Preservice teacher education and the negotiation of social difference

This paper reports on the results of a research project on 35 teacher candidates in a Canadian Faculty of Education. It challenges the usual explanations of why prospective teachers are ineffective in teaching children of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds by installing macro and meso levels of social organization that reticulate with preservice teacher education. It reveals that not only do teacher candidates defy generalization as a group, but their positions on education and social difference are replete with inconsistencies even on an individual basis. The process of socialization is fraught with tensions that arise from expectations for teacher candidates to adapt to environments that are themselves embroiled in unresolved and long-standing dilemmas. How teacher candidates negotiate social differences cannot be understood apart from the tensions they encounter that derive from a range of sources, and from the ambivalent ways they cope with those tensions.