Developing a Pedagogy of Teacher Education for Teaching for Diversity : Exploring Teacher Educators' Epistemic Cognition for Epistemic Agency

Due to increasing globalisation, diversity is integral to many modern societies. Yet, graduate teachers can feel unprepared to teach diverse groups of children, leading to questions about how teacher educators might best respond to such challenges. In this chapter, we draw on epistemic cognition (claims about the nature of knowledge and processes of knowing) to sharpen our focus on epistemic agency to inform a new pedagogy of teacher education. Thirty-two Australian and New Zealand teacher educators participated in social labs, specifically addressing epistemic understandings of teaching about/to/for diversity. Findings showed that teacher educators stressed the importance of developing epistemic aims of ‘understanding’ and ‘knowledge’ related to teaching diverse groups of children. However, there was little evidence of reflexive accounts of epistemic aims for evaluation (critical reflection), adjudication, and justification of competing perspectives with respect to such questions as what is diversity; what does it mean to teach diverse learners; and whose knowledge and which conditions shape our decisions? We need to know more about what constrains and enables teacher educators to embrace evaluation and justification as epistemic aims and how a focus on epistemic reflexivity can help us to engage in a new pedagogy of teacher education for social justice in teacher education programs.

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