Abstract
In most teacher education programs, there is regular examination of how best to prepare teachers to face the challenging conditions in which they will teach. These challenges are not isolated to the micro-environmental level (e.g., local schools and communities). Preservice teachers must also understand the national and global (i.e., macro) sociopolitical climate and the ways in which the current polarized political climate creates challenges that may undermine their best efforts at enacting humanizing, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining pedagogies for their students and families (Carter Andrews, Bartell, & Richmond, 2016; Carter Andrews & Castillo, 2016; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014).
Such consciousness is also paramount for teacher educators as they design programs that aim to provide critical and culturally situated classroom and field experiences for future teachers (Richmond, Bartell, & Dunn, 2016). The aforementioned climate continually manifests politics that support neoliberal and market-based educational reforms (see, for example, Kumashiro, 2010), while creating space for surfacing hidden or subversive individual and group viewpoints and actions that further marginalize, oppress, and dehumanize our most vulnerable youth, schools, and communities. In the current global landscape—where issues of anti-Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, citizenship, and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) rights, among other forms of discrimination, are prevalent—we believe that teacher preparation program design elements have the potential to support the development of beginning teachers who not only have a social justice orientation to teaching and learning, but also understand issues of education from varying frameworks of scholarship, including historical, economic, sociological, philosophical, and psychological, and are prepared to respond to these issues. Furthermore, an understanding of teaching and learning as occurring within settler colonialist, imperialist, White supremacist, capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchal learning contexts is also essential (Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb, & Swift, 2018; Cannon, 2012; Casey, 2013; hooks, 2000; Kerr, 2014; Ravitch, 2000; Sleeter, 2017).
A dilemma for teacher preparation programs is how to prepare teachers who strive to understand the structure and operation of our systems of schooling, without taking partisan positions on contested issues. The growing extent of social inequality in the United States is amply supported by evidence from social science (e.g., Duncan & Murnane, 2011), but educators, analysts, and citizens disagree about whether this inequality implies that states should adopt market-based approaches to schooling. Education is inherently political, with varied views about aims, methods, and organization. Teacher education should prepare teachers to be thoughtful, informed actors engaged with political issues. Teacher education institutions, however, particularly public ones, which are supported by citizens from a mix of political parties, must not to be seen as partisan. The articles in this issue often refer to “communities.” With few exceptions, communities in the United States are divided in their political loyalties and often in their views about education. Teachers should have the skills and inclination to learn about the communities where they work. One challenge they will face is how to understand and work with the differences they find, both between themselves and community members and within the communities themselves.
The work of teacher education cannot be accomplished unless there is a sincere commitment on the part of teacher educators and administrators to design programs that provide classroom and field experiences that build candidates’ capacities to actively engage with and learn from communities throughout their preparation to teach (e.g., Richmond, 2017). In addition, programs must have the financial and human resources to respond to these challenging and sometimes oppressive conditions. We recognize that what we suggest here is no easy task, and it should be coupled with a focus on critical democratic practices (see, for example, Crowley & Apple, 2009). In the teacher preparation program at our own institution, we work tirelessly to live out our collective and explicit commitments to produce teachers who not only leverage contextual elements that support socially just teaching, but also can respond effectively to conditions that prevent such efforts. This work is coupled with ongoing individual and collective self-examination about the extent to which we are implicated in perpetuating or dismantling epistemologies, research methodologies, systems, policies, and practices that counter our personal and professional commitments.
There is a rich body of research that calls for teacher educators and teachers to embody and demonstrate social justice commitments in practice that further the goals of democracy (e.g., Crowley & Apple, 2009; Freire, 1997; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro, 2015; McDonald, 2005; Michelli & Keiser, 2005; Murrell, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002; Zeichner, 2009; Zygmunt & Clark, 2015). The articles in this issue offer models for preparing justice-oriented teachers, with specific attention to obtaining experiential knowledge through firsthand interactions with youth and families. Ultimately, such learning experiences can improve candidates’ readiness to exercise informed professional judgment as they make decisions about how to work in communities, which may be unlike those in which they were educated. They will also be challenged by the range of views held by parents of their students, other community members, and those in the broader community within which their school operates. We remain convinced that teacher preparation programs should be designed with attention to the varied cultural perspectives of diverse community stakeholders. These programs have the obligation, and are continuously presented with opportunities, to prepare teachers who embody pedagogies rooted in critical caring, empathy, and an authentic commitment to educating all students to advocate for the type of democratic and socially just society in which they want to live.
As Hess and McAvoy (2015) argue in their recent book, preparing students for democratic participation is fostered by helping them learn to discuss and deliberate. Discussion involves coming to understand varying views on disputed issues, weighing evidence, and seeking a shared understanding. Deliberation involves moving from that shared understanding toward agreement on a plan of action. Both have become more difficult in a polarized political climate, where the goal is more often victorious for one position, rather than working toward an approach that takes account of the situation and interests of all stakeholders. To support students’ success in discussion and deliberation, teachers need to “consider the context in which they teach, the available evidence, and their educational aims” (p. 12). Closer ties to the communities in which they teach is a promising way to strengthen prospective teachers’ understanding of context, evidence, and aims.
Three articles in this issue directly address the role of community members in preparing future teachers to work in culturally diverse settings. Although schools and classrooms should be democratic spheres, communities are often models of democratic processes at work. University–community partnerships and university–school partnerships in teacher education can further democratic ideals by helping teacher candidates pursue serious issues of educational and societal equity and the public good beyond the individual classroom by learning with and from community members (Hooley, 2008; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016). In this way, preservice teachers’ pedagogy and practice draws upon community cultural wealth (Buck & Sylvester, 2005; Yosso, 2005) and the knowledge of community teachers, leaders, and mentors (as several of these articles argue). In his study, Robert Lee offers a conceptual framework and programmatic examples for a community-based urban teacher preparation model where community scholars, school practitioners, and university faculty come together to create a pipeline of community-minded teachers committed to teaching in their communities. Lee argues that pedagogical training for teachers should be culturally situated in communities where teachers are likely to be hired, leading to higher self-efficacy, agency, persistence, and retention over time. Eva Zygmunt and her colleagues examine the ways in which caring relationships between preservice teachers and volunteer community mentors scaffolded candidates’ contextualized understanding of culture, community, and identity of children and families. This work highlights the importance of viewing community members as mentors and community-based teacher educators who have the funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to assist preservice teachers with embodying and enacting caring teacher–student relationships rooted in a deep understanding of youth and families as knowledge holders and creators. The article by Ken Zeichner examines the experiences of a group of nine community-based mentors of teacher candidates in a multiyear partnership between a local, community-based organization and a graduate elementary and secondary teacher education programs at a research university in the Pacific Northwest. This study draws upon the perspectives of community mentors regarding their work with teacher candidates and university teacher educators to underscore the benefits of effective university–community partnerships that center the cultural and intellectual resources embedded within communities via youth, families, and community leaders. Community members themselves can serve as teacher educators (see also Lees, 2016), providing firsthand, intimate knowledge of community epistemologies and ontologies that can inform teachers’ curricula, relationship-building with students, and instructional practices focused on centering equity and justice.
The article by Jenset, Klette, and Hammerness challenge us to more deeply consider ways that university coursework in teacher education can bridge theory and practice, furthering praxis goals in teacher education spaces globally. We agree with these authors and others (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2009) in their claim that teacher preparation should be more deeply linked to practice. Jenset and colleagues posit that we know little about how such linkages are achieved within different international programs. In this study, the authors examine the degree to which programs provide opportunities to learn that are grounded in practice during university coursework. Drawing upon data from methods courses in six programs in Finland, Norway, and California, the authors provide evidence regarding the successes and challenges of incorporating practice in teacher education. The article by Chezare Warren advances the idea that the application of empathy operationalized through perspective taking is useful to preparing future teachers to make professional decisions that produce evidence of culturally responsive pedagogy. As Warren argues, there are too few instructive models in teacher education that help connect teacher candidates’ knowledge of students and communities to the development of efficacious physical habits, tendencies, and trends in observable behavior or teacher dispositions. Engaging teacher candidates in perspective taking (defined by him as adopting the social perspectives of others as an act and process of knowing) invites them to obtain (and reason with) new knowledge of students and the sociocultural context where she or he will teach. The article by Nazan Bautista and colleagues reminds us all that many preservice teachers are constantly trying to reconcile commitments to social justice and the common good with aspects of their personal value/belief system. This study illuminates the complexity involved with religious beliefs and democratic ideals.
As teacher educators and researchers, we are encouraged by what the studies in this issue offer for advancing democratic and social justice ideals in teacher education research and practice. However, we challenge our readership to remember that what is necessary and sufficient for programmatic change is not simply a commitment to certain ideals but also enactment of programmatic change. Several scholars argue that any change in how we “do” teacher education requires that we embrace the fact that knowledge/expertise requisite for effective teaching does not reside solely in institutions of higher education that prepare teachers, but rather in other communities as well (see, for example, Zeichner & Payne, 2013). We extend an earnest challenge to teacher educators writ large to not only embrace this fact but also make use of the distributed expertise between universities, schools, and communities to share the responsibility and opportunity to support the development of critically compassionate, aware, and responsive classroom practitioners. As Crowley and Apple (2009) argue, unless future teachers see that critical, democratically oriented practices in curricula, teaching, and evaluation are not simply Utopian—that they can be put into practice even under the difficult economic and political circumstances—the critically oriented perspectives that teacher educators may try to teach can easily be washed away under the daily pressures that make teachers’ lives so fulfilling and difficult at one and the same time. (p. 451)
Teacher preparation programs should not simply cultivate the work of helping preservice teachers deconstruct misperceptions and negative stereotypes that they have about culturally diverse schools and communities; part of cultivating democratic and justice-oriented pedagogies is to help teacher candidates develop relationships with learners embedded in communities; this is accomplished in part through interactions with community leaders and experts who hold rich funds of knowledge regarding the most effective ways for teachers to achieve academic benchmarks with students while sustaining their identities, literacies, and ways of being in the world (Buck & Sylvester, 2005; Cooper, 2007; Moll et al., 1992; Paris, 2012). This kind of work requires in part that those within teacher education program structures recognize that critical knowledge is held by those individuals and entities outside the university (Zeichner, Payne, & Brayko, 2014) and that these knowledge holders are invited to become full partners in teacher preparation efforts. It also requires that program faculty and their teacher preparation students engage with the challenging discussions that seek shared understandings, and with the even more challenging deliberations aimed at deciding what steps to take to improve teaching and learning.