Cultural diversity among teachers will raise education quality

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Considering that the world is falling behind in achieving a quality education, the time is right to focus on attracting, preparing, supporting and retaining a culturally diverse teaching workforce.

The cultural diversity of teachers is known to have a positive impact on historically disadvantaged students’ academic achievement, including literacy and numeracy, and on school completion rates. Across the globe, teacher education has a significant role to play in ensuring the teaching workforce is diverse, well trained, and that teachers are culturally safe and empowered.

Efforts to attract a more culturally diverse education workforce began in the 1970s when educators became concerned that the diversity of children and young people in schools was growing, but the teaching workforce remained white, middle class and monocultural, especially in the Global North.

Related to the emergence of discourses around multiculturalism, concerns about the whiteness of the teaching workforce included that white teachers often have very different life experiences and worldviews than the students they teach.

This difference in worldview or standpoint matters, especially because young people from ‘minority backgrounds’ historically achieve less well academically, are disciplined more often and are expelled or drop out of school more often than white students.

The lack of understanding and, even more so, the lack of value or respect schools sometimes demonstrate for their students from culturally diverse backgrounds is an example of how a white teaching workforce disadvantages students from culturally diverse backgrounds.

‘You can’t be what you can’t see’

Lisa Delpit’s ground-breaking book Other People’s Children (1995) was influential in positing that white teachers had an intellectual as well as a moral responsibility to pay attention to their students’ lives, and that not to do so leads to stereotyping as well as low expectations for students whose lives they do not know anything about.

Furthermore, the phrase ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, coined by African American child rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, gained prominence, recognising that students who never see a teacher like themselves have no role models, which impacts upon their aspirations and limits their own expectations.

The idea that teachers’ ethnocentrism (Urch, 1970) and cultural bias (Dickson, 1967) could have a detrimental impact on their students began to be considered during this period when civil rights in the United States and elsewhere gained prominence.

Since these conversations started, Initial Teacher Education has always, to some extent, sought to attract diverse teachers into the profession as well as preparing all teachers to work with students from culturally diverse backgrounds.

These efforts have varied in their success and the extent to which Initial Teacher Education programmes attend to these matters ebbs and flows. More recently, with the silencing of content such as critical race theory, some express concerns that these efforts will be reduced.

Deterrents to teaching for people from diverse backgrounds

Teaching remains a white, middle-class profession, at least in the Global North. Even though the raw number of teachers from diverse backgrounds appears to be increasing (Ingersoll, 2018), current statistics from some nations are concerning.

As examples, in the United States, almost 80% of teachers are white and non-Hispanic (National Center for Education Statistics, US, 2024), and in Australia only 2% of teachers are Indigenous (Perkins and Shay, 2022). These low numbers of teachers from diverse backgrounds are not representative of the students they teach. Despite many efforts to attract more people of colour (for instance) into teaching, these numbers remain low.

There is some understanding of the barriers: These include historical and logistical issues (such as the expense of going to university and the lower numbers in general of marginalised communities’ participation in higher education).

Once enrolled in teacher education, however, preservice teachers from diverse backgrounds report feeling marginalised. They experience multiple forms of bias, including both indirect and direct racism and institutional racism embedded in tertiary systems. If preservice teachers are the only teachers of colour in their course, as is not uncommon, this can be frustrating, isolating and distressing.

This extends to their experiences on practicum or placements, where preservice teachers can feel they are treated unfairly in a myriad of ways. Negative experiences affect preservice teachers’ mental health and well-being, and what amounts to racism (for example, being mocked for an accent) has been reported as reasons why preservice teachers leave their course and abandon their goals to become a teacher.

Activism and affinity groups appear to make the most difference to a preservice teachers’ sense of agency; that is, when like-minded communities support each other, it seems much more likely a preservice teacher will graduate from their course and feel welcomed by the profession.

In addition, teachers from backgrounds of cultural diversity often report specific social justice aims in their desire to become a teacher, such as working with their communities, giving back and making a difference for young people. These goals can be at odds with teacher education standards, which can seem like the wrong priorities.

Preservice teachers from culturally diverse backgrounds bring ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll, 2001) that are often devalued, overlooked or misunderstood in teacher education. In recent years, university marketing teams have been more cognisant of including teachers of colour in their online and media campaigns, though this can be perceived as tokenistic.

In order to attract and retain teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds, it stands to reason that their lived experience, worldviews and experience would have to be reflected not just in Initial Teacher Education marketing, but in everything from making sure course content reflects diversity, coursework readings represent diverse authors, assessment is not culturally biased, and practical experiences are safe.

In addition to welcoming multiple standpoints, the inclusion in Initial Teacher Education curricula of multiple perspectives builds the knowledge of white teachers as well, enhancing their cultural awareness, cultural sensitivity and cultural safety. In the end, it supports them to be more accountable.

There are calls now to go beyond superficial representation (such as by offering one subject in diversity or an elective in First Nations studies) to deeper or ‘more genuine’ ways to value other ways of knowing and being, which may even include the intersectional recognition of race, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, social class and power.

The imperative to attract and support a more diverse teaching workforce is thus connected to the project of decolonising teacher education. This process involves white teacher educators working personally and individually to ‘know what they don’t know’, whilst at the same time teacher education institutions, and the policies that drive them, are vigilant in using language and terminology correctly, and in all ways removing barriers to teacher diversity.

Teacher diversity in a time of teaching shortages

UNESCO’s Global Report on Teachers: Addressing teacher shortages (2023) refers to an international teacher shortage crisis. Fewer people are attracted to going into teaching as a profession, attrition is rising and an increasing number of children and young people are without quality teachers.

The UNESCO report states clearly that: “Inclusive policies are needed to promote gender equality in the teaching profession, address under-representation of women in certain subjects, levels and leadership roles and encourage men to enter and remain in teaching. Teaching workforces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, thus enhancing attractiveness and enriching learning experiences.”

Though the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey offers some information on the diversity of teachers, data is hard to find. That means we don’t know exactly which teachers we are retaining in these times when the teaching workforce is declining.

We do not yet know whether workload and working conditions affect teachers from backgrounds of cultural diversity more, or differently, and whether we are attracting, losing or retaining teachers from these backgrounds more now than ever. More research is crucial when Initial Teacher Education is under pressure and the profession is at a turning point.

Professor Jo Lampert is professor of teacher education for social transformation, and co-leader of Monash University’s Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab, Australia. Professor Jane Wilkinson is professor of educational leadership and co-leader of Monash University’s Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab. Dr Fiona Longmuir is a senior lecturer in educational leadership and co-leader of Monash University’s Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab.