Teacher Learning in Response to Autobiographical Literature

Despite efforts to recruit a diverse teaching force, U.S. educators remain typically young, European American, female, monolingual, and from lower and middle-income backgrounds. A recent report reveals that the past decade has actually seen an increase in the percentage of European American monolingual teachers and a decrease in teachers from racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority backgrounds (National Center for Education Statistics). In contrast, their students tend increasingly to be from linguistic minority backgrounds and lower income families. This disparity is particularly troublesome when teachers work to support language and literacy development (Cazden and Mehan).