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Crafting culturally efficacious teacher preparation and pedagogies, by B. Bustos Flores, L. Claeys and C. D. Gist

In Crafting Culturally Efficacious Teacher Preparation and Pedagogies, Bustos Flores, Claeys, and Gist provide an in-depth look at the possibilities offered by teacher education programs that focus on preparing diverse groups of educators for 21st-century classrooms. Historically, educators in the United States have struggled to provide culturally sustaining pedagogy to an increasingly diverse student population (Villegas & Lucas, 2012). Schools might attempt to create a sense of belonging for diverse student groups through periodic multicultural lessons, but a deeper problem exists when teachers cannot understand the cultural or linguistic lenses from which students view instruction. This issue can become exacerbated when teachers do not hail from the same ethnic, cultural, or linguistic backgrounds as their students and struggle to make sense of the experiences that students bring into classrooms with them. Further, while current research advocates for valuing emergent bilingual students’ linguistic repertoires and taking a dynamic view of bilingualism in order to promote learning (García, 2009), others have argued that educators must go even further to deconstruct the societal frameworks placed on linguistic and ethnic minority students in order to implement truly culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012). In response to a shortage of teachers who share similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds with student populations, as well as a need to prepare teachers to deliver instruction in a culturally sustaining manner, the Accelerated Teacher Education Program (ATEP) at The University of Texas at San Antonio began to implement its Culturally Efficacious Evolution Model (CEEM). This model forms the focus of study for Bustos Flores, Claeys, and Gist’s recent book. In their roles as professors and researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (Bustos Flores and Claeys) and at The University of Arkansas (Gist), the authors are experts on bilingual education and teacher preparation for culturally diverse student groups. In this study, they examine the effectiveness of ATEP’s model in its efforts to prepare pre-service teachers to implement culturally sustaining pedagogies and develop a social justice mind-set. Although the program accepts students from all cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the demographic makeup of San Antonio has helped ATEP to recruit students who are racially and ethnically representative of the classrooms in which they will eventually serve. However, the authors make the observation that not all teachers from diverse backgrounds have a natural ability to teach students of varying linguistic abilities and cultural experiences. This difficult paradox made the success of CEEM even more vital to teacher educators in San Antonio, a city in which 45% of the total population is bilingual, 20% live below the poverty line, and approximately 20% of students are coded as English Language Learners by reports from the Texas Education Agency. Despite figures that might appear to be initial obstacles, the study sought to describe the ways in which graduates of the program were accomplishing the goal of implementing culturally sustaining pedagogies in 21st-century classrooms. The reader will note that the authors use the critical pieces of what have been termed culturally relevant pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 2014) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012), as well as a commitment to social justice and equity, and extend them to define culturally efficacious