Pathways2Teaching: Addressing the Teacher Diversity Gap through a Grow Your Own Program

As a longtime former special education teacher and now teacher educator, I am troubled by the growing decline of interest in becoming a teacher. The Condition of Future Educators 2015 reveals that only 4 percent of high school ACT-tested students said they intended to pursue a career as an educator – and that number continues to decline. The lack of interest is particularly true for students of color in general, and more specifically for young men of color.

The critical shortage of a diverse teacher workforce is nothing new. Researchers have been exploring this topic and calling for more diversity in the teacher workforce across disciplines for decades (U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

There are many reasons why diversifying the teacher workforce is important. The strengths teachers of color bring to their students have been well-documented (Easton-Brooks, 2019; Villegas & Irvine, 2010) over the years. Villegas and Irvine (2010) discuss how teachers of color improve academic outcomes and school experiences for students in many ways, including (a) serving as advocates and cultural brokers, (b) confronting issues of racism through teaching, (c) developing caring and trusting relationships with students, (d) using culturally relevant teaching strategies, and (e) having high expectations for students.

Beyond the research that supports the need to increase the racial and cultural representation in the teacher workforce, we must ask ourselves about the daily messages conveyed to all students regarding the authority of knowledge and positions of power when students experience school with a predominantly white (and mostly female) teacher workforce. For these reasons and more, we must focus more attention on developing sustainable programs to address the teacher diversity gap.

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs have been frequently cited as one of several potential solutions to address the critical teacher shortage and the teacher diversity gap (Goings, Brandehoff, & Bianco, 2018). As Gist, Bianco, and Lynn (2019) point out, there are a number of early outreach programs designed to recruit high school students into the teacher workforce, but not all focus specifically on recruiting students of color.

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In order to encourage students of color to consider becoming teachers, program curricula must be intentionally designed to engage students by explicitly highlighting why they are desperately needed as our future teachers – not only because of their racial or ethnic membership, but also because of their lived experiences and deep understanding of their home communities that need them the most.

Encouraging students of color to explore a teaching career is not always easy. For many, school is not always a welcoming or safe space. This is especially true for African American, Latinx, and Native American males. One only needs to examine national or state data by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status to see the disproportionate rates of school disciplinary actions, suspensions, special education placements, and lower graduation rates for students of color to better understand the level of disenfranchisement often felt by students. The marginalization students experience can become the catalyst for helping them understand how they can disrupt the inequities they have experienced by becoming a community responsive teacher.

The program is specifically designed to encourage high school students of color to consider becoming teachers and/or other related education professionals.

To address the urgent need for more teachers of color in special and general education, I developed the Pathways2Teaching® program. The program is specifically designed to encourage high school students of color to consider becoming teachers and/or other related education professionals. Through collaboration between school districts and teacher preparation programs, three concurrent enrollment courses are offered to students during their eleventh and twelfth grade years. The series of courses (9 credits) provides students with weekly classroom field experience at local elementary schools, an overview of special education, and skills for teaching multilingual learners. Additionally, the curriculum has a strong emphasis on college access and readiness skills, with a particular focus on academic writing.

Upon successful completion of the three courses, students earn a Pathways2Teaching Paraprofessional certificate which enables them to seek employment within their district immediately after high school graduation. This opportunity provides additional hands-on classroom experience while also addressing a financial need that many of our students have while they attend college.

The Pathways2Teaching program supports students as they explore the teaching profession through an explicit focus on educational justice, equity, and developing critical consciousness (Freire, 1990). Students critically examine the complex historical and contemporary educational issues of inequity that exist in underserved communities that disproportionately affect students of color – the very issues that have contributed to the marginalization and disenfranchisement that our students have experienced in schools.

In accordance with our focus on equity and justice, we are unapologetic about making sure the courses are offered to any interested student. In other words, we firmly believe in casting a wide net by removing any potential barriers (e.g., GPA) to enrollment. In fact, based on our 9-year history, some of our most engaged students come to us with some of the lowest GPAs.

Over the course of the last nine years, Pathways2Teaching has become a national model for a high school Grow Your Own teacher program. Currently we have multiple programs throughout Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee, New York, and in 2019 we will have new programs in North Carolina and New Jersey. Unlike other high school programs designed as teacher encouragement programs, Pathways2Teaching seeks to create a new generation of diverse, community-responsive educators who have a deep understanding of their home communities. In this manner, we are dedicated to disrupting educational inequities in and for diverse communities by empowering students to become the educators they wish they could have had.