Earners from Native American communities in the U.S. experience unfamiliar curricula that are designed and implemented by educators from the dominant culture who are often unprepared to meet the needs of diverse leaners. Consequently, teacher education programs have a responsibility to equipe preservice teachers with knowledge and skills essential to integrating culturally relevant contents. Therefore, this collaborative autoethnography conducted as a teacher-educator professional development program, explored the perspectives of Native Peoples on preferred pedagogical approaches for Indigenous learners. Data were collected through autobiographical notes, written reflections, focus groups, interactive activities with study participants, and structured interviews. A thematic analysis resulted in two findings, that is, importance of contextually appropriate curriculum and the value of community-based collaborative learning professional development activities in supporting authentic culturally responsive lessons for teacher educators. Among other recommendations, the data support the enactment of teacher education programs that support intentional culturally collaborative Community-Based Professional Development activities between educators and Indigenous Peoples.

In this qualitative investigation, racial and ethnic minority teachers (N = 6) used personal stories to elucidate their experiences with social injustices that have impacted their teaching in rural schools. These counter-stories serve to disrupt orthodox conceptions of teachers of color, to resituate their work in their cultural positions, and to demonstrate the ways in which their experiences with oppression and resistance affect their teaching in rural settings.

This interpretive phenomenological study explores the perspectives of in-service, K-12 teachers in a graduate teacher education program on using goal setting to promote culturally responsive practices. The participants set two goals, documented their growth, and rated course instructional strategies that contributed to their learning. Data were collected through written reflections and responses to an anonymous midterm questionnaire in an online forum. Additional data came from the participants’ final reflections, the principal researcher’s reflective teaching notes, and end-of-semester reflections gathered by an unaffiliated critical friend after grades were posted. Coded data revealed that: 1. In-service teachers created goals that were relevant to specific areas of growth in professional learning and development in culturally responsive teaching practices and understanding diverse learners, 2. Goal setting, as a self-regulated learning strategy, serves to empower teachers toward teaching for promoting culturally responsive teaching practices, 3. Instructional supports and activities enhance personal development in becoming culturally responsive teachers, 4. Teacher educators’ reflection-on-action supports professional development.

Educational policies and practices in the current age of heightened globalization are increasingly grounded on unjust binary curriculum approaches that favor educational designs from Minority-World countries at the expense of epistemologies of indigenous people in Majority-World nations that are typically deemed culturally inferior (Gupta, 2015). Essentially, those opposing binaries promote neocolonial and neoliberal ideologies while disregarding lived cultural contexts of people in Majority-World countries (Lee, 2012). To grapple with this conundrum, this ethnographic study examined how educators in Kenya and Nepal (N = 26) contested, constructed, and transformed educational practices in contexts of globalization, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism. Qualitative data from four schools in Kathmandu, Nepal (16 participants) and two schools in Kenya (10 participants) revealed that educators struggled with issues of intellectual imperialism. Therefore, they strived to deconstruct the existing unjust binary curricula policies by embracing pluralist educational discourses essential to sustaining indigenous languages and dialects. In doing so, those educators focused on advancing local cultural values, rights, and ideologies without antagonizing influential stakeholders from Minority-World nations.