Abstract
Earlier this year, teachers in the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district in Michigan engaged in rolling teacher sick-outs to protest their deplorable working conditions. On January 11, 2016, more than 60 schools were closed due to teachers not showing up for work. On January 20, a sick-out forced the district to close 88 of its 97 schools due to more than 865 teachers being absent from classrooms (Lewis, 2016). For years, DPS teachers have voiced their concerns about poor pay, lack of supplies, overcrowding in classrooms, and unsafe building conditions. These are not new phenomena; Jonathan Kozol (2005) has been documenting such “shame of the nation,” particularly with respect to traditionally marginalized populations (e.g., schools with majority students of color, schools with students in poverty) for decades. Former Detroit teachers’ union president Steve Conn stated, “the young people in this city deserve the same quality education provided in predominantly white suburbs” (Lewis, 2016). According to Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/25/qa-look-at-detroit-public-schools-teacher-sick-outs.html), Conn reported that incoming teachers make approximately US$32,000 annually, a salary lower than teachers in neighboring communities. Furthermore, there have been no pay raises in DPS for the past 4 years, and DPS teachers now pay approximately 25% of their health care costs, compared with no required contribution only 5 years ago. Equally concerning are the instructional and learning environments for teachers and students. Many DPS teachers report working in rooms without heat in the winter or air-conditioning in warmer weather, and recent city inspections have found schools with water-damaged ceilings, mold, standing water inside buildings, and rodent infestations. The sick-outs are a response to not only dehumanizing working conditions for teachers but also their resistance to state control of the school district and the governor’s restructuring plan. We are calling attention to the teacher sick-outs in Detroit and the factors leading up to them in these pages, because they represent one of the numerous examples throughout the country of educators’ resistance to the continued de-professionalization of teachers and teaching and the institutional and structural forms of dehumanization that teachers experience regularly. Furthermore, we believe teachers’ professional self-concept is negatively impacted by inequitable working conditions in many high-need schools and communities that are not present in schools that are resource-rich. If teacher professional self-concept indeed plays a significant role in instructional quality and can contribute to student learning success (as illustrated by Paulick, Großschedl, Harms, & Möller, 2016), what is being done—or should be done—at the building level and within the profession more generally to ensure that educators work in supportive educational spaces and have opportunities to enhance their pedagogy and practice in ways that empower and effectively prepare them to educate youth of various cultural backgrounds?
Several of the papers in this issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) raise central questions related to (a) a kind of teacher professional development which fosters social justice–focused critical inquiry (see Brown, 2016), (b) mentoring teachers through instructional dialogue (see Kim, 2016), and (c) cultivating teachers’ positive academic self-concept and professional knowledge (see Paulick et al., 2016). We believe that these papers, and others like them, challenge teacher educators and the larger field to consider strategies for professionalizing teachers and teaching as the profession faces a dual challenge. The challenge is that of meeting the needs of more diverse learners and doing so in increasingly complicated contexts that are often farther removed from the lived experiences of many, perhaps most, P-12 educators. We believe that for teachers to do their best work in the classroom on behalf of all children, their physical and sociopolitical work environments must be humanizing spaces that advance professionalization rather than detract from it. As raised in our March editorial, challenges to professionalization do present themselves not only through popular educational reform policies (such as value-added assessment measures, fast-track teacher preparation and licensure, scripted, narrow curricula; Milner, 2013) but also through governmental, institutional, and local demands on teachers that promote “teaching to the test” and which prohibit them from fully focusing on teaching to the whole child (e.g., Tanner, 2013; see also, Gurl et al., 2016). A climate of high-stakes standards and accountability stifles teacher agency and innovation, perpetuates narratives that de-professionalize teaching, and negatively affects teachers’ professional self-concept. Thus, we urge teacher educators to consider the following questions:
What is the responsibility of teacher educators in helping preservice and inservice teachers embody and enact humanizing and just pedagogies and practices that speak to students’ lived experiences inside and outside schools?
How can teacher educators create sustained professional learning experiences for practicing teachers that allow them to engage in social justice–focused critical inquiry around a set of classroom challenges? How can action research within professional development be a medium by which this critical inquiry occurs?
How might reframing instructional coaching as instructional dialogue assist mentors in more effectively facilitating teacher critical reflection about practice?
How might self-concept measures provide an alternative assessment of preservice teachers’ professional knowledge and satisfaction?
As teacher educators, we find ourselves continually challenged by the first question. This is not because we question the significance of facilitating the development of humanizing pedagogies and practices for preservice and inservice educators; rather, we understand that the teacher educators’ ability to cultivate such pedagogies in teacher candidates and practicing educators requires their embodiment of a critical consciousness that is fostered through problem-posing education where their students co-construct knowledge with them through dialogical inquiry (Carter Andrews & Castillo, 2016; Freire, 1970). If the teacher educator does not possess a humanizing pedagogy, it is difficult to cultivate this pedagogical stance with pre and inservice educators. Just as preservice teachers cannot develop and maintain a social-justice pedagogical orientation through experiences in one “diversity” course within their teacher preparation program, practicing teachers cannot develop and maintain a humanizing pedagogy through experiences in one “diversity” or “multicultural” professional development seminar about teaching “the Other” (Carter Andrews & Roberts, 2014). Such structures cannot provide teachers with the skills they need to effectively utilize culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2014) and sustaining (Paris, 2012) pedagogies in the classroom. Even when a teacher preparation program has at its core a focus on preparing teachers for careers in the most disadvantaged and marginalized communities and provides a sequence of courses and field experiences in high-need communities, the state and local policy demands of the P-12 context might preclude teacher candidates and practicing teachers from maintaining a social-justice orientation to their work (Flores, 2007). Thus, teachers’ professional self-concept and self-efficacy for teaching in under-resourced schools can become distorted by lack of autonomy regarding curriculum development and decision making and decreased agency and self-regulation (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). This conundrum begins early in the educational process.
In this issue of JTE, Christopher Brown examines a year-long professional development course for PreK-K inservice teachers that enables them to “research, develop, and implement learning activities with their linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse (LCSD) students that reflected issues central to their lives” (p. 184). Engagement in action research projects centering students’ lived experiences is one way for teacher educators to support teachers in “responding to governmental, institutional, and local demands on their teaching while attempting to formulate learning experiences that reflect their students’ sociocultural worlds” (Brown, p. 183). Building on Brown’s argument, the Detroit teacher sick-outs are an excellent example of how teachers can co-construct learning experiences with their students based on an examination of issues of equity, privilege, and oppression related to their learning conditions. Imani Harris, a sophomore at Renaissance High School in Detroit, poignantly describes the dehumanizing physical and political learning climates in DPS—the same context in which teachers work (see http://www.metrotimes.com/Blogs/archives/2016/01/25/this-dps-students-open-letter-puts-the-sick-outs-into-perspective). Teachers’ ability to design and implement action research projects related to students’ sociopolitical realities can serve to enhance their professional self-concept, advance their professionalization, and ultimately enact culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies in the classroom.
The third aforementioned question suggests the need for reframing instructional coaching from one that provides a critique of the teacher toward that of instructional dialogue promoting teacher reflection. Critical teacher reflection, such as that about race and culture of teachers and their students, can support the development of culturally responsive teaching practices (Carter Andrews & Castillo, 2016; Howard, 2003), supporting efforts toward humanizing and just pedagogies and practices. Conversations using a dialogic approach (Bakhtin, 1981) to promote teachers’ reflective thinking presume teaching is complex and teachers are professionals as such conversations acknowledge and build on teachers’ expertise and ability to improve their own practice (see Kim, 2016). Furthermore, teacher educators’ use of the dialogic approach in supporting teachers’ reflective practice promotes teacher empowerment and autonomy.
The recent events highlighting long-standing challenges with teacher de-professionalization in Detroit are a manifestation of issues present in districts across our nation and abroad. The solution does not rest on providing appropriate experiences to pre and inservice teachers alone; it also requires educating administrators about ways to support teaching staff consistently, equitably, and effectively in ways which hold both professionals and children as capable of teaching and learning at the highest levels. The solution requires acquainting policy makers and financial stakeholders with the best ways to distribute resources—both human and material—for educational purposes, and it requires informing parents and community residents of the issues surrounding the education of children and empowering them to demand that decisions regarding the welfare of schoolchildren and teaching staff be data-driven, thoughtfully and openly considered, and with the health and well-being of the community in mind. Teachers are teaching in dehumanizing times, and youth are learning in dehumanizing times. But teacher educators, policy makers, and administrators must see themselves as firmly situated to provide professional development, policy reforms, and working and learning conditions that advance the professionalization of teaching and teachers and foster positive teacher professional self-concepts.
As with all contributions that appear in the pages (hard copy or virtual) of the journal, we encourage our readers to post reactions and ideas on our blog, the JTE Insider, at http://edwp.educ.msu.edu/jte-insider.