Please mind the culture gap: Intercultural development during a teacher education study abroad program.

Marx, H. & Moss, D.M. (2011). Please mind the culture gap: Intercultural development during a teacher education study abroad program. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(1), 35-47.


This article helped me think in a different way about what kinds of programs actually promote true cultural awareness and lead to transformed perspectives that actually can lead preservice teachers to embrace culturally responsive teaching that honors and works through cultural diversity rather than seeing differences as deviations from the norm. My teacher education program, like many others in the US, requires preservice teachers, most of whom are white, middle-class, suburbanite females who speak only English, to complete field experiences in culturally diverse urban settings. Yet at times I have worried that these exposures only serve to reinforce and strengthen prior perceptions of children as “the other”, and a deficient other at that. The authors here point out that in the US, the dominant culture still drives and controls schools. Even if the student population no longer matches that dominant culture, still, the norms of schools prevail in a hegemonic way that is not questioned. The preservice teacher is positioned as the one who is “right”, and some of my preservice teachers perceive themselves as people in a superior circumstance who are teaching so that they can “help” children become more like themselves. Marx and Moss maintain that unless you experience being “the other” in a setting, you will not develop the level of cultural awareness that teachers need to be able to see the need to teach in a culturally responsive manner. They believe that the best way to experience this is immersion in an international setting, completely off the preservice teacher’s own “turf”, i.e., in an international school setting.

In the case study of one preservice teacher related here, the setting was in London, England. At first I questioned just how much challenge immersing preservice teachers in an English-speaking international environment might be. The authors addressed this concern eventually, and cautioned against automatically assuming that cultural awareness would result from simply being in a different cultural environment. A certain level of reflection is needed, and the authors described how “Catherine,” an English woman who taught a college course for the study abroad participants, served as a sort of a “cultural guide” who provided a safe space for honest reflection and facilitated the preservice teachers’ growth as their perceptions of culture and themselves as cultural beings transformed. By the end of the article I realized that while working in a culture that does not speak one’s home language might be very powerful, there are serious obstacles and fears that come with such an experience, and lengthy preparation would be required to learn a language. That simply might not happen with most preservice teachers, so English-speaking countries are probably the best bet. Other countries that require most students to be multilingual as a regular requirement might have the advantage over the US in this regard, however.