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Researching Possibilities: Vignettes of Accomplished Multicultural Teachers Dr. Christine E. Sleeter Professor College of Professional Studies California State University, Monteray Bay Rather than viewing teachers in terms of what they’re not doing (let me go critique them), I’ve become a lot more interested in finding teachers who are doing wonderful things and…learning from them and sharing ideas from them.

Dr. Sleeter started by discussing the three issues that she faced in her journey of becoming a researcher and learning how to use research as a tool for advocating for multicultural justice:

• The tension between research that gets you promotion and status in the academy and research that improves schools

• Learning how to own the research process to have it serve your purposes rather than finding an issue that works with the research methodologies you know

• How to balance your work between teaching, getting a research program going, and service to the community

Dr. Sleeter shared two examples of her work as a researcher that show a shift over time in the stance she has taken towards doing research with teachers—a shift from doing research on teachers to doing research with teachers. The following three things have been pivotal for her in making this shift:

• Twenty years of experience as a teacher educator working with pre-service students, masters level in-service students, and teachers at the in-service level. From this experience she realized that what would really help teachers would be seeing actual models of teachers doing the kind of teaching she envisioned

• Developing her own identity as a teacher and her teaching skills and finding teachers who were doing wonderful things and learning from them and sharing ideas from them

• Seeing some examples of research that have given her some new ideas, such as

1) producing a video with the voices of the people who were interviewed being central rather than the voices of the interviewer/researcher and

2) working in a participatory way so that the people who you are doing research on are your co-research constructors.

To help show teachers who are role models, Dr. Sleeter has been making video vignettes of excellent classroom teachers—ones who teachers and teacher-ed students can identify with and learn from. She has included some of these vignettes, along with a lot of writing, in a multi-media book.
In one example, a teacher was able to help students who were not writing become good writers by:

• Holding high expectations for them

• Scaffolding the instruction so that they learned to own the writing process, and then taking away the structure as the students became more comfortable with writing

• Having the students write from their own experience and about things that mean the most to them, and then learning to own the writing process as a way to be able to claim voice and speak to a wider audience

• Helping the students learn to review the work of other students for inclusion in a school-wide publication

Dr. Sleeter then described the process she uses to construct the video vignettes and how she involves the teacher in the process. She also briefly described the book she is currently writing, which will show a more long-term picture of individual teachers including their growth and change processes. She concluded by stating her vision of “action research,” which is using research to transform the environment in which you are working.

BIOGRAPHY

Christine E. Sleeter is a Professor in the College of Professional Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her research and consulting focuses on anti-racist multicultural education and multicultural teacher education. Dr. Sleeter has received several awards for her work including the California State University Monterey Bay President’s Medal, the National Association for Multicultural Education Research Award, the AERA Committee on the Role and Status of Minorities in Education Distinguished Scholar Award, and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside Research Award. Her journal articles appear in publications such as Review of Research in Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, and Educational Foundations. Her most recent books include Culture, Difference, and Power (Teachers College Press), which is a multimedia electronic book; Multicultural Education as Social Activism (SUNY Press); and Turning on Learning with Carl Grant (Wiley). In addition, she edits the book series Social Context of Education for SUNY Press.