Reproducing and Interrupting Subtractive Schooling in Teacher Education (Research) (Essay‪)‬

These are the words of one preservice teacher voicing his frustration over the fact that he has been required to take a course focusing on teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts. We can feel his pain because we are two professors who teach such courses and we consistently hear similar complaints from our teacher education students who substitute the word "math" with any number of other content areas which reflect their specialization. Our job is to convince these well-intentioned and idealistic students that it will be their job to teach all of their students and in the reality of today's schools they will have students who are English language learners (ELLs). Perhaps it is not surprising that we have encountered such resistance from preservice teachers given the fact that our students, like the majority of preservice teachers in other universities, are White and come from middle-class and monolingual English speaking backgrounds (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (2004) address this issue: