Critique Of A Qualitative Study

In the study “I Want a Multicultural Classroom: Preparing Social Studies Teachers for Culturally Diverse Classrooms,” the study was done to find out how two cohorts of elementary preservice teachers who were enrolled in the same university viewed citizenship education in today’s culturally and globally diverse classrooms. Though both cohorts were enrolled in the same university, one group participated in an urban-based teacher education program. The author focuses on the intersection of Social Studies, Citizenship, and Multicultural Education. The main goal/purpose of the study is to present findings from a qualitative study that traces how preservice teachers enrolled in two different cohorts of one elementary program—a traditional elementary

The personally responsible citizen, the participatory citizen, and the social justice-oriented citizen. The personally responsible citizen is expected to be a productive member of society, obey the laws, and exhibit sound moral qualities. The participatory citizen acts to improve the community through civic engagement, volunteer work, and participating in the political process. The social justice-oriented citizen asks critical questions about the cause of inequity and injustice in the community and seeks to rectify such injustices through activism. Along with the three kinds of citizenship, there is also multicultural citizenship. Multicultural citizenship is concerned with helping students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and values appropriate in an increasingly ethnically pluralistic nation-state. Finally, the way participants define and view multicultural education varied. There was multicultural education that distinguishes between multicultural education for the acceptance of culturally diverse others and multicultural education for social change to end

Although participants defined citizenship as the purpose for social studies teaching, their view of what citizenship entailed differed significantly. Participants overall believed social studies could provide life skills or tools such as money management, knowledge about how government works, and skills to express one’s ideas and communicate with others. For the participants, the central component of competent citizenship was the ability to utilize social studies to understand reality. Also, the study suggests that the perspective pre-service teachers in the urban cohort hold are qualitatively different conceptions of the purpose for social studies teaching and the relationship between social studies and teaching in culturally, linguistically, or economically diverse contexts. Urban cohort members gravitated more toward activist and cultural citizenship as a purpose for teaching social studies. Urban cohort members also held more advanced ideas of infusing cultural content in the social studies and creating culturally responsive classroom