This article uses three tenets of critical race theory to critique the common pattern of teacher education focusing on preparing predominantly White cohorts of teacher candidates for racially and ethnically diverse students. The tenet of interest convergence asks how White interests are served through incremental steps. The tenet of color blindness prompts asking how structures that seem neutral, such as teacher testing, reinforce Whiteness and White interests. The tenet of experiential knowledge prompts asking whose voices are being heard. The article argues that much about teacher education can be changed, offering suggestions that derive from these tenets.

Using Kymlicka’s analysis of conflicts between “imperatives of state control” and “objectives of social movements,” I draw on my experiences with multicultural education to extrapolate some trends from the past and present that may inform the future. After briefly describing the origins of multicultural education (mainly within the United States), I situate struggles over education in the context of the global expansion of neoliberalism, critique “neoliberal multicultural education,” then briefly describe some efforts that push back. This essay concludes with four recommendations for moving forward.

Scholars of multicultural education have outlined goals for preservice teacher preparation that include preparing teachers to form relationships with students from backgrounds different from their own backgrounds, to bridge home and school cultures, to integrate multicultural content into the curriculum, to use pedagogy equitably in the classroom so they teach all students well, to reduce prejudice and build relationships among students, and to be change agents who can recognize and challenge injustice. In this chapter, first we briefly review research that supports these goals. Next, we analyze preservice teacher education research from articles published between 1980 and 2009 to highlight dominant themes and identify any changes that may have taken place in the research. Then, we examine research on how novice teachers use multicultural knowledge and skills from their preservice programs when they begin to teach to illuminate the extent to which their programs prepare them for work in diverse settings during their first years of teaching. We concluded by recommending directions for future research.

Critical family history challenges historians to ask about their ancestors. Who else (what other groups) was around, what were the power relationships among groups, how were these relationships maintained or challenged over time, and what does all this have to do with our lives now? These are different questions from the questions most family historians ask. This introductory essay elaborates on what critical family history is and where the concept came from, then provides a brief overview of the articles included in this Special Issue.

Many teacher educators attempt to prompt teacher candidates, who are usually majority white, to examine themselves as culturally and historically located beings in order to prepare for multicultural and anti‐racist teaching. But with white teacher candidates in colonialist societies, this work is difficult. Family history stories that white teacher candidates tell tend to disassociate individuals from the context of race and class relations in which they lived. Using insights from Critical Race Theory, critical whiteness studies, and post‐positivist realist identity theory, I probe below the surface of a ‘heroic individual’ story I grew up hearing about one of my immigrant great‐great‐grandmothers. This paper reports detailed historical research that situates her life in a social and cultural context, thereby making racism visible. Using a research methodology I am calling ‘critical family history,’ I uncover the story’s silences related to her claiming of a white identity in the context of racism and competition for economic resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for how teacher educators work with family history and racism in order to move from uncovering how racism was constructed and how it works, to how white people today might act differently.

Family history research connects very well with multicultural curriculum because it opens up the multiple experiences of members and communities of a society, as well as helping to make visible the historic construction and ongoing legacy of unequal relationships. The author of this article began to play with what she later called “critical family history,” while simultaneously teaching a course on Multicultural Curriculum Design and researching her own family history. However, it wasn’t until years later that she was able to include critical family history within a multicultural education course. In this article, after discussing various ways in which people approach family history research, the author offers three theoretical lenses for critical family history, then two sets of tools to guide research. Then she discusses her experience teaching a multicultural curriculum course for teachers that included critical family history. She concludes by proposing critical family history as a highly useful tool for deepening the practice of multicultural education in classrooms.