Developing a Dialogic Space for Moving towards Critical Multicultural Education

This chapter builds on a cooperative self-study project that involved 14 university-based teacher educators in the School of Education at the University of Iceland. Over three years, they engaged in self-study to understand how dialogue could aid their understandings of how their cultural backgrounds influence their work as teacher educators. Specifically, they worked to become aware of their identities and educational practices, developing a critical understanding of how they can either resist or reify existing structures of inequity. The purpose of this collective self-study was to document and analyze the process of developing a discursive space that 14 university-based teacher educators in Iceland co-designed and negotiated to mobilize the diverse understandings and experiences of the group to work towards multicultural teacher education. The aim was to strengthen teacher education through a “diversity-as-asset lens.” Their research question was: What did the co-authors, Karen and Gunnhildur, learn through their negotiation with each other and their colleagues in the process of creating a discursive space for moving towards multicultural teacher education? The data collected included focus group interviews, self-interviews, and audio-recordings of meetings. They used art-based analysis methods via the co-construction of sculptures and poems to create a dialogic space (Freire, 1970). Doing so led teacher educators to develop a shared agenda for collective transformation. Ultimately, this inquiry led them to collectively name and interrogate ideas and identities to transform their understandings and practices as teacher educators, helping them (re)commit to educating teachers in ways that prioritize equity and justice (Kitchen et al., 2016; Zeichner, 2018).