Preservice teachers seeking to develop cultural competence can face a struggle fraught with multiple challenges, even when they are committed to culturally relevant pedagogy. This article closely analyzes one White beginning teacher’s negotiations with cultural competence during a lesson in her student teaching semester, then traces how she made sense of that lesson in the weeks and months that followed. Findings indicate that taking on cultural competence posed both cognitive and affective challenges. More specifically, emotional responses to racialized situations, inner conflicts over Whiteness, and the dynamics of the school context combined to mediate the development of cultural competence. This study suggests that teacher educators should focus not only on the achievement of cultural competence but also on the struggle involved in enacting it. By giving more attention to how beginning teachers develop cultural competence, teacher educators will be better prepared to help beginning teachers normalize the fraughtness involved in the struggle.
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