Multicultural Education in Teacher Education: The State of the Scene.

Overview & Synopsis

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Standards for the Accreditation of Teacher Education were revised to include references to multicultural education in May, 1977. To help teacher education institutions plan for and implement the standards, data on existing conditions were collected and analyzed. Information in the areas of curricula, faculty, students, management, and research and development was collected from 387 institutional members of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Over half of the responding institutions (78.8 percent) indicated that they had, as part of their education programs, activities that are supportive of the multicultural education concept as described in the NCATE Standards. These institutions were more likely to have courses or departments in ethnic and women's studies, to provide inservice training in bilingual and multicultural education, and to have a higher percentage of minority group faculty members. An analysis of institutional characteristics found significant differences based on: (1) public and private institutions; (2) NCATE-accredited and non-accredited institutions; (3) geographic distribution; (4) rural or urban setting; and (5) size of student population. (FG)