Abstract
Following the break up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, like all former Soviet Republics began to realize its need in ethnic identity, what was reflected in all the spheres of social and cultural life, including teacher education. Since then the accent has been made on developing the mainstream Ukrainian culture of students-prospective teachers, who are supposed to foster the same dominant feeling in their prospective secondary school students. This led to cultural and communitarian underestimating of ethnically diverse student population in Ukrainian educational establishments, who began to feel excluded and even ashamed of their cultures. Today Ukrainian teacher educators recognize many of the problems created by such a situation, and think of inclusive models of teacher preparation. Issues of equity and diversity have been addressed in local contexts in several ways.
One of the efforts being made is redesigning the teacher preparation programs so that teacher candidates are better prepared to work with diverse student populations. Even though the goals of Ukrainian education are changing, our instructional approaches have been slow to evolve. The problems include predominance of whole-class instruction, with very little instructional variability, minimal teacher-student and student-student interaction, failures with serving students with disabilities.
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