Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions: Programs, Policies, and Social Justice
... Virtually every step in the common teacher certification process risks disproportionately excluding prospective teachers of color, providing the greatest gatekeepers for Black and Hispanic teachers (Barnum, 2017). Research continues to show that teachers' scores on licensure exams have no bearing on their ability to raise student achievement and/or overall teacher quality (Chaplin et al., 2017;Kolman et al., 2017;Petchauer, 2018). Rather, teacher racial diversity is consistently found to matter in terms of student achievement, particularly for students of color (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015;Jackson & Knight-Manuel, 2019;Sleeter, 2011;Sleeter, 2015). ...
In this mixed-methods study, we seek to understand the impact of the California Subject Examination for Teachers (CSET) on the makeup of the teacher pipeline. We are specifically interested in exploring how teachers of color are impacted by these tests when seeking to enter the teacher workforce. Findings from the data, both qualitative and quantitative, provide evidence that the tests negatively impact all four racialized groups as labeled by the California Teaching Commission (African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American), while also conveying racialized messaged to candidates of color. In contrast to common rhetoric about the utility of these exams, we found the CSETs to hinder efforts to diversify the teacher.
La educación para la justicia social y la formación del profesorado resultan dos temas de especial interés para la transformación de las personas y de las sociedades. El principal objetivo de esta investigación fue analizar la presencia/ausencia de la justicia social en la planificación de la formación inicial del profesorado de Educación Infantil y Primaria en los diferentes niveles de concreción curricular. Se trató de un análisis documental en tres niveles: (1) los libros blancos de los Grados de Maestro, (2) las memorias de verificación de dichas titulaciones de las universidades españolas incluidas en el Ranking Shanghái y (3) las guías docentes de todas las asignaturas de estas titulaciones seleccionadas (n = 1 856). Los principales resultados indicaron una presencia sustancial de la justicia social en las competencias, tanto en el primer como en el segundo nivel de concreción curricular. No obstante, su distribución fue desigual en las guías docentes en función de la universidad, la titulación, el curso, el carácter de la asignatura y los elementos curriculares. Se necesitan políticas públicas que conformen un primer nivel de concreción más comprometido con la temática, así como mayor uniformidad entre las titulaciones y universidades.
Although teacher education researchers have long claimed their commitment to successfully preparing teachers to educate students of Color—a growing majority in U.S. schools—notably absent from their attempts are the voices of teachers of Color. This silence often results in pathological portrayals, positioning teachers of Color as the problem while obscuring the pervasive, problematic, and harmful Whiteness of teaching and teacher education. In this context, inspired by James Baldwin’s letter-essays and centering truthtelling as theoretical framework, eight tenured New York City public school teachers of Color and a teacher educator of Color engaged in collective analysis of a truthtelling exercise focused on what practitioners and institutions of teacher education can and should learn from teachers of Color to develop an antidote to the overwhelming Whiteness of teaching and teacher education, which has been shown to disproportionately disadvantage students of Color. Herein, we offer a composite counter-story—a letter to White teacher educators and, in fact, teacher educators of any racial identification who are in any way aligned with protecting and upholding Whiteness—revisiting our own nuanced memories of becoming and being teachers, unveiling teacher education’s epistemic violence, and issuing a call to action.
Background/Context
Many teacher education programs are trying to build partnerships with local schools to create ongoing opportunities for their candidates to observe and practice in authentic settings. Prior research on university–school partnerships, however, has found that the structure and design of these partnerships have a huge impact on whether they turn out to be mutually beneficial, meaningful, and sustainable. One of the most commonly cited challenges is the lack of regular communication, respect, and trust between university professors and PK–12 classroom teachers and administrators.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question
This article focuses on Blocks, an initiative in the teacher education program at New Mexico State University (NMSU). Candidates spend their entire day at a single elementary school site, alternating between coursework and clinical practice.
Research Design
We conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with teacher education professors, teacher candidates, and classroom teachers and administrators in the Blocks program to understand the core components and strategies that buoyed its success, as well as the major challenges and opportunities inherent in such a transformative model.
Findings
Given that NMSU is a Hispanic-serving institution that already prioritized university–school–community relationships, we were also interested in how the Blocks model might be replicated in teacher preparation programs at predominantly White institutions. Key findings include that (1) Blocks is a nonhierarchical model based on mutual respect and full collaboration, wherein professors and classroom teachers are both viewed as having equally valuable knowledge about teaching and learning, and both parties share ownership of the success of the program; (2) candidates’ coursework and clinical practice are not simply held at the same site, but are strategically sequenced and integrated to raise real-time questions of practice and provide candidates with a more cohesive and authentic preparation for becoming teachers of record; and (3) candidates do more than “observe” or “student teach”; they are given meaningful, progressive, and scaffolded opportunities to be involved in lesson planning, coteaching, student assessment, parent conferences, and extracurricular activities, all of which help them develop stronger teacher dispositions and identities.
Conclusions/Recommendations
Key recommendations for teacher education include the importance of intentionality and mutual respect when designing and forging university– school partnerships, including ensuring that all participants have a clearly defined role and a valued voice in the process; that clear communication and opportunities for self-reflection are strategically built into the collaborative process; and that faculty are rewarded for work that takes place in community settings.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between participants’ edTPA writing and edTPA portfolio scores. Specific questions included (a) Is there a relationship between overall word count and total score on the edTPA? (b) Are individual task commentary word counts associated with specific task scores and total edTPA scores? and (c) Is there a relationship between edTPA-specific vocabulary and total score on the edTPA? Written artifacts from 67 music education students who completed the K–12 Performing Arts edTPA Portfolio were collected over a 4-year period. Correlations between word counts and task and total scores were positive and of modest to moderate strength, as was the correlation between edTPA vocabulary word use and total scores. These findings are interpreted in relation to a national K–12 Performing Arts edTPA portfolio average score of 45 and existing edTPA policies affecting music teacher education programs.
This article draws upon original research about a teacher education program at a Tribal College located in rural Montana that integrates culturally relevant pedagogy across its coursework and clinical experiences while calling attention to widespread trauma in Native communities based on a history of forced assimilation. We end with recommendations for how all teacher education programs can better prepare candidates to work in Native American schools and communities.
This qualitative case study provides a deep dive into a teacher education program at Jackson State University, a Historically Black University (i.e. HBCU) located in Mississippi that is intentionally preparing Black men teacher candidates to successfully support the academic achievement of students in culturally diverse, low-income, and underserved schools.
In this autoethnography, I utilized the concepts of otherfathering, social capital, and testimonio (i.e., testimonial) to explicate the need for and value of Black male mentors in physical education teacher education (PETE). To do so, I describe how three of my mentors operated as otherfathers by imbuing me with the social capital needed to be successful in academia. I conclude by arguing for specific intersectional efforts to support Black men and Black women in PETE, along with the establishment of organizational efforts, to meet the needs of Black professionals in PETE.
Minority-serving institutions are important in the production of teachers of color. However, this formative process is not without limitations. This multisite, multistate study relied on network analysis techniques to unveil timely and relevant concerns that students, faculty, and administrators identified as critical toward the strengthening of teacher production.
In this paper, we explore the challenges inherent in conducting research with a hidden population – how to conduct research with teachers who have left the classroom. Capturing the storied experiences of this group is vital to understanding how to effectively recruit, prepare, support, and sustain teachers in US classrooms for our next generation of students. Although not typically considered vulnerable, this population of “teacher leavers” remains hidden-by-choice because of a voluntary severing of ties with former schools and school districts. In this paper, we chronicle our efforts to identify an appropriate sampling method for this population, our selection of snowball sampling because of the hidden nature of individuals, and our efforts to use snowball sampling to construct a national sample of teacher leavers. We conclude by identifying the resulting areas of balance and imbalance in our sample, their possible explanations, and their subsequent implications for informing thoughtful sampling methodology.
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