Showing papers in "Teacher Education Quarterly in 2010"

Collaboration and Teacher Development: Unpacking Resistance, Constructing Knowledge, and Navigating Identities.

Abstract: Research has shown that quality professional development can change teachers' practices and positively affect student learning (Borko, 2004; Darling-Hammond, 2000). It is widely accepted that such professional development should be anchored in teachers' reality, sustained over time, and aimed at creating peer collaboration (Chan & Pang, 2006; Richardson, 2003). Grounded in the assumption that teacher growth does not happen in isolation, current professional development seeks to create learning communities where participants engage in meaningful activities collaborating with peers to co-construct knowledge about teaching and learning (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Shulman & Shulman, 2004). Nevertheless, there is still need for more research that explores the complexities of teacher learning in these redefined professional development contexts (Borko, 2004). This article presents a study of the Collaboration Centers Project (CCP), which is a pseudonym for a three-year, federally-funded program that focused on helping in-service teachers better address the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms. The CCP is important to study because of its clear intention to integrate real teachers--their understandings, voices, selves, and practices--into professional development by providing an experiential, collaborative and school-centered context for ongoing reflection on teachers' practice. It is important to understand the complexities of teacher development in the context of a project that sought to break with the short-term transmission model that Richardson (2003) described as the still dominant approach to in-service professional development. By investigating the ongoing collaboration created by the program, we seek to provide a multi-layered understanding of how collegial and collaborative professional development affects teachers and how teachers affect professional development. Therefore, our purpose is to add to the existing research that explains the complexity of teacher collaboration by uncovering the meaning of teacher resistance and by providing an in depth look into how a group of teachers co-constructed knowledge and negotiated their identities over time. Theoretical Framework In recent years, collaboration has been the focus of extensive research across disciplines, especially from the perspective of the co-construction of knowledge in the context of shared enterprises (John-Steiner, 2000) and learning communities (Wegner, 1998). As John-Steiner stated, "a collaboration bears the complexity of human connectedness, strengthened by joint purpose and strained by conflicting feelings" (p. 91). Collaborative learning is at the core of communities of practice involving co-construction of meaning and mutual relationships through a shared enterprise (John-Steiner, 2000; Wegner, 1998). Accordingly, collaborative practices have been defined as central to professional development because they further opportunities for teachers to establish networks of relationships through which they may reflectively share their practice, revisit beliefs on teaching and learning, and co-construct knowledge (Achinstein, 2002; Chan & Pang, 2006; Clement & Vandenberghe, 2000; Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990; Little, 1987). Likewise, Shulman and Shulman (2004) positioned teacher development in the context of learning communities in which teachers as learners create environments that integrate a common vision and their reflections on learning processes and practices. Fundamental to understanding the implications of collaborative practices in teachers' professional development are the discursive concepts of knowledge and identity. Knowledge is produced through social interaction and is historically and socially situated (Britzman, 1991; John-Steiner, 2000; Wenger, 1998). As we learn and develop, we grow from absolute dependence on others to interdependent relationships that allow us to become autonomous and independent as we internalize different abilities and knowledge (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996). …

Tools for the Study and Design of Collaborative Teacher Learning: The Affordances of Different Conceptions of Teacher Community and Activity Theory

Abstract: Has Teacher "Community" Lost its Meaning? Teacher educators need tools to help them think about teacher learning, to design activities and programs that foster it, and to assess the results of their work with pre-service and in-service teachers. In this article, in order to improve the conceptual tools available for the design and study of teacher education, I tease apart distinctions among several popular notions of teacher community, clarifying how each can make a distinct contribution to the research and practice of teacher development. I also suggest how activity theory in general, and writing about third spaces in specific, might compliment the contributions and limitations of various notions of teacher community. An impressive array of scholars and reformers have called for teachers to overcome their historic isolation through the development of "teacher professional community" (McLaughlin T Sergiovanni, 2000). Some call for teachers to work as part of a larger community beginning in pre-service teacher education (Dinsmore & Wenger, 2006; Koeppen, Huey, & Connor, 2000; Kosnick & Beck, 2003). This profusion of community-oriented reforms has led Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth (2001) to observe that "community has become an obligatory appendage to every educational innovation" (p. 492) and to conclude that the word community "has lost its meaning" (p. 492). DuFour (2004) similarly concludes that the concept of professional learning community is "in vogue" (p. 6) but worries that so many have leapt onto the bandwagon that the phrase now describes "every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education" (p. 6). DuFour also fears that the concept of community is "in danger of losing all meaning" (2004, p. 6). Westheimer (1998) found the literature on teacher community "disappointingly vague" (p. 3), and warns that without richer and more careful conceptualization, "the rhetoric of community is rendered ubiquitous and shallow" (p. 148). It would be a shame if different notions of community blurred together to loosely connote some important kind of collegial learning and comradely spirit that can occur among teachers. Different conceptions of teacher community have been essential in helping me to understand how a group of preservice teacher education supervisors learned their craft (Levine, 2009), and to explore what groups of in-service teachers learned from their collaborative work (Levine & Marcus, in press). I have not only used the conceptions in research. My departmental colleagues and I want to improve how we prepare our preservice teachers to teach specific subject matter to English language learners (ELLs), suffusing understanding about ELLs across many different aspects of teacher preparation rather than asking just one professor and course to address the topic. As my colleagues and I try to improve what we know and can do, we're combining insights regarding how inquiry communities and communities of practice promote learning; having distinct models has helped us think about the role of inquiry and deprivatized practice as we conceptualize our work together and assess our progress. As suggested in the top five rows of Table 1, most conceptions of teacher community do have a common core, i.e., the notion that ongoing collaboration among educators produces teacher learning, and this ultimately improves teaching and learning for K-12 students. Different constructs, however, can also focus us on different aspects of teacher learning from collaboration. As suggested by the bottom two rows of Table 1, some additional theorizing regarding how individuals may act and learn together offer even more affordances for studying collaborative teacher learning. …

Do Differing Types of Field Experiences Make a Difference in Teacher Candidates' Perceived Level of Competence?

Abstract: A ubiquitous national call for the reform of teacher education is of principle importance to university and college-based teacher educators. For decades, individuals such as Dewey (1965) and Barth (2001), and professional groups such as the Carnegie Forum on Education (1986) and The Holmes Group (1986) have advocated for the essential role of field experiences in the preparation of teachers. Generally speaking, field experiences are defined as a variety of early and systematic P-12 classroom-based opportunities in which teacher candidates (TCs) may observe, assist, tutor, instruct, and/or conduct research. While field experiences generally occur in schools they may also take place in other settings such as community based agencies (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2002). Field experiences and "practice teaching" have been recognized traditions of teacher-training programs dating back to the times of the American Normal School, one should not assume that all field experiences will actually help bridge the theory-practice gap and that merely requiring more field experience is necessarily better (Allsopp, DeMarie, Alvarez-McHatton, & Doone, 2006; Korthagen, Loughran, & Russell, 2006; Zeichner, 1980). With this important point in mind, our study was designed to determine the effect of differentiated field experiences upon the perceived level of competence of TCs completing three different types of field-based experiences within the same teacher preparation program. These differing placements and experiences represent the continuum from basic coordination between cooperating teachers in partner schools and university professors (Control) to in-depth communication, coordination, and collaboration between and among all stakeholders in a Professional Development School (PDS) to the same in depth collaborations and experiences plus a required action research component built into the PDS setting (Inquiry) all situated within the same lower SES, rural/suburban environment. The existing research base regarding field experience appears to be somewhat equivocal as the learning that occurs during field experiences is highly contextualized and uneven (Ritter, Powell, & Hawley, 2007; Tellez, 2008), and empirical data on the effects of differing types of field experiences has been characterized as sparse and inconclusive (Bischoff, Farris, & Henninger, 1988; Henry, 1983; Shanahan, 2008; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002). Bridging the gap between theory and practice does not automatically occur simply as a result of participating in field experiences (Barksdale-Ladd & Rose, 1997). Sometimes incongruence between theory and practice may become more evident as a result of field experiences reflecting the "two-worlds pitfall" (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985) which provide an exposure to procedures and instructional practices such as transmissive teaching that may conflict with more learner-centered instruction promoted in university-based coursework causing novice teachers to gravitate toward the practices and values of the P-12 classroom while dismissing those espoused in university courses as being too theoretical. Along these lines, several studies have reported the apparent regression of novice teachers as they become more rigid, bureaucratic, and custodial; conforming to existing school practices, procedural concerns, and routine tasks (Beyer, 1984; Grisham, 2000; Grossman, 2005; McBee, 1998; Moore, 2003; Silvernail & Costello, 1983; Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981; Zeichner & Teitelbaum, 1982). Gless and Barron (1992) argued that new teachers typically transition through five distinct phases during their first year of teaching. The transition to teaching begins with the anticipation phase where the new teacher often romanticizes the new role. Then the new teacher immediately enters the survival and disillusionment phase where they realize they have a great deal to learn about school and district procedures, their peers, and communicating with parents. …

Sustaining Teachers' Growth and Renewal through Action Research, Induction Programs, and Collaboration.

Abstract: Developing and retaining highly qualified teachers continues to be a critical need (Berry, 2004; Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003). As more teachers retire and school populations continue to grow, an increasing number of schools, universities, and states are implementing programs to ease induction, develop quality teachers, and inform educational practices. Many educators turn to action research to achieve these goals. Action research, also called classroom or teacher research, has been defined as "systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers" (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, p. 5). Action research encourages school personnel to systematically develop a question, gather data, and then analyze that data to improve their practice. Over the last fifteen years the complexities of using action research in schools have been well documented (Calhoun, 1993; Crawford & Cornett, 2000; Morton, 2005; Sagor, 1995); however, few studies have explored the effects of prolonged action research engagement on schools (Folkman, 2002; Wagner, 1999). This investigation offers a unique lens with which to view action research. In an earlier study we interviewed teachers at Parkland Elementary School to determine the impact of a school-university partnership on teachers and teaching at one school (Gilles & Cramer, 2003). Action research emerged as one of the engines that drove renewal in this school. For the current inquiry the data were further examined to unpack the complex interactions surrounding action research and to describe what factors led to the group's growth and longevity. Although many change initiatives are short lived, Parkland's action research group had existed for seven years at the time of the research. It was required for those involved in an induction program, the Teaching Fellows, and was voluntary to all other teachers. The Partnership and the Teaching Fellows Program Parkland belongs to the Missouri Partnership for Educational Renewal (MPER), a partnership between the University of Missouri-Columbia and selected Missouri schools. The mission of the partnership is to "collaboratively discover, develop, demonstrate, and disseminate effective standards-based educational practices" (MU Partnership for Educational Renewal, 2008). The partnership belongs to the National Network for Educational Renewal, conceptualized by John Goodlad (see http://www.nnerpartnerships.org). One important outgrowth of this partnership is the Teaching Fellowship Program. The Teaching Fellowship Program places a first year, fully certified teacher/ Fellow in a classroom with the support of a released mentor teacher, who mentors two Fellows. The Fellows also pursue their master's degrees over 15 months with coursework tied closely to their novice needs. The master's degree is free to the Fellows, and they receive a reduced teaching salary. The combination of appropriate coursework and mentoring help these new teachers transition quickly into solid, thoughtful, and strategic teachers (Gilles & Cramer, 2003). At each school in the Teaching Fellowship Program, one teacher is selected to be the mentor. One-third of the mentor's time is devoted to coaching two Fellows, one-third is committed to the school, and one-third of the time is assigned by the university to college teaching, committee work, or supervision. The mentor in the school facilitates action research with the Teaching Fellows and other interested teachers. For more in-depth information about this program, visit http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~tfp Review of Literature Although a great deal of literature has been published in the last decade examining action research or teacher research, more recently the idea of inquiry at the heart of action research has been explored (Badiali & Hammond, 2002; Calhoun, 1994; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). Collaborating on action research opens communication among teachers and school faculty; it increases awareness and reflection of issues that affect learning and professionalism (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995; Friesen, 1994; Lauer, 2001; Levin & Rock, 2003; McLaughlin, Watts, & Beard, 2000). …

Multicultural Teacher Education: Examining the Perceptions, Practices, and Coherence in One Teacher Preparation Program.

Abstract: With the nation's shifting ethnic and cultural texture, multicultural education has become imperative in the 21st century. As an outcome of the shifting diversity in our country, more than 6.3 million students with English as their second language and as many as 13 million students living in poverty are enrolled in pre-K through 12th grade public schools (Children's Defense Fund, 2005). In contrast to student diversity in the U.S., most of the current teaching force, those coming into teaching, and those who teach prospective teachers are White females who have been raised in middle class homes in rural and suburban communities (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/minoritytrends/ind_1_1.asp). With such dramatic changes in our nation's cultural landscape, it is not surprising that one major goal of many teacher education programs is to better prepare a mostly White, female monolingual teaching force to work effectively with students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Yet, even though most teacher education programs report that they have thoroughly incorporated diversity perspectives and multicultural content into the curriculum, external examinations often prove the contrary (Bartolome, 2004; Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grossman, Rust, & Shulman, 2005). Many teacher preparation programs attempt to infuse multicultural perspectives by simply adding one or two courses in multicultural education and/or requiring teacher candidates to complete assignments that explore surface level differences in culture and language such as sampling different "cultural" foods or learning to say hello in several languages. Such practices can be superficial and partial rather than infused into a coherent multicultural curriculum (Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1999;Villegas & Lucas, 2002; Zeichner & Hoeft, 1996) and can reinforce the idea that only a few individuals are responsible for preparing teacher candidates for a diverse society. Even when multicultural courses are thoroughly infused into the curriculum, many teacher educators in the same teacher preparation program tend to have very different ideas about multicultural perspectives on teaching and teacher education and how important they are. According to Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grossman, Rust, and Shulman (2005) one way to make long-lasting changes in the way teacher candidates are prepared to work with diverse students is to create coherent programs where teacher educators build a shared vision of good teaching, use common standards of practice that guide and assess coursework and clinical work, and demonstrate shared knowledge and common beliefs about teaching and learning. For Tatto (1996), having a coherent program does not necessarily suggest that all faculty think alike, instead the coherence of a program should consider how faculty members can reach common ground around professional norms and expectations, as well as in the way that learning experiences are organized and conceptualized. In other words, creating a coherent multicultural teacher education program requires faculty members to strive for and identify a central focus for teacher learning, to be collectively responsible, and to have the opportunity to influence policies and practices. Such program coherence is sustained by a collective purpose and promotes focused and sustained program development (King & Newmann, 2000). Although the literature on multicultural teacher education asserts that coherence may be one of the most critical aspects of teacher preparation programs (Nieto, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), there is very little research on this topic. And like Gay and Howard (2000), we believe that teacher education programs and the faculty who teach in these programs "must be held accountable for implementing quality multicultural education as they expect their students in K-12 classrooms" (p. 15). The purpose of this study was to examine teacher educators' perspectives about multicultural education in an elementary and middle school teacher preparation program. …

Acts of Solidarity: Developing Urban Social Justice Educators in the Struggle for Quality Public Education.

Abstract: In many instances, teacher education programs have been positioned as apolitical entities with the task of preparing teachers to perform the duties and responsibilities of the profession. Instead, the position of the authors is that because teaching is a deeply political endeavor that requires expert knowledge of issues beyond the classroom, teacher education programs must embrace a particular responsibility. We agree with Cochran-Smith that teacher education is a political issue that requires "an intentional blurring of the roles of teacher education practitioner, teacher education researcher, and critic/analyst of the policies, political agendas, and popular and professional discourses that directly or indirectly influence teacher education" (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 4). In so doing, we recognize that "political" in this sense is not referencing electoral partisan politics. Instead, it is in reference to the overt and nuanced power relationships between the state (both local and federal), public policy, and its residents. Teaching should not be considered outside of this construct. By taking the position that teaching for social justice is an act of necessity and solidarity, this work seeks to highlight two examples of teacher education initiatives. Because the relationships between teacher, student, family, school, and state are integral to the teaching process, three central questions guide our thinking and teaching. The first question in our inquiry is in what ways can teacher education be re-conceptualized in relation to communities to address the political function of teaching? Secondly, how can teacher education renegotiate traditional relationships with key stakeholders to move towards social justice education? Finally, what specific strategies and innovations are teacher educators implementing within communities and schools to develop social justice educators? In order to engage these questions, we operate from Freire's position of developing conscientization within teacher education candidates (Freire, 1993). Herein is the process of developing consciousness-raising within teacher education candidates in order to reflect and begin to ask critical questions of their practice as teachers. Discussed in detail in later sections, the two cases cited here speak to the process of making it possible for teachers to create such conditions without fear of persecution. To start the process, we begin with a working definition of social justice in education. Following this section is a brief section linking the contexts of teacher education for social justice in Chicago and New York City. The third section (titled Part One) is a narrative example of building school and community relationships in Chicago, outlining the process by which a teacher educator engaged a school and the surrounding community as well as a an example of a collaborative teacher designed assessment tool for preservice teachers. The fourth section of the document (titled Part Two) discusses the New York context, providing an example of what building solidarity with student and community looks like at the classroom level. Concluding the document is a discussion of the importance of social justice in teacher education education in a day and age where local, state, and national conversations are dominated by the rhetoric of market economy and standardization. On Method and Positionality As this article is a narrative account of our experiences as teacher educators, it should also be considered in the line of research that takes into account the commitment of the scholar activist to work in solidarity with schools and communities (e.g., Thuiwai-Smith, 1999; Lipman in Koval et. al., 2007; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2007). Recognizing the exploitative relationships in which researchers have engaged over the years to gain "access" to communities for the sake of gathering data and presenting at conferences, we do not seek the same association. …

Weaving Teacher Education into the Fabric of Urban Schools and Communities

Abstract: Urban schools and communities face numerous challenges: Urban poverty; high mobility and displacement in and out of neighborhoods; inadequate funding to adequately cover the educational, social, and health needs of children and their families; and high teacher turnover are just a few examples. Too often, schools and teachers are inadequately prepared for the social, political, and economic conditions impacting the lives of their urban students, families, and communities. This is because, as Keyes and Gregg (2001) explain, "while an urban school is located in a community, it is not often of the community. Employees are rarely neighborhood residents. Many do not share the culture or race of their students" (p. 32). Koerner and Abdul-Tawwab (2006) add that "Most teachers in urban classrooms ... often teach in communities that they have never previously even visited" (p. 37). Clearly, a greater effort must be made to ensure that future teachers in urban areas learn to see themselves as part of a school's community. Indeed, such a movement has begun, as Murrell (2001) documents. A key component of the new national agenda is collaboration among institutions of higher education, the K-12 schools they work with, and a broad community constituency. The success of urban school reform will depend, in part, on how the university, to learn, not that teachers, pre-service teachers, and teacher educators go into the community to learn. However, a growing set of literature is defining communities in terms of their assets, or the term used here, their strengths. Theories of community strengths urge teachers to go into the community, meeting and partnering with community members and agencies, to learn about the important community strengths that can then be utilized in a more culturally relevant education. Funds of Knowledge The concept "funds of knowledge," introduced by Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez (1992), refers to the sets of cultural and strategic knowledge and skills found within a particular community. Moll et al. (1992) describe funds of knowledge as a family's "development and exchange of resources--including knowledge, skills, and labor--that enhance the households' ability to survive or thrive" (p. 73). Funds of knowledge can include such cultural components as language and traditions, or can include the strategic network of relationships established within and outside the family and community. This community knowledge often does not coincide with the types of knowledge valued in the educational system, but when a teacher takes the time to learn and recognize a community's funds of knowledge, that set of cultural and strategic skills, she can more effectively draw on those to create a culturally relevant classroom (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Community Cultural Wealth In a similar fashion, Yosso (2005) developed the concept of "community cultural wealth," which "focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged" (Yosso, 2005, p. 69). Yosso (2005) details six types of "capital" held by members of marginalized communities. 1. "Aspirational capital"--"the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers" (Yosso, 2005, p. 77), also known as resiliency. 2. "Linguistic capital"--"the intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style." (Yosso, 2005, p. 78) 3. "Familial capital"--"those cultural knowledges nurtured among familia (kin) that carry a sense of community history, memory and cultural intuition." (Yosso, p. 79) 4. "Social capital"--"networks of people and community resources. These peer and other social contacts can provide both instrumental and emotional support to navigate through society's institutions. …

No Longer a "Little Added Frill": The Transformative Potential of Environmental Education for Educational Change.

Abstract: Introduction My daughter, as a physician, says that, when a patient visits a general practitioner with a specific concern, there is often a simple solution to be prescribed In instances where this is not the case, well you really don't want to hear about the alternative When environmental education manifests itself in schools, it is usually a simple matter of the insertion of an environment-related activity into the science, or perhaps social studies, curriculum However, if you find a teacher who has "the ethic," the entire school might be "green" The fact that this ethic is spreading through a relatively well organized and rapidly expanding field of theory and practice, grounded in research and philosophical thought, that challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant educational discourses, may be a cause for concern in some quarters Those teachers who are happy in standard practice may not want to hear about "the alternative," the critiques of business-as-usual in the field of education, whether from environmental education or other related areas such as social justice and cultural studies The purpose of this article is to explore some issues of worth concerning what takes place in schools and in teacher education from this vantage point of environmental education, as a field that challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant discourses of schooling In view of the focus of this special issue on "environment in the curriculum," with teacher education in mind, I argue that the socially critical charter of the field of environmental education has meaningful things to say to mainstream education that, if taken seriously, can provide the means to transform our thinking about some things that really matter in schooling I begin by providing a number of basic contrast points between mainstream educational goals (initially using science education as the example) and the philosophical position taken up by environmental education largely as a result of UNESCO-based international conferences over several decades Examination of these founding documents reveals an environmental education that does not advocate insertion of isolated activities into the curriculum On the contrary, it provides a complex philosophy with particular theoretical groundings that, just as environmental issues do within society, position dominant educational concepts as contested concepts for critical debate in (teacher) education These distinctive qualities are found in philosophical counter-narratives generated by environmental education debates over more than 40 years as foundation for exploration of notions of structure-agency in teaching These notions are then applied to education, and particularly to teacher education, as they relate to teacher and student subjectification in the schooling process Environmental Education in the School Curriculum: A Piece for a Different Puzzle? Decisions about "what counts" in schools are always rooted in assumptions about the nature of education Embedded within the curriculum and pedagogy of subject areas such as science are messages, often tacit or subtle, about historical theories of culture and society, as well as the nature of educational discourse Such non-neutral theories have generated interesting debates within teacher education concerning how much of this history and philosophy teachers need to know in order to critically participate in their translation into curriculum and pedagogy For example, how much more should teachers know than the fact that there is a range of views on these matters, that deeper purposes, interests and values underlie various perspectives? How much should they know about the connections between these perspectives and the forms of inquiry that supposedly sustain them? And, more specific to school subjects such as science and maths, at what depths should they be able to discuss ways of knowing (i …

Developing Teachers' Capacity for Ecojustice Education and Community-Based Learning

Abstract: Vignette In the summer of 2009, a group of teachers, community activists, and university professors came together in a Summer Institute on EcoJustice Education and Community-Based Learning held by the Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalitions at Eastern Michigan University (EMU). A series of workshops were organized to help participants examine the interwoven foundations and educational implications of social and ecological violence. They read and discussed a passage from Val Plumwood's book Environmental Culture (2002) in which she interrogates what she calls "the illusion of disembeddedness"--our hyperseparation from nature and its connection to a more general "logic of domination"--and they watched a film called Race: The Power of an Illusion (2003). Following the film, the group engaged in a silent "chalk talk," (1) filling the board with their responses to the question: "What does the study of race as an illusion have to do with our desire to teach for stewardship and ecojustice?" Below is a sample of their comments: * The language that we use to rationalize racism relies on the oppression of nature. Some races are "wild," "uncivilized," etc ... * Start by teaching how to appreciate differences instead of devaluing them. * OK--how do we teach instead to undo anthropocentric teaching/acting? * Anthropocentrism--other types of dualistic thinking. Helping students become stewards for the environment will hopefully lead them to realize the hierarchical nature of other dualist principles. * I really like this concept [arrow to anthropocentrism]. * Drives home the importance of not thinking dualistically. * Stewardship is seen as part of the healing process from "ages of dominance" and oppression. It is a way of creating a new wholeness and being less concerned with the pieces. This silent conversation was followed by a powerful open conversation among the participants reflecting on the series of activities they had experienced. Together, they shared further insights, questions, and their emotional reactions to the issues explored. As might be expected there were varying levels of analytic insight, but lots of energy in their reactions. One thing was sure, we were embarking on an important journey together. In this article, we lay out the primary aspects of EcoJustice Education as a model of teacher education and school reform by examining the complexities of teacher professional development as they encounter these ideas, focusing on the work of the Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition. Context The world is facing enormous ecological and social problems--top soil loss, overfishing and acidification of our oceans, loss of potable water and access to safe food sources, and global climate change are just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, there is an increasing gap in world-wide control of resources as modern industrial cultures (the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan) representing about 20% of the world's population enjoy 83% of the world's wealth gleaned from nature and human labor. Meanwhile three billion people, nearly half of the people in the world--many of whom once lived on land now controlled by corporations--are forced to work for less than two dollars a day, hardly enough to feed themselves. In our own country, young children from Black and Latino families are suffering from high rates of asthma, lead poisoning, obesity, and nutrition-related diseases as their families are forced to live in impoverished conditions disproportionately close to toxin-belching incinerators and in urban areas classified as food deserts. How many of us consider the lack of access to potable water in our own cities and world-wide, or the Texas-sized mass of plastic floating in the North Pacific as we drink from our bottles of "spring water," often sucked out of our own aquifers and yet more expensive than gasoline? …

What Works in Race-Conscious Teacher Education? Reflections from Educators in the Field.

Abstract: Introduction and Purpose David is a White teacher at an urban school in Los Angeles. He grew up in rural Oregon in an almost entirely White community. As an adult, he specifically wanted to work in racially diverse schools. During a classroom visit, I watched as his students investigated music as a way of understanding how marginalized groups counter their oppression. They discussed gospel and rap. He made vivid connections between the lyrics and slavery and Biblical passages. This complex conversation dazzled his students. Their interest was palpable. Two hours away in the California desert, Mona, a White woman, teaches middle school English in a majority Latino school. During class, her thirteen years olds chant out the alphabet. "B says /buh/, /buh/," says Mona. The class responds. Over and over they mimic her lead. The children are timed--when the buzzer rings, they switch to a new sound. This goes on for an hour. She explains to me that this is all they can do. Their parents don't value education. They just need the basics. Mona thinks this approach works best for these students. It is all they can handle. In South Los Angeles, Ms. Holden yells down the hallway at two Mexican second graders. She admonishes them for running; she says they look like criminals. One child, who is learning English and can't understand what was said, asks his classmate in Spanish to translate. "No Spanish in school!" shouts the teacher. "Learn to speak English! You'll be picking in the fields forever if you don't!" Over the years I have spent as a teacher and as a teacher educator, I have been collecting stories. These stories are similar in that the main character is White and the plot is about ethnicity. The stories are different in the protagonist's understanding of how race and racism operate in schools. These stories provide a jumping off point for the questions that shape this research. This is a study about how schools of education impact their students' ability to be successful in urban schools. What experiences--if any--in teacher education programs shape the development of race-conscious White teachers? To address my goal, I conducted a qualitative study of six teachers currently employed in urban schools. (1) All were considered excellent White teachers of children of color. Through a series of interviews, I explored the ways race, culture, and diversity were addressed in their teacher education programs and whether the experiences were meaningful. In this study, I define race conscious as the opposite of colorblind. I see race consciousness as occurring along three dimensions: (1) teachers understand that racism impacts schools; (2) they acknowledge and draw on the racial and cultural backgrounds of their students; and (3) they understand the value of culturally relevant pedagogies. This is akin to Teel and Obidah's (2008) definition of culturally competent teachers as understanding personal and societal racism and having the ability to apply these understandings to teaching and learning processes. I chose specifically to focus on White teachers since they are the majority of school teachers. As of 2004, White teachers make up 83% of the teaching force in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007). As K-12 student bodies continue to diversify, teacher education programs have addressed this need through a variety of interventions. Typical approaches have included fieldwork, stand-alone courses, and community projects that include issues of race and diversity. But do they matter? What experiences stick with teachers once they are out in the field? Much of the research on preparing White teachers for diverse contexts focuses primarily on the short term and in university settings. Studies provide information on the immediate changes (or lack thereof) the treatment had on the participants. In most cases, students participate in a field experience or take a course, and then are followed up via survey or interview. …

Environmental Education in Action: How Expeditionary Learning Schools Support Classroom Teachers in Tackling Issues of Sustainability

Abstract: Introduction "Change begins because of you!" read a calendar urging action to end pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. Created as a final product by a group of Expeditionary Learning School teachers engaged in a professional development experience, the calendar synthesized one-week's worth of immersion in learning about human impact on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. These science and math teachers engaged in water testing, interviewed experts, and conducted fieldwork to investigate environmental issues and propose solutions. Some produced public service announcements, restaurant place-mats, "harbor bands" (a variation on Silly Bandz, with shapes like crabs, rockfish, and bottles), and the calendar above. The teachers' enthusiasm was palpable; they were proud of their work and of their knowledge in spreading a message of environmental action. The real power, one teacher expressed, "is in taking this back to my own classroom so that my students feel the way that I do right now." As the anecdote above illustrates, the environmental education (EE) movement has much to contribute to educational reform and more specifically, to how we construct effective teacher professional development. Literature about environmental education defines it in multiple ways, and for the purposes of this research we understand EE to be a collaboration of content and pedagogy that engages students in a study of the environment to "encourage behavior change and action" (Thomas, 2005). Fundamental to EE are pedagogical methods that include: hands-on activities, relevant subject matter, and topics that engage students and encourage participation. Education reformers recognize EE as an effective tool in capturing students' enthusiasm for learning in subject areas ranging from math and science to literature (Lieberman, 1994). Research also indicates that EE promotes the following qualities in students: critical thinking, problem-solving, leadership characteristics, high academic engagement, and healthy lifestyles (Archie, 2003; NAAEE, 2001). Environmental education pedagogy is grounded in a view of teaching as a "creative and dynamic process in which pupils and teachers are engaged together in a search for solutions to environmental problems" (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001056/105607e.pdf). However it is not only the students who need support engaging in this search but the teachers--in creating dynamic, rigorous exploration of environmental issues. Ian Robottom (1987b, 1987c, 1987d) promotes professional development to support teachers' pedagogical approaches to EE, which differ from traditional teaching approaches.These include interdisciplinary planning, active investigation of local issues, and robust participation--with students--in activities around environmental improvement. Research about professional development in environmental education indicates that it can bring about significant shifts in teacher thinking about environmental issues (Shepardson, Harbor, Cooper, & McDonald, 2002). A recent study (Fleming, 2009) identified key areas of need for professional development in environmental education; among these are: involving communities in environmental and health initiatives, networking opportunities for teachers to share best practices, strategies and techniques for teaching students critical thinking skills, and integrating EE into K-12 curriculum. However, many teachers, while interested in engaging students in EE, struggle with successful integration, whether in the classroom or in connecting students to out-of- classroom fieldwork opportunities (Barnett, Lord, Strauss, Rosca, Lanford, Chavez, & Deni, 2006; Orion, N., & Hofstein, A., 1994; Shepardson, Harbor, Cooper, & McDonald, 2002; Simmons & Young 1993; Young & Simmons, 1992; ). Also, there is little research about how teachers develop and implement curriculum or use materials from professional development experiences. …

Becoming aware of the challenges of helping students learn: An examination of the nature of learning during a service-learning experience.

Abstract: Introduction Learning to teach is an incredibly complex endeavor with nuances that elude even those carefully observing it. "Even when observing good teaching or experiencing it for oneself, one cannot easily glean a deep understanding of the complexity of the work" (Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, Bransford, & others, 2005, p. 368). Fresh out of their own experiences as K-12 learners, candidates possess a variety of conceptions of schooling, learning, and teaching based on their "apprenticeship of observation" (Lortie, 1975). Although many experiences provide a rich framework on which to build their learning throughout teacher education, preservice teachers' interpretation of what they observed in the classroom often leads to the formation of preconceptions of schooling that are difficult to overcome during a teacher education program (Hammerness, et al., 2005). These include beliefs that teaching is easy (Britzman, 2003), that concepts and ideas in teacher preparation programs are familiar and obvious, and that learning is a simple and mechanistic process that entails little more than a one-way transfer of information from teacher to student. As a result of such preconceptions, many preservice teachers tend to envision teaching as telling and have a difficult time comprehending the challenges students face while learning in their classrooms. Constructive views of knowing elucidate learning as humans' attempt to interpret the world based on their extant knowledge, skills, and developmental levels, which influences what students ultimately learn (Bransford Derry, Berliner, & Hammerness, 2005). As such, scholars have begun emphasizing the importance of addressing preservice teachers' preconceptions during preparation programs to offer them space to change the beliefs they held prior to entering the classroom (Bransford, et al., 2005; National Research Council, 2000).Without engaging their preconceptions, preservice teachers may fail to understand new conceptions or learn ideas to perform well on a test but revert to their initial ideas once outside the classroom (Hammerness, et al., 2005). The 'teaching-as-transmission' preconception is particularly difficult for teacher educators seeking to prepare novices to use pedagogies that are compatible with current research on how people learn (National Research Council, 2000). Asking novices to move beyond this pedagogical metaphor often requires them to make a fundamental shift from the approaches they participated in as learners (Hammerness, et al., 2005). Thus, designing learning experiences that allow preservice teachers the opportunity to reconsider the use of more traditional instructional approaches, and to assess their benefits and shortcomings, is often a challenge. Short-term interventions intended to accomplish these ends have typically resulted in few changes to novices' preconceptions (Hammerness, et al., 2005; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). Even more difficult than changing preservice teachers' preconceptions of learning and teaching is helping them learn to teach in ways that align with how people learn (Hammerness, et al., 2005). Various scholars have noted disparities between what preservice teachers desire to be as teachers, what they know about teaching upon leaving their program, what they say they will do in the classroom, and their actual teaching practices upon entering the profession (Crawford, 2007; McGinnis, Parker, & Graeber, 2004; Windschitl, 2003). Furthermore, it is not uncommon for novices to think of their teaching as distinct from rather than in constant relation to the learner, focusing initially on their own teaching practices while paying little attention to student learning until they have been in the field for an extended period of time (Kagan, 1992; Nuthall, 2004; Wilson, Floden, & Ferinni-Mundy, 2001). Scholars have attributed this to novices' developmental stage, or "klutziness" (Bransford, et al. …

Shaping New Models for Teacher Education.

Abstract: American teacher education is stuck in an unproductive and dysfunctional pattern, not unlike the American domestic automobile industry. American teacher education programs graduate thousands of newly certified teachers each year, but the evidence that even half of the new graduates are dynamic and capable teachers is weak. The reputations of the teacher education programs through which they pass are poor, both within the academic community and in the field of K-12 education. Tinkering to improve at the margins of university-based teacher education has not worked. The time has come for dramatic, fundamental change in the way we prepare the teachers of America's fifty-five million school children. The dramatic change needed will require a redefinition of teacher education, taking it beyond preservice preparation to include the ongoing support of teachers throughout their professional lives. Further, teacher education should be situated at the nexus between universities and schools--the place where theory and practice can come together. And finally, making these fundamental changes in teacher education will require that teacher educators in both school and university settings have the benefit of the type of on-going professional development that research has shown to be essential to consequential, long-lasting reform in schools (Lieberman & Miller, 2001; Little & McLaughlin, 1993; Little, 2007). Powerful, sustainable reform must be driven by inquiry among teacher educators themselves and it must be active, collaborative, embedded in a teacher education context, and a central part of school and university cultures. Looking across the Field of Teacher Education Often, teacher education is understood by teacher educators, researchers, policy-makers, and the public in ways that bring to mind the campfire effect. A group is warmed and energized, even inspired, when sitting around a blazing campfire; but as soon as we move away from the heat and light and into the darkness, the power of the campfire moment quickly fades. Likewise, efforts to reform teacher education tend to focus on the immediate surround of preservice education but to evaluate its impact at a distance, i.e., relative to what new teachers do in their first years of teaching. However, unlike the blazing campfire at summer camp, teacher education itself is not a single entity that always works in identical ways in every setting. So, reforming teacher education is not a matter of revising one specific set of practices, a specific configuration of courses, or a particular evaluation system. Rather, what is needed is a comprehensive re-conceptualization of what effective teacher education can be; an empirically based and radically local framework that addresses the two major issues confronting teacher educators: the problem of practice and the challenge of succession. The Problem of Practice Educators preparing professionals in almost every field from law, to medicine, to social work currently contend with the dilemma of how to bring research together with practice in ways that enable both a mutual interaction and a qualitative upgrading of practice. The problem of practice is particularly acute in teacher education where a number of reports on teacher education (Abell Foundation, 2001; American Federation of Teachers, 2000; Cochran Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 1997, 2001; Haselkorn & Harris, 1998; National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999) suggest a field that is in disarray and loosing credibility with both policymakers and the public. For example, Levine (2006) finds that few programs stand up to any type of rigorous scrutiny. He writes, Too often teacher education programs cling to an outdated, historically flawed vision of teacher education that is at odds with a society remade by economic, demographic, technological, and global change. Equally troubling, the nation is deeply divided about how to reform teacher education to most effectively prepare teachers to meet today's new realities. …

Supervisor Transformation within a Professional Learning Community.

Abstract: High-quality professional development is defined as having the characteristics of longevity, context specificity, teacher voice, collaboration, and follow-up (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995; Lang & Fox, 2003; Lieberman, 1995; McLeskey & Waldron, 2002; Richardson, 2003) Effective professional development is "grounded in inquiry, reflection, and experimentation that are participant driven" (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995, p 597) One vehicle for professional development that adheres to the principles inherent in high-quality professional development is professional learning communities (PLCs) Also referred to as communities of practice (Wenger 1998), these communities are "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or passion about a topic, who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, p 4) Professional learning communities are named as contexts that are ripe for members to engage in transformation (Servage, 2008) Transformation is process that occurs when a learner engages in critical reflection on their assumptions and beliefs resulting in adapting existing frames of reference or adopting new frames of reference for viewing the world (Mezirow, 2000) This study includes data from a PLC of prospective teacher field supervisors who focused on bringing an equity focus to their supervision practice This article will explore the transformation in a PLC and the key elements that supported transformation for three field supervisors Additionally, in order to more adequately portray the integrated nature and complexity of these elements, implications for understanding and fostering transformation within PLCs are presented Theoretical Framework Professional Learning Communities Wenger et al (2002) describe communities of practice as (1) possessing a shared concern or domain of interest that provides the community with a unique identity, (2) engaging in joint activities and discussions, and (3) developing a shared practice that includes developing strategies for solving problems As the PLC members meet over time, they "develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches" (Wenger et al, 2002, p 5) During these meetings, communities work to solve problems, discuss individual situations and needs, talk about common concerns, act as sounding boards, develop personal relationships and patterns of interacting, tell stories, and coach each other In a PLC, knowledge is not viewed as an object or something that can be owned Instead, knowledge "resides in the skills, understanding, and relationship of members as well as in the tools, documents, and processes that embody aspects of this knowledge" (Wenger et al, 2002, p 11) Wenger (1998) points to the fact that, in order for collegial learning to take place within a PLC, there must be deliberate attention to both practice and the community itself PLCs can become venues for problem solving and inquiry as the community encourages greater supported risk taking (Englert & Tarrani, 1995; Snow-Gerono, 2005) PLCs are lauded as a positive reform in professional development where "through collaborative inquiry, teachers explore new ideas, current practice, and evidence of student learning using processes that respect them as experts on what is needed to improve their own practice and student learning" (Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008, p 90) An overwhelming portion of the literature on PLCs focuses on descriptions of programs, teacher perceptions, and learning community characteristics (Vescio et al, 2008) However, relatively little research examines the specific interactions and dynamics by which a PLC constitutes a resource for learning and innovations in practice (Little, 2003; Wilson & Berne, 1999) Transformative Learning Theory One theory of adult learning, transformative learning, can be defined as: The process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mind-sets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action …

A Critical Analysis of Sustainability Education in Schooling's Bureaucracy: Barriers and Small Openings in Teacher Education.

Abstract: Introduction: Confronting (Un)sustainability Education In the era of climate change, economic unrest, peak oil, perpetual war, and mass extinctions, teacher educators have to begin asking each other: are our workplaces relevant to the complex realities of a changing planet? Or, do they mainly serve the bureaucracies and the unquestioned assumptions that surround and increasingly determine the culture of schooling? On planet Earth over the last few decades, the glaciers have been melting faster than education has been changing to meet serious new crises. With few exceptions, the field of teacher education has been nonresponsive to a wide array of globalized sustainability problems impacting local environments everywhere. This is so in part because teacher education, in practice, is less a field of cultural and ecological inquiry than it is a network of bureaucracies that operates under a largely unexamined cultural logic. Epitomized by the super-pervasive No Child Left Behind Act, teacher education bureaucracy explicitly and implicitly reflects political and economic ideals that are fundamentally at odds with a vision for social and ecological sustainability at local and global levels. Especially since the A Nation at Risk report, the political rationale for the huge sums of money committed to schooling has been to outcompete our economic rivals (and enemies) in the increasingly global economic competition. This underlying nationalistic and militaristic rationale means that the fundamental of purpose of education in the U.S. and elsewhere is not to educate young people to better understand themselves and their relations to others with whom they share the planet, human and other-than-human, but to prepare them for the economic marketplace, an enterprise that has always been grounded in questionable intentions and has always produced questionable results for people and places worldwide. Furthermore, the common practices of teacher education and schooling reproduce and reinforce educational structures, curricula, and pedagogical practices that do more to contribute to the problems of unsustainability than they do to acknowledge and respond to these problems (Gruenewald, 2004; Gruenwald & Manteaw, 2007; Kahn, 2010; Stevenson, 1987). Still, the cultural politics of education can at times be responsive to the larger cultural politics around the globe, in the nation, and at state and regional levels. In this second decade of the new millennium, around the world and in the U.S., many citizens, educators, as well as government and business leaders and non-government organizations, have begun to pay attention to the complex network of social and ecological problems facing humans and other species in the era of climate change, peak oil, global economic unrest, perpetual war, and mass extinction. One quick search on the Internet (using the keywords environmental, place-based, or sustainability education, for example) can demonstrate that everywhere around the world educators are defining their roles as much more than agents of a state bureaucracy obsessed with competitive achievement, but as cultural or ecological workers dedicated to a saner vision of humanity and the human-nature relationship than that which is promoted by a culture of standardized testing alone. As Paul Hawken (2007) describes it in his book Blessed Unrest, the environmental-social justice-civil rights-labor rights-Indigenous rights movement currently creating change on planet Earth, though unnamed, may be the largest social movement in the history of the world. People everywhere want and are working for change--for more just social relations and for healthier environments for people and the other species now and in the future. Unfortunately, our nation's schools and colleges of teacher education continue to function as if the most pressing problem we face is how to get everyone reading "at grade level" (a ritualized goal that has failed many times in recent decades), or college or workplace "ready" (a target manufactured by business leaders as they exert power over the curriculum). …

A Schooling for Sustainability Framework

Abstract: One hardly needs to catalog the challenges that constitute the ecological crisis that is the theme of this issue of Teacher Education Quarterly. The encouraging news is the evidence that there are schools across North America and around the world responding to these challenges. They are discovering that guidance for living abundantly on a finite planet lies, literally, under their feet and all around them--in living soil, food webs, and water cycles, energy from the sun, and everywhere that nature reveals her ways. They are drawing on 3.8 billion years of natural research and development to find solutions to problems of sustainable living, make teaching and learning more meaningful, and create a more hopeful future for people and communities. David W. Orr of Oberlin College describes the task facing educators: to teach students how they are part of the natural world; to emphasize self-understanding and personal mastery; to recognize the responsibility to use knowledge well in the world; to understand the effects on people and communities of the application of knowledge; to provide role models of integrity, care, and thoughtfulness in institutions whose actions embody their ideals; to recognize that the process of education is as important as its contents. (1) Orr sits on the board of the Center for Ecoliteracy --www.ecoliteracy.org--in Berkeley, California. Since its founding in 1995 by Zenobia Barlow, Peter Buckley, and Fritjof Capra, this public foundation's mission has been education for sustainable living. This article reflects lessons learned from work with thousands of educators from all types of K-12 schools. While recognizing that there is no schooling-for-sustainability blueprint that fits all schools, the Center has articulated a set of precepts that it calls "Smart by Nature." They are described in more detail in its recent book Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, (2) which profiles schools across the United States that are putting elements of this schooling into practice. In that book's preface, Barlow proposes ... a radical vision for education--radical in the sense of being essential, fundamental, and deeply rooted. It is founded on a conviction that the best hope for learning to live sustainably lies in schooling that returns to the real basics: experiencing the natural world; understanding how nature sustains life; nurturing healthy communities; recognizing the consequences of how we feed ourselves and provision our institutions; knowing well the places where we live, work, and learn. (3) The Smart by Nature approach is characterized by: * An operational definition of sustainability * An expanded understanding of "curriculum" * A suite of guiding principles * Shifts of perception resulting from systems thinking * Desired outcomes described by core competencies Defining Sustainability The concept of sustainability, first articulated in the early 1980s, has served as a useful organizing principle for educators, as in the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). (4) It has also been so variously defined as to be problematic to many. To some organizations, schools included, "sustainability" seems mostly to mean "what we need to do to stay in business." As Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times Magazine in late 2007, "The word 'sustainability' has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it--whatever 'it' means." (5) So it is worthwhile to reflect about what "sustainability" could mean. Imagine sustainability as a far richer concept than simply meeting material needs, continuing to exist, or trying to keep a degraded planet from getting worse. A community worth sustaining would be alive--fresh, vital, evolving, diverse, dynamic. …

The Culture of Learning to Teach: The Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Conservative Schooling

Abstract: In his consideration of the developmental consequences of education, Cole (2005) takes a cross-cultural and historical perspective that leads him back to the earliest classrooms of Indo-European civilization. To consider the historical depth of educational traditions, he infers great stability based on his consideration of the arrangement of a Sumerian classroom in the ancient city of Mari, Syria.1 This classroom likely originated in the city's second golden age under the Amorite dynasty that lasted from roughly 1,900 BCE through 1759 BCE, when the city was sacked by Hammurabi, sixth king of Babylon. Cole surmises that the last 4,000 years have seen great continuity in educational practice in a number of regards. As the photograph reveals, students sat in rows--here, fixed in stone--facing the teacher. This template, in spite of other developments in teaching practice, has served to guide instruction in most Western educational settings from Sumerian civilization through the present. Students occupied its seats 1,400 years before Nebuchadnezzar II is believed to have built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is as old as the idea of formal teaching and learning in the history of human social life. Other ways of teaching and learning have been developed over the millennia. Over 1,500 years after students nodded through their teacher's Sumerian lessons, Socrates stepped out from behind the lectern and taught by means of cross-examining and typically refuting his students' assumptions, revealing their sophistical reasoning through the dialogues that he manipulated. Whether he did so as a means of inquiry or as a bully remains open to question (see White, 2001). In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi formulated educational visions that centered on the learner. Rousseau pioneered the Romantic conception of the (male) child as learner and the adult as guide and companion in educational experiences rather than director and authority, an idea that has endured in many forms in Western education, if largely on the margins of the pursuit. In his history of English education, Applebee (1974) notes that a number of pedagogical traditions are available to teachers, including those that center on the learner, yet most rely on a teacher-and-text-centered approach that could easily have found its home in ancient Mesopotamian classroom spaces (cf. Cuban, 1993). While the students' seats are no longer made of stone and only rarely remain bolted to the floor, they typically stay fixed in one location, facing forward so that students may concentrate on the teacher undistracted by the chatter and shenanigans of their classmates. The image presented in Figure 1 of my aunt's elementary school classroom in Brooklyn in around 1920 shares similarities with both the Sumerian classroom described by Cole (2005) and the University of California, San Diego classroom in which I presented a version of this paper (Smagorinsky, 2008) in which the chairs were indeed bolted to the floor. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Alternative pedagogies originating in the 20th Century, while often aligned with the views of Socrates, Rousseau, and a handful of others, tend to be based in some way on Dewey's progressive views, which generally emerge from the following tenets: [D]emocracy means active participation by all citizens in social, political and economic decisions that will affect their lives. The education of engaged citizens, according to this perspective, involves two essential elements: (1). Respect for diversity, meaning that each individual should be recognized for his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, and cultural identity, and (2). the development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good. These elements of progressive education have been termed "child-centered" and "social reconstructionist" approaches, and while in extreme forms they have sometimes been separated, in the thought of John Dewey and other major theorists they are seen as being necessarily related to each other. …

Preparing Urban Teachers as Public Professionals through a University-Community Partnership.

Abstract: It has been recognized for many years that preparing teachers for high-need urban schools is a challenge requiring a reexamination of teacher education program structures and content. Robert Farls, for example, writing in 1969, made a number of suggestions that sound remarkably contemporary. Among them are recommendations to increase fieldwork in the schools, require coursework in comparative culture, offer coursework on-site in schools, and study human relations, psychology, and the history of the civil rights movement (p. 411). His central concern is developing teachers' capacities to work effectively with poor children of color. Though his language is different, many of Farls' recommendations have found expression in current urban teacher preparation initiatives. Deepening and enriching the knowledge of urban teaching candidates for working with a diverse student body has become a central tenet of preparation programs (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Coursework that attempts to develop new teachers' perspectives on diversity and multiculturalism as assets rather than deficits has been woven into teacher preparation curricula (Banks, 1994; Banks, & Banks, 2004; Banks & Banks, 2010; Grant & Sleeter, 2007; Ladsen-Billings, 1995; Nieto, 2007), while the application of multicultural insights and affirming attitudes towards diversity can be found in the study of culturally responsive teaching practices (Banks, et al, 2001; Gay, 2000; Irvine, 2003; Ladsen-Billings, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Taken together, such coursework offers opportunities for preservice teachers to generate new knowledge about and appreciation of diverse cultures and communities and support deep examination of their own beliefs and assumptions. At the same time, it provides them with frameworks for developing pedagogy and curriculum for educational equity and cross cultural competency, a commitment both emotional and intellectual, to appreciate difference while recognizing the fundamental unity of all humans (McAllister & Jordan-Irvine, 2000). Recognizing that academic course work alone, no matter how transformative its intentions, may be insufficient to educate teachers of diverse students, courses of study for urban teacher preparation have made knowledge of family, home, and community integral to teaching and learning. A "funds of knowledge" approach (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005; Moll & Gonzalez, 2004), for example, adds a critical element to developing cross cultural competence by making explicit how the knowledge and skills of families and communities can be brought to bear in teaching learners from underrepresented groups. Such an approach helps teachers establish ties between home and school that can greatly enrich student achievement. A more robust form of community-based learning combines service learning and diversity education to create multicultural service learning through which preservice teachers not only learn about the assets of students' home communities but also about community-defined needs (Boyle-Baise, 2002; Boyle-Baise & Grant, 2000; Boyle-Baise & Sleeter, 2000; Carter-Andrews, 2009; Grineski, 2003). Combined with ethnographic inquiry and action research, these kinds of field experiences can help teachers to interrogate and modify their beliefs and assumptions and even to understand their work as part of an explicit social justice agenda that privileges access to knowledge and equitable education over individual, meritocratic success (Hyland & Nofke, 2005; Tiezzi & Cross, 1997). Each of these efforts can contribute to educating the "community teacher" (Murrell, 2001), one who can "draw on a richly contextualized knowledge of culture, community, and identity" (p. 4). Despite progress in urban teacher preparation over the past forty years, concerns still remain about transforming programs and practices in order to affect teachers' capacities to work with culturally diverse communities. …

Pre-Service Teacher Pathways to Urban Teaching: A Partnership Model for Nurturing Community-Based Urban Teacher Preparation.

Abstract: Introduction A teacher's knowledge of how culture is formed and sustained, and his or her attitudes regarding education, are a vital component of effective student learning, particularly in classrooms where the teacher's background and culture are very different from those of the students (Loadman, Freeman, & Brookhart, 1999). Understanding the influence of culture on education has become increasingly important in recent years, and the relevance that cultural mapping has for learning is now recognized (Vygotsky, 1962; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Murrell, 2007). "Cultural mapping is the method by which to uncover the ideologies and meaning systems that play a significant role in shaping cultural practices and how young people [and teachers] position themselves in relation to those practices" (Murrell, 2007, pp. 21, 39). An individual's cultural map is shaped through experience; one relates all new experiences to the previously learned map, thereby interpreting the new in terms of the old and possibly also changing the map. It is through this map that perceivers--including teachers and students--identify cultural behaviors in others that are relevant to their own respective culture. Teachers--both pre-service and in-service--who are put into radically new and different situations generally attempt to transplant their own cultural map onto the new environment, which can lead to misinterpretation by the teacher of cultural behavior, dissatisfaction and/or alienation on behalf of the teacher and/or students, and a lowered learning threshold for the students (Wolffe, 1996). Gibson (2004) states: "In many pre-service education programs, there is still minimal understanding of race and ethnicity and yet a high incidence of ethnocentric power-struggles between pre-service teachers and their diverse students" (para. 15). She contends "despite the evidence of increased diversity and cultural segregation of many public schools in the United States, mainstream pre-service teachers consistently show lack of needed competencies in teaching students who are different from themselves" (para. 32). Furthermore, without addressing the assumptions and beliefs that individuals have at the outset, classroom field experiences have the potential to actually increase prospective teachers' stereotypes of diverse students, compromising their effectiveness as urban educators and inhibiting future learning (Haberman & Post, 1992; Gomez, 1996). Collaborative university-and-school-based teacher education programs can address this situation by engaging pre-service teachers in diverse field experiences combined with guided discourse about the beliefs, assumptions, dispositions, and concerns that they bring with them. Programs should "provide substantial field experience during teacher preparation that places prospective teachers in the kinds of hard-to-staff settings in which they will be teaching" (Allen, Palaich, & Anthes, 1999, Key Questions, para. 2). As a result of such course-embedded exposure and preparation within the urban classroom setting, awareness and cultural understanding can increase, and cultural differences can be treated as learning opportunities rather than as deviations from academic or mainstream norms (Gibson, 2004). But do these suppositions bear out in practice? After reviewing the literature on urban teacher preparation, this article presents findings from the second year of one large university's grant-supported work to infuse teacher education courses with new contents, guided discourse, and diverse field experiences related to urban teacher preparation (UTP). The findings are based on data from attitudinal surveys completed at the beginning and end of each semester by students enrolled in the redesigned courses. Survey results indicated that students' intentions to teach in an urban setting increased during the semester in which they participated in a redesigned UTP course. …

Journeys toward Becoming a Teacher: Charting the Course of Professional Development

Abstract: Introduction Teacher education programs challenge students' beliefs about teaching and learning in hope of creating a pedagogical awareness that will inform teaching practices and guide the professional transformation from student to teacher (Bird, Anderson, Sullivan & Swindler, 1993; Graber, 1996; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1984; Tom, 1997; Stooksberry, 2002; Korthagen, 2004; Zeichner, 1999). The process of becoming a teacher is referred to variously as teacher development (see Burden, 1990; Gilles, McCart Cramer, & Hwang, 2001; Ingvarson & Greenway, 1984; Jackson, 1992; Raymond, Butt, & Townsend, 1992; Reilley Freese, 1999; Zulich, Bean, & Herrick, 1992), professional growth and development (see Kagan, 1992; Sprinthall, Reiman, & Theis-Sprinthall, 1996), identity development/construction (see Graham & Young, 1998; Gratch, 2000; Walling & Lewis, 2000), and/or learning to teach (see Alexander, Muir & Chant, 1992; Carter, 1990; Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 1996; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). Reviews of teacher development literature (e.g., Kagan, 1992; Richardson & Roosevelt, 2004; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005) have illustrated the complexity involved in this developmental journey. In most teacher preparation programs, there is a mix of university coursework and field (classroom/practicum) experience, which affords preservice teachers opportunities to be both students and teachers. Nevertheless, the aim of teacher education programs is one of professional development--for students to emerge as teachers. For example, a student coming into an education program may already have had experiences teaching in other contexts and might consider herself a teacher. Once immersed in her first-term courses, she may feel her identity is wrapped up more in a "student's role". As she embarks on her practicum, she is thrust back into a "pretend teacher's role" (Tom, 1997, p. 131), sometimes confident and sometimes doubtful about her readiness to assume the mantle of teacher. While in her practicum she may, at times, feel like a student again (e.g., when she is being evaluated or observing her sponsor teacher). Sometimes the practice teaching activities are so short that she may only "momentarily escape student status--the best the teacher-to-be can hope for is a brief role playing experience at being a teacher" (Tom, 1997, p. 136). Once again returning to the university, she may revert to a student's role, possibly holding onto some teacher identity from practicum experiences. Her first teaching position may be the first time she feels like a "real teacher" with her credentials in hand, embarking into the professional world of education. This example illustrates the recursive process inherent in the training of people to be teachers, which has emerged in the literature (e.g., Snyder & Spreitzer, 1984; Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004; Walkington, 2005; Luehmann, 2007; Troman, 2008). But how does this process happen at the individual level? More particularly, how are identity and commitment manifested in the journey from student to teacher? To explore these issues we studied 23 students involved in a one-year teacher education program and examined their identity changes and commitment to teaching. We were interested in how students' beliefs and orientations influenced their evolving identity and commitment to teaching. Our approach provides a grounded look at the perceptions and expectations of the very people who experienced the process in situ. This study is based on the rationale that "a view through the eyes of the pre-service teacher is essential for all clearly to understand the personalized and contextualized journey of learning" (Walkington, 2005, p. 56). In order to better understand participant's journey, discussions of teacher identity and commitment became the underlying constructs to help tell their stories. …

Engineering a Dynamic Science Learning Environment for K-12 Teachers

Abstract: Teachers are eager learners and participants when professional development opportunities are relevant to their personal interests, classroom needs, or both (Basista & Mathews, 2002; Gordon, 2004). However, it is often difficult for teachers to translate professional development concepts to the classroom in a way that meets their students' needs (Duffy, 2004; Gordon, 2004). In-depth research on teachers' professional experiences is essential to identify the features that most effectively promote outcomes that address both student and teacher needs (Westerlund, Garcia, Koke, Taylor, & Mason, 2002). Such research can contribute to a clearer understanding of how learning environments interact with individual and group differences to optimize design of existing and future opportunities (Duke, 2004; Westerlund, et al, 2002). The present study follows a cohort of 17 K-12 teachers through a six-week resident learning experience in science and engineering, and on into the planning and implementation of applications for their classrooms. This Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program was examined using the strategic approach of design-based research, with its fluid, adaptive management of the complexity of authentic learning in situ and its attentive documentation of expected and unexpected events, in process and products, to capture the richness of teachers' and mentors' experiences. Background The design-based research approach used in this study considered multiple elements of teacher learning and transfer in order to obtain a rich and complex data set. Research on effective teacher professional development, adult learning, situated cognition, and learning transfer were utilized to inform the evaluation design. Teachers' and mentors' perceptions of their experience were essential in this study and the data collection was structured to meaningfully include these factors. Teacher Professional Learning Effective teacher professional development should: (1) include well-defined theory in teaching and learning; (2) build in-depth knowledge and skills; (3) model strategies; (4) build learning community; (5) support teachers' leadership; (6) link to larger educational communities; and (7) be continually reassessed for improvements (Bell & Gilbert, 1996; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Wilson & Berne, 1999). In order to promote substantive changes in teaching practice, educators need opportunities to study both content and pedagogy (Berliner, 1991; Branscomb, 1993; Wilson & Berne, 1999) and to engage actively in situations merging content with meaningful learning contexts (Bybee & Loucks-Horsley, 2000; Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001). However, few teacher professional development opportunities integrate these important design features (Westerlund et al., 2002; Wilson & Berne, 1999). The RET program is designed to address many of these requirements by offering teachers an opportunity to participate in authentic research experiences and then translate them into classroom practice. During the six-week RET summer experience, teachers work in small groups of four to six with a university research mentor to answer testable questions related to specific engineering disciplines. They are asked to turn what they learn into classroom activities that will increase their students' understanding of concepts they regularly teach. The teachers are offered an opportunity to write proposals to receive funding for classroom materials related to the activities they create in order to encourage full participation. Teacher professional development couched in authentic field experience can promote knowledge and skill development for teachers, especially when collegiality and communication between scientists and teachers are high (Dresner, 2002; Dresner & Worley, 2006; Westerlund et al., 2002). Summer institutes such as the RET, outside of teachers' daily professional contexts, offer in-depth learning opportunities and promote collegial sharing (Basista & Mathews 2002; Keyser,1997). …

Educational Reforms that Foster Ecological Intelligence.

Abstract: There are powerful forces of resistance that must be acknowledged when introducing educational reforms that foster ecological intelligence. The foremost source of resistance is the paradigm gap that now separates generations. That is, the vast majority of university professors, classroom teachers--and thus the general public that has been educated by them--were socialized to take-for-granted many of the conceptual underpinning that supported the idea that intelligence is the attribute that is the basis of individual autonomy. This included, as mentioned earlier, all the misconceptions that marginalized awareness that the languaging processes carry forward the misconceptions and silences of earlier eras--including the moral values and deep cultural assumptions rooted in the West's anthropocentric traditions of thinking. They were also socialized to think in terms of events, dates, facts, places, characteristics of things and people, what can be measured, and assigned a monetary value--rather than in terms of relationships and mutually supportive or destructive patterns. The dominant mindset reinforced by the educational process also takes-for-granted that change is an inherently progressive process. Indeed, this assumption, which scientists combined with the assumption that the rational process can correct the limitations of the natural world, led to the introduction into the environment of the thousands of synthetic chemicals that are now being discovered to be life-altering toxic substances. And learning to think of the characteristics of distinct entities such as individuals, things, and events rather than relationships and interdependencies further reinforced the habit of valuing abstract thinking over awareness of cultural and environmental contexts. This taken-for-granted conceptual and moral orientation helped to perpetuate the myth of western cultures being more advanced and thus having a messianic responsibility for the development of less advanced cultures. This legacy of late twentieth century thinking continue s to frame today's political discourse where a large majority of the public are in deep denial that the ecological crisis will require fundamental lifestyle changes. Scientists and politicians who take the crisis seriously assume that it can be solved by introducing more energy efficient and less carbon producing technologies. The small number of faculty in the social sciences and the even smaller number in the humanities who are introducing their students to environmental issues mostly focus on environmental writers such as Holmes Rolston III, Warwick Fox, Arne Naess, J. Baird Callicott, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry--and ecofeminists such as Charlene Spretnak, Susan Griffin, Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, and Vandana Shiva. These writers are important as they challenge from different perspectives the dominant myth of a human and patriarchal centered world. Reading them contributes to a change of consciousness, but they do not provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary for living lifestyles that are less dependent upon consumerism, or on an individual-centered form of consciousness. Little if any attention is given to discussing with students how the new digital technologies, valued chiefly for their personal convenience, speed, and social networking, perpetuate the same cultural patterns that further marginalize awareness of the ecological crisis. Other obstacles to introducing educational reforms that foster greater reliance upon ecological intelligence include the deepening culture wars where a mix of religious fundamentalism and years of a fragmented educational process that leaves students graduating with only a surface knowledge of the history of ideas, leads to the current violence-prone political discourse. This discourse, which continually degenerates into making the false distinction between friends and enemies is dominated by an Orwellian mix of political slogans. …

Visions Lost and Dreams Forgotten: Environmental Education, Systems Thinking, and Possible Futures in American Public Schools.

Abstract: The contributions to this special issue of Teacher Education Quarterly introduce the reader to a powerful analytical framework through which one can reflect upon the meaning and role of environmental education, teacher education and professional development, and salient aspects of the quintessence of the human experience on planet Earth. In a very real sense, the articles herein were brought together so as to provide an interlocking array of intellectual and practical perspectives through which we can better understand our elemental human nature and the various socio-cultural and economic overlays which have served to insulate humanity from that nature and, in the process, from a workable relationship with the world environment to which the fate of the human animal is inexorably bound. These articles also raise very real, compelling, and urgent implications for the practice of teacher education and professional development, classroom instruction in public schools, and how these can lead Western civilization toward a more intelligent and workable relationship with our planetary home. The authors of these articles present a number of insightful observations and thought-provoking ideas that warrant further scrutiny and reflection as the human family confronts some of the most daunting challenges it has ever encountered during its long and arduous sojourn on planet Earth. At the core of all the contributions to this special issue is the compellingly urgent realization that humanity is facing, and must deal with, enormous ecological and social problems and challenges. This situation has created an urgent and compelling need centered on how the future citizenry of the industrialized West will be prepared relative to addressing and dealing with these problems and challenges. Competing Paradigms: The Current Influence of Past Realities In essence, the analytic framework and perceptual perspectives mentioned above give rise to the vision of competing paradigms in the conception of public education's purpose and role in contemporary American society. The paradigm that currently dominates the thinking of policy-makers in American public education--and forms the backdrop for much of the discussion in this special edition of Teacher Education Quarterly--dates from the late 19th century as the United States transitioned from an agrarian and small-scale manufacturing economy to a large scale, mechanized industrial economy. Ultimately, it is the product of a long tradition of Western thought born in the intellectual formulations of the Copernican Revolution, honed in the course of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment as the pan-global mercantile empires of the West grew to dominate the world scene, and then given more mature form and new purpose during the socio-cultural reformulations attendant with the Industrial Revolution. In the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these powerful trends in Western thought led political and business elites to combine and create a new scientifically managed comprehensive public school system based on the most pervasive business model of the time and employing standardized native intelligence testing and ability tracking (both in-class ability grouping and class cohort ability grouping) so as to create a factory model of education capable of both sorting and socializing a large immigrant labor force into the developing industrial system of production (Emery, 2007). This new educational platoon system was intellectually legitimized by the emergence and rise of the new science of educational psychology. E. L. Thorndike was central to the development of this discipline and infused it with a thick patina of operant conditioning which stressed repetition, memorization, and teacher-centric didactic instructional methods in which students were passive receptors of information batches designed to assimilate, acculturate, and pacify. The objectives of public education policy-making in America increasingly focused on the elimination of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity and its replacement with a new standard issue American citizenry suitable for working in, and commercially supporting, the rapidly expanding industrial-corporate infrastructure. …

Working Together in Urban Schools: How a University Teacher Education Program and Teach for America Partner to Support Alternatively Certified Teachers.

Abstract: It is no secret: Teach For America (TFA) and traditional colleges of education have had strained relations over the past 20 years, as their approaches to teacher preparation are starkly distinct. TFA, as its mission, recruits recent college graduates, provides a five-week summer training, and assigns primary teaching responsibilities in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) classrooms for a two-year commitment, whereas traditional colleges of education aim to prepare lifelong teachers over the course of two-to-four-year teacher preparation programs. Since the beginning of TFA in 1989, academia has challenged the effectiveness of TFA teachers in the classroom and criticized the organization for the short-lived teacher preparation and limited time teachers are expected to stay in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Frelow, 2002; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Veilig, 2005; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). Due to the inherent differences between the traditional path to teaching certification provided by colleges of education and the alternative path to teaching certification provided by TFA, many universities find their ideologies of teacher education too disparate to reconcile. No matter one's perspective on whether these teachers should be in the classroom, over 3,700 new teachers entered urban and rural classrooms via TFA in 2008 across America. In 2008, there were nearly 390 TFA teachers teaching in Phoenix-area schools alone. The College of Teacher Education and Leadership (CTEL) at Arizona State University (ASU) embraced the opportunity to partner with TFA to tailor existing teacher preparation programs to meet the unique needs of alternatively certified teachers in urban schools. Rather than harp on the distinctions between ideologies and approaches to teacher preparation, CTEL and TFA Phoenix found common ground with the shared mission to better support urban teachers in classrooms with thousands of Arizona children. This commentary is part of a developing line of research focused on opportunities to explore partnerships between TFA and colleges of education. This line of research aims to better prepare and support alternatively certified teachers (i.e., teachers who become licensed to teach without a degree in education) in urban schools, rather than discredit TFA teachers and argue whether they should or should not be in the classroom in the first place. Our goal is to share lessons learned from our partnership, so that other institutions and non-profit organizations can form scalable models for teacher education in urban schools. To describe and reflect upon the teacher education program for TFA teachers teaching in urban schools in the Phoenix metropolitan area, we focus on one conceptually based question: How have two organizations partnered to adapt and modify an existing teacher preparation program to best support inservice urban teachers in the classroom? In order to reflect upon our support and preparation of TFA teachers in urban schools, we (a) describe the setting in which our partnership exists, (b) provide a literature review as basis for program development, (c) highlight four key program elements which form the framework for working in urban schools to prepare alternatively certified teachers, and (d) reflect upon our programmatic transformations to embed inservice teacher education in urban schools. Setting: The University and Teach For America Partnership CTEL and TFA share the responsibility ofpreparing effective teachers for the urban classrooms of Phoenix, Arizona. Similar to other alternatively certified teachers who enter the classroom without formal teacher preparation, TFA teachers enter the classroom with the minimum of an undergraduate degree in an unrelated field (e.g., sociology, economics, Spanish) and a five-week, intensive summer training on classroom management, instruction, and assessment. The crux of the teachers' professional preparation and development occurs while the teachers are already teaching in the classroom. …

Forging New Norms in New Orleans: From Emotional to Ecological Intelligence.

Abstract: Just as social and emotional intelligence build on the abilities to take other people's perspective, feel with them, and show our concern, ecological intelligence extends this capacity to all natural systems. --Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy In a few less-than-quiet classrooms in New Orleans, about 15 middle and high school students gathered together for five weeks during the summer of 2010 to discuss what they wanted to do about the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This was not the way they'd originally planned to spend their summer vacation, which was envisioning how New Orleans schools could be improved by 2015, the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For most of these young people, Katrina was, of course, the biggest event to rock their lives, causing some to lose family members, some to lose homes, and most to be temporarily relocated to other communities. But it was also the event that got them out of New Orleans, where both the illiteracy and murder rates are among the highest in the nation, and allowed them to see what other schools look like. "The bathrooms were the biggest things for me," recalls Dudley Grady, Jr., who is now a student at Xavier University of Louisiana. "To see a clean restroom in school? I'd never seen that before. To see toilet paper, soap, mirrors on the wall that were not broken? I'd never seen that," he repeats. After returning home, Grady joined other students with similar experiences and, under the wise and supportive guidance of some very committed community organizers, artists, architects, media experts, and educators from New Orleans and around the nation, formed a new group called the Rethinkers: Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools. They meet in school clubs throughout the academic year and, over the past five years, have gathered every summer, concluding each year with a news conference at which they've announced recommendations for how New Orleans schools should rethink bathrooms, food and cafeterias, and a myriad of policies and practices to promote a climate of dignity and respect. In 2010 the BP spill, which currently has spread over more than 170 miles of shoreline from Louisiana to Florida and raised big questions about Americans' appetite for oil, created a new focus and a new recommendation: encourage schools to move toward becoming oil-free by 2015. On first blush the ambitiousness of that goal might inspire a disbelieving "good luck!" But the Rethinkers have a way of getting attention for their ideas. For example, the press conference where the Rethinkers issued this recommendation attracted the Times-Picayune, ABC News, and other media outlets, as well as community and education leaders--notably, Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District, which was established in 2003 to turn around chronically failing schools. "Paul is obsessed with the Rethinkers and wants Rethinkers clubs in all schools," says Siona LaFrance, chief of staff to Vallas. "He likes that the kids are thinking and challenging authority and that all of their suggestions are based on a lot of consideration. And he likes that this is a continuing effort." (1) Whether the Rethinkers clubs, which are now in six New Orleans schools, will end up in all New Orleans schools remains to be seen. But this much, says founder and director Jane Wholey, is clear: "If we continue to slowly and gradually add several clubs a year, in five years we can have 20 clubs. That's clubs in about half the middle schools: enough of a percentage of the middle school population to create a culture of civic engagement in schools in this city. That is the goal." Breakdown or Breakthrough At points of instability in a system--whether a school, community, or any other social system--there is the opportunity for breakdown or breakthrough. In that moment of opportunity arises the possibility for significant change through the emergence of new norms or standards of behavior that reflect the evolving values of the larger group. …

Fulfilling the Promise: African American Educators Teach for Democracy in Jim Crow's South.

Abstract: Of all the instruments for the maintenance of a government, the public school is recognized as the most powerful. The strength of America has been in the transformation of people from other parts of the world into American citizens loyal to a new country and to a new way of life full of opportunities for the common man. The building of this citizenship has been the duty primarily of the American public school system. It is the backbone of our democracy. Let's Be Honest about Democracy, NAACP pamphlet, 1939, p. 12 In 1939, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the nation's school leaders and teachers to make good on the Founding Fathers promise to educate youth for their future civic roles. Influential African American scholar Charles Wesley echoed the NAACP's sentiments in his 1941 essay that encouraged teachers to make democracy "the guiding philosophy in our [Negro] schools" through practical as well as theoretical examples. For Wesley and NAACP leaders, one role of schools was to reinforce the ideals that citizenship in a democracy should promote "the presentation of truth ... freedom of speech, press, pulpit and assembly ... the right to strike, the right to a fair trial [and] freedom from unlawful search and seizure" (Wesley, p.73). Consistent with mainstream civic education discourse of the 1930s and 1940s that emphasized the need to create good school citizens, Black and White educators appeared to promote mutual objectives that would encourage individuals to work together for a "common good" (Dewey 1909, 1916). Ironically, in the same NAACP pamphlet that contained the civic education rhetoric, the organization also listed as its goals to stop lynching and hate crimes, to secure fair legal representation for African Americans in state courts, and to lobby through the judicial system for equal pay and better conditions in segregated public schools (NAACP, 1939, p.8). The NAACP platform also addressed the need to create greater public awareness of discrimination and to lessen fears of violent attacks that many African Americans confronted daily in the segregated South. Leaders encouraged members, whenever possible, to bring pressure on local communities to stop widespread racially motivated acts of violence (Anderson, 1988; Grant, 1993; Mangum, 1940). Indeed, America's civic community from the end of the Great Depression through the post World War II years was hardly rational or racially neutral in its uneven and unequal treatment of African Americans and other underrepresented groups (Blades & Richardson, 2006; Dunn, 1916). Conventional civic scholarship of the era has ignored the complexities of a racially segregated society that in theory would have made it difficult, if not illogical, for African American educators to embrace and promote democracy within their communities (Dewey, 1916; Hartmann, 1948; Lazerson, 1978; Wesley, 1942) Given the climate of social and political contradictions in the United States, how did African American educators teach students about equality, freedom, and justice in a separate and unequal society? This article addresses a basic yet complex question through the voices of five African American educators who taught in one Southern state's segregated schools before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Recollections of their teaching experiences, coupled with historical data, provide context on social studies and civic education that is rarely addressed in historical civic discourse that often interpreted dominant political and social views without regard for perspectives of African Americans and other underrepresented groups (Hertzberg, 1981; Karier, 1978; Saxe, 1991). African American Perspectives on Civic Life Central to the study of 20th century African American life and thought is the concept of a double consciousness, first articulated by scholar W. …

Project "Nueva Generacion" and Grow Your Own Teachers: Transforming Schools and Teacher Education from the Inside Out.

Abstract: In a speech on October 9, 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a call to teachers and teacher educators, stating that "Many ed schools do relatively little to prepare students for the rigor of teaching in high-poverty and high needs schools"(U.S. Department of Education, 2009). Many of the high-poverty, high-needs schools to which Duncan refers are located in urban districts that suffer from high student mobility, displacement in and out of neighborhoods, overcrowding, high teacher turnover, and shortages of qualified teachers. Duncan's observation is not new to colleges of education that strive to adequately prepare teachers to work with a racially and linguistically diverse student body within the context of the complicated social, political, and economic conditions that impact schools, families, and urban communities. Colleges of education have responded to the need to better prepare teacher candidates, who are largely White and female (Zumwalt & Craig, 2005), for the realities of urban schools by adapting their traditional programs and implementing community-based models that essentially immerse the teacher education students in a community that is culturally different from their own (Sleeter, 2001). Such programs have merit and it has been demonstrated that the cross-cultural experience "... may aid students' cultural awareness and solidify aspirations to teach within such communities" (Gallego, 2001, p. 313). In spite of such teacher preparation innovations, there continues to be a need for teachers and teacher candidates to understand not only the importance of connecting with the communities where they work but also the complex nature of the relationship between the school and the community and the marginalized position of the individuals who live there. (Koerner & Abdul-Tawwab, 2006; Murrell, 2001). The on-going quest to more effectively connect teacher candidates with urban communities and schools drives the examination of the role of colleges of education within the school/community context. Given that most community-based teacher education programs originate on campus and then move into communities, it is not surprising that a disconnect persists between colleges of education, their students and the communities they strive to serve. In this article I will describe a nine-year old partnership between a teacher education program and a community-based organization that is a viable and complementary alternative to campus-based and community-based teacher education programs. The unique partnership between the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) and the Bilingual Education Program at Chicago State University (CSU) essentially brought the university to the community at the community-based organization's request. The collaboration was initially funded as a federal Title VII grant. Since it began nine years ago, between 60 and 70 neighborhood residents, many of whom already worked in the community as teacher assistants, school volunteers, and community leaders, have had the opportunity to attend college and work toward a bachelor's degree and teaching credentials. Founded on LSNA's core belief that the members of their urban community can and should serve as resources in schools, Project Nueva Generacion (New Generation) is the model for the Grow Your Own teachers initiative in Illinois. The Grow Your Own teachers initiative provides funds to consortia consisting of a community based organization, a college of education, and a school district to recruit and prepare community leaders to become teachers. Presently, Project Nueva Generacion continues with Grow Your Own funding from the state. Through a documentary account of the of the evolution of the partnership and the mechanisms by which Project Nueva Generacion was organized and implemented, I hope to illustrate what can happen when a teacher education program partners with a community based organization because, "One success tells us what is possible"(Payne, 2008, p. …

Representations of Education in HBO's the Wire, Season 4

Abstract: The Wire is a crime drama that aired for five seasons on the Home Box Office (HBO) cable channel from 2002-2008. The entire series is set in Baltimore, Maryland, and as Kinder (2008) points out, "Each season The Wire shifts focus to a different segment of society: the drug wars, the docks, city politics, education, and the media" (p. 52). The series explores, in Lanahan's (2008) words, an increasingly brutal and coarse society through the prism of Baltimore, whose postindustrial capitalism has decimated the working-class wage and sharply divided the haves and have-nots. The city's bloated bureaucracies sustain the inequality. The absence of a decent public-school education or meaningful political reform leaves an unskilled underclass trapped between a rampant illegal drug economy and a vicious "war on drugs." (p. 24) My main purpose in this article is to introduce season four of The Wire--the "education" season--to readers who have either never seen any of the series, or who have seen some of it but not season four. Specifically, I will attempt to show that season four holds great pedagogical potential for academics in education. (1) First, though, I will present examples of the critical acclaim that The Wire received throughout its run, and I will introduce the backgrounds of the creators and main writers of the series, David Simon and Ed Burns. The Wire: The Best Show on Television (Ever) The Wire drew much critical acclaim, being described as "the most aggressively experimental program on television" (Kehr, 2005); as "one of the most demanding and thought-provoking series ever to grace television" (Lowry, 2006); and as "a masterpiece" that is "one of the great achievements in television artistry" (Goodman, 2006). This kind of acclaim is exemplified by Jacob Weisberg (2006), who, in a frequently-cited column, described The Wire as "surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America," adding: "No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature." Weisberg's comparison of The Wire to great literature derives from the vision of the series creator, David Simon, who conceived the show as "a visual novel" (Rothkerch, 2002), and this novelistic quality has been remarked on by many who have written about the series, such as Lanahan (2008), who described what Simon was doing with the series as follows: Simon was writing a televised novel, and a big one. Innumerable subplots came and went, and main characters disappeared from the show for several episodes at a time. Nothing ever resolved itself in an hour, and there were no good guys or bad guys. All were individuals constrained by their institutions, driven to compromise between conscience, greed, and ambition. Facets of their characters emerged slowly over time. They spoke in the sometimes-unintelligible vernaculars of their subcultures. All of this made unprecedented demands on viewers and provided immense reward to those who stuck around. A righteous anger at the failure of our social institutions drives The Wire, but the passionate ideas that fuel it are hidden several layers down. (p. 24) (2) David Simon and Ed Burns are the originating sources of what Lanahan describes as "righteous anger" and "passionate ideas"--and the sources, too, of the deep knowledge and the multilayered experiences that manifest themselves in what Weisberg (2006) described as the realistic portrayal of "the social, political, and economic life of an American city." Simon--the show's creator, producer, and chief writer--grew up in Washington, D.C., attended the University of Maryland, and became a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, where he worked from 1983 until 1995. In the early 1980s, Simon met Ed Burns, who would eventually become his main collaborator on various projects. …

Reciprocity through Co-Instructed Site-Based Courses: Perceived Benefit and Challenge Overlap in an Urban School-University Partnership.

Abstract: Educational reformers have argued that universities and the schools they serve must work as partners in teacher education so as to tighten linkages between theory and practice (e.g., Anagnostopoulos, Smith, & Basmadjian, 2007; Bullough & Draper, 2004; Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden, 2007; Patterson, 1999). Such partnerships ultimately aim to achieve "simultaneous renewal" wherein each institution participates equitably in a "mutually beneficial relationship" (Goodlad, 1993, p. 29). However, because partnerships are commonly initiated and evaluated by universities rather than schools, research on the effectiveness of these efforts in meeting partnership goals has typically focused on benefits to university students rather than to the host schools (e.g., Adams, Bondy, & Kuhel, 2005; Buczynski & Sisserson, 2008; Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden, 2007). Partnership models assume that schools benefit, if indirectly, because partnership-based programs will produce teachers whose preparation is more closely aligned with schools' needs. But do school personnel perceive these and other benefits? And if so, do they perceive such benefits as a fair trade for the challenging work that is required for genuine institutional collaboration? Voices of school staff are largely silent in this regard. To address this research gap, we attempt to gain greater insight into an under-examined perspective by conducting observations, surveying teachers, and interviewing the principal at one urban high school about their experiences collaborating with a university. The larger context of this study is a partnership that joins a university with secondary city schools in the goal of preparing aspiring teachers who will thrive in urban classrooms. Recently, the university began locating teacher education courses on neighboring middle and high school campuses so that pre-service teachers might benefit from immediate and direct contact with life in urban schools, with the further expectation that this effect would be enhanced when the courses were co-instructed by host schoolteachers and university professors. This partnership model assumes that host schools will develop capacity alongside the aspiring teachers enrolled in site-based university courses, yet there has been little examination of benefits host schools derive from such collaborations or how a site-based co-instruction model might facilitate such benefits. Given that the model we examine here places additional burdens on host schools, it is important that we examine schools' perceptions regarding its challenges and benefits as well as the factors that influence their perceptions. Our experience suggests that schools must dedicate scarce resources to the sustaining of the site-base co-instructed teacher education model. These resources include, for example, classroom spaces in which university classes are held, as well as time and energy to manage logistical issues. Furthermore, co-teaching can often be more challenging than solo teaching since co-instructors face the additional task of working toward consensus when identifying instructional goals, crafting lessons to meet those goals, and assessing student progress (Buczynski & Sisserson, 2008). In fact, Musanti and Pence (2010) found that collaboration is a skill that co-instructors must learn in its own right, one that often involves a long and painful process. If we wish for schools to embrace partnership initiatives--which are typically theorized and designed by universities--we need a better understanding of the extent to which host schools perceive such initiatives as beneficial to their own goals. Additionally, we are mindful of warnings that the rush to highlight program effectiveness can, if overemphasized in the absence of critical inquiry, harm reform efforts (Goodlad, 1993). We assume that partnership research should not focus solely on outcomes, but also on processes (Goodlad, 1993; Maurrasse, 2002), and that the substance of innovative teacher programs is found in "the elaboration and enactment of particular program features rather than in their mere presence or absence" (Zeichner & Conklin, 2008, p. …

Encouraging Agitation: Teaching Teacher Candidates to Confront Words that Wound.

Abstract: Introduction Gee's (1986) emphasis on teachers' consciousness about "the political nature of their practices" posits literacy education as a social justice project Advocating this stance is particularly important as we work to understand and negotiate post-9/11 literacies, those socially situated and culturally informed literacy practices that acutely traverse, are responsive to, and make meaning from the politically charged popular culture narratives of our current day and age (Staples, 2008a) These literacies are entangled with constructs like race, gender, culture, language, religion, terror, and sexuality in ways that are globally unprecedented and hyper-communicated at lightning speed Gee clarifies the importance of teachers' "inquiry stances on their practice" as primary vehicles through which we can influence the ways "language, literacy, and power intersect" to "enable or stunt" the sensitivities, inclinations, and even trajectories of our students (Fecho & Allen, 2003, p 234) This "enable or stunt" dichotomy is often the result of teachers misunderstanding ways to support students' language learning and the barrage of linguistic violence students are exposed to and utilize on a regular basis In this analytic conceptual essay, and from my standpoint as an African American woman teacher/researcher, I present a rich description of a personal sensibility and promising professional practice for literacy educators and those who prepare Reading/English/Language Arts teacher candidates for service among students who are historically marginalized and underserved by schools and communities First, I examine some of the literature on the racial and gender identities of most teacher candidates in America, the corollary between this group's inexperience with students who are different from them, and conceptions about language in relationship to racism and sexism Second, I provide examples of the ways demeaning words are used in popular culture narratives among those who are privileged and how their words alienate and oppress "others" Finally, I define the "Agitator Identity Trait" and articulate the ways it can develop promising pedagogical practices among teacher candidates, counter wounding words, and assist students' counter-oppressive thinking and action While I ultimately contribute these promising practices for identifying and countering overt language adversities as they occur in popular culture narratives, I also present a brief review of the two primary ways language adversities function--covertly and overtly--as a way to frame the intersections of racist and sexist ideologies, language, and human objectification Words That Wound Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw (1993) wrote of "wounding words" and their implications with respect to the field of law and the intersections it shares with sociology and history Their seminal work paved the way for inquiry into the intersecting fields of literacy education, teacher preparation, media, and popular culture Their work is significant because hurtful words are frequently exerted in private and public discourse Words that wound, characterizing individuals as inadequate, and therefore less valuable than those considered normal and favorable, are used to subjugate Words like "retards," "nappy headed hos," "bitches," "dykes," "kikes," "spics," and "niggers" come to mind With a greater rate of recurrence, individuals who use these words openly or privately and can be considered power brokers because of their gender, ethnicity, social affiliations, professional positions, and/or access to broad communication arenas in the public domain, exert or are complicit in the propagation of these words They wreak havoc on readers and listeners Those who promulgate racist and sexist language incite disorder and the deconstruction of humanity in several ways First, they disregard the insidious nature of wounding words …