Search results

This chapter describes the impact of a multicultural curriculum transformation assignment on the consciousness and pedagogy of pre-service and in-service educators preparing to teach and lead within diverse U.S. P-12 schools. Highlighting how two university faculty leveraged a mosaic of critical theories and pedagogies to engage action research exploring the inquiry, How might the application of an assignment grounded in an instructional framework comprised of theories in educational leadership, critical multicultural education, and critical pedagogy inspire and motivate pre- and in-service educators to teach, lead, and serve for social justice beyond their program of study?, It provokes us to consider how best to prepare educators with the knowledge, skill, and will to teach and lead employing a praxis situated in equity and justice. Findings contribute to scholarly conversations and school-based practices focused on culturally responsive teaching and leadership, and prove relevant for P-12 educators, teacher educators, those in educational leadership, and educators advocating equity and justice for historically marginalized and minoritized students attempting to learn in unjust classroom and school spaces.

The study aims to present a logic map linking the Professional Development School (PDS) Nine Essentials as a PDS theory of action and offer an analysis of dissertations that compare outcomes of learning in PDS and non-PDS contexts.

For this current study, the authors identified 25 of the 210 dissertations from a larger study that used a comparison methodology to provide a window into how learning in PDS and non-PDS settings may differ. In reviewing these comparison studies, the authors identified a set of clustered themes, as well as a variety of comparison constructs and measurements researchers used to determine the impact of PDS.

Five themes emerged including (1) the experience of learning to teach in a PDS setting vs. a non-PDS; (2) the experience of teaching in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (3) teacher candidate quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (4) teacher quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (5) school leader quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; and (6) K-12 student learning in PDS vs. non-PDS.

Limitations of this study include the complications related to comparison, logic-related fallacies and the complexity of capturing simultaneous renewal.

In the 30th year of PDS work, the study utilizes a theory of action comprised of linking the PDS Nine Essentials to situate the comparison dissertation analysis of outcomes in PDS and non-PDS contexts suggesting challenges and possibilities and perhaps a direction for new research questions.

This chapter traces the development of InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educators' Development, which originated with four European teacher educators in 2013. Given that the role of teacher educators is largely missing in the description of the enactment of teacher education, this work focused attention solely on teacher educators and their professional development, as well on how its membership kept InFo-TED growing and expanding internationally. Two contrasting narratives of teacher educator are included to show the diversity in their preparation and roles. The chapter ends with generic features of teacher educators' work and a discussion of what factors are more nationally, institutionally, and not to be overlooked, personally dependent. Erasmus funding and dissemination were discussed, all with the intent of understanding how to act locally, but impact globally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine multiple dimensions of reflexive and reciprocal mentorship as they work through the fear of teaching challenging and politically charged ideas.

This piece is a case study of the complex instances of reciprocal mentorship within a teacher education program. Objects of analysis included the informal educational experiences from the bi-monthly meetings and student-teaching experiences. Semi-structured interviews, field notes, interpersonal discussion and the authors’ own reflections were used as data sources.

The authors found that having difficult conversations in informal spaces provided social studies teacher candidates with the opportunity to get more comfortable with challenging conversations; that mentorship is helpful when shifting context between formal and informal spaces; and that once these teachers grew more comfortable, they moved from mentee to mentor with support and guidance from their own mentors. The authors conclude by providing several implications for pre-service teachers, teacher and teacher educators, as they help social studies practitioners work with and beyond the politics of fear.

Limitations such as subjectivity, generalizability and implementation exist. Factors such as personality, program, cultural background, lived experience and other elements played a role in the findings. Therefore, the authors do not suggest these are monolithic claims about the nature of mentorship, teacher education or teaching, but rather the authors wish to share these findings and recommendations.

The authors argue that three major findings emerged from the data. First, informal spaces are valuable for initiating difficult conversations among mentors and mentees. Second, shifting between formal and informal spaces can be uncomfortable, but allow for mentoring opportunities during these challenging instances of becoming. Third, moving from mentee to mentor includes valuable reciprocal mentorship within a learning community.

This research project is grounded in the needs of the participants and researchers. To the authors’ knowledge, a project of this type with similar participants has not been done.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how participation in a multicultural literature course impacted K-12th classroom teachers’ social justice pedagogy and classroom practices one to three years after completion of the course.

This study investigated the effectiveness on teacher practices of a graduate literacy course, which was redesigned within a framework of social justice pedagogy by focusing on critical analysis of texts, teacher inquiry and a literacy civic engagement project. The authors interviewed 20 teachers one to three years after they enrolled in this multicultural children and young adults’ literature course. The authors also explored their classrooms and kept a researcher’s reflective journal.

The authors describe how participants implemented social justice pedagogy and strategies with their K-12th grade students.

While many studies look at how teacher education programs integrate social justice education into their programs, few researchers follow their students into the K-12 classrooms to investigate if teachers are connecting higher education course work and theory into practice.

In the current political environment where nativist sentiments are driving policies that overtly discriminate against immigrants and refugees, most notably Muslims, it is crucial to prepare teachers who will value and serve all students regardless of their ethnicity, language, or race. It has never been more important than now to bring the stories, experiences, and languages of all the people who make up this country into our classrooms. This study employs self-study of teacher education practices to question how teacher educators might improve our practice to better meet the needs of the diverse students in our classrooms, most specifically English Language Learners (ELLs). Self-study allowed me to engage in cycles of design and analysis to examine how well I implemented critical research as praxis as a tool to prepare students in my Sheltered English Immersion class to critically engage in theories and practices of teaching ELLs.

In this chapter, Mousumi De presents the principles and implications of CRT in the context of Asian and Asian American experiences including the perspective, features, strategies, and new directions on how to facilitate the preparation of teacher candidates and work with all teachers to understand the complexity of the Asian and Asian American identity, their racialized experiences, and their sociohistorical, transnational contexts that continue to influence their lived experiences. This chapter highlights the important issues and challenges facing Asians and Asian Americans that have been camouflaged by their stereotypical treatment as model minorities. It also shares the work of many scholars on approaches for promoting diversity and inclusion, such as implementing anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and inclusive history curricula, cultural citizenship education, teaching for social justice, and culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching for addressing the marginalization of Asians and Asian Americans.

Early career teachers (ECTs) of Color are key in making change, resisting racism and pushing back against white supremacy in K-12 education, specifically in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. Through a narrative telling inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) of Nora, an Asian American ELA ECT in the Midwest, and by drawing on Fisher’s (2011) Critical Integral Pedagogy of Fearlessness, this study aims to recognize the narrative power within teaching praxis as Nora stories herself toward becoming a critical pedagogue.

Using narrative inquiry methodology and methods (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), the authors simultaneously considered the commonplace tenets of narrative inquiry – temporality, sociality and place – of the intertwined relationships of the participants and observers. The field texts included in the corpus of data include myriad tellings of Nora’s experiences in her initial years of teaching ELA. Data were analyzed in stages of parsing out narrative blocks and structures.

The findings indicate that Nora, as an ECT, went through recursive cycles of fear as conceptualized by Fisher (2011) – bravery, courageousness and being fear-less – of working toward radical love (Hooks, 2000) within her ELA instruction. The authors argue that Nora confronted her personal and professional fears as she strove to become a critical pedagogue in her ELA classroom.

Current scholarship portrays ECTs as lacking agency in their development and/or effectiveness in the classroom and little is said about Asian American ELA ECTs and critical instruction. The authors present Nora’s counter-narrative to make visible what is right with ELA ECTs, specifically teachers of Color, as they transform their fear into courage to fight for educational equity.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the way in which pre-service teachers adopt ways of thinking critically about learning and practice. It highlights the unfolding of critical dialogue, knowledge and artful action as a way of “reading the scene” (Pahl and McKenna, 2015). The focus concerns mindshifts that occur while learning to be a teacher. The study sets out to seek factors that contribute towards development as professional practitioner.

As part of a much larger study involving ten pre-service teachers, this paper focusses on just one participant named Meredith, a pre-service teacher in her fourth year of her teacher education course. The design constructed draws on the data from Meredith’s interview and conversation, art making and gestural activity while painting and communicating her stories. These narratives from interviews exist in this paper as vignettes and privilege of the interplay of art making, interview and gestural responses. Implementing a framework by Denzin (2001) enables a way of reading to note learning and epiphanic moments that exist for Meredith.

Moment of learning and themes are indicated and suggest that from the original interview there are 11 important moments of epiphanic mindshifts for Meredith.

The method as practice intends to make cogent links to new levels of consciousness by presenting innovative ways in which qualitative research data can be gathered and analysed. Meredith engages in mindshifts that occur as learner and also embraces experiences of praxis as a means of understanding self and teacher identity.