;Teacher candidates' private and public socialization experiences contribute to their understandings of how they began to make sense of learning to teach in multicultural and multilingual urban schools. Each of the following contexts informs their philosophies and practices: (1) their family and schooling experiences before entering the teacher education program, (2) the teacher education program, and (3) their beginning practices in urban schools. The candidates' stories provide an articulation of a Black feminist/womanist humanist vision of community and struggle that responds to educational inequities and the cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity of K-12 public schools. Their stories reveal how their philosophies of teaching and practices with diverse student populations in urban schools are undergirded by an ethic of care interweaved with a commitment to just practices.;This study provides a framework from which future research on preparing all teachers for diversity and educational and social equity can continue. Centering the African-American teacher candidates' socialization experiences illustrates how the implementation of a Multicultural Social Reconstructionist Teacher Education Program can meet the educational needs of teacher candidates' stemming from the intersection of race, social class, and gender.