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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the manner teachers interacted with Mexican-American and Anglo students in self-contained classrooms in grades one through six in selected Nebraska Class 3 school districts.
The study was conducted in Nebraska schools which had enrollments of at least ten percent Mexican-American students. There were eight Class 3 school districts in the state that exceeded this percentage. One school from each class, A-B-C-D, participated in the study. A random sampling procedure was used to select elementary teachers for the study. A lower elementary teacher, grades one or two, and an upper elementary teacher, grades five or six, from each of the four districts became a part of the study.
From this study, it is apparent that teachers of the culturally different have had little or no educational preparation to help prepare them to interact with all students. The eight teachers in this study felt their college/university had not provided adequate teacher education experiences in preparing them to teach in low SES schools. Based upon the findings of the study, the writer offers the following recommendations: (1) Educational administrators should attempt to recruit teachers who possess interactional skills that relate to all minority groups. (2) Teacher training institutions should assume an aggressive leadership role in developing teacher preparation programs which will better prepare teachers for multicultural school populations. (3) Teacher training educators should actively recruit teacher education students to enter programs designed for multicultural education, bilingual education, minority studies and similar courses of study. (4) The training of school administrators should include a course on multicultural education as a requirement for the master's degree in education.
