Toward a Teacher-Led Model of Small School Reform

• In Event: Teachers as Public Intellectuals and Civic Agents: Toward a Grounded Theory of Transformative Teacher Education

Abstract

Drawing from their own practice as teacher-administrators of a small school in East Los Angeles, the authors of this paper will examine the uses of culturally relevant instruction (Ladson-Billings, 1995), collaborative and humanizing professional development (Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin, 1996), and community engagement in creating a dynamic twenty-first century learning community. The authors build upon a framework that draws from Freire’s theory of education for critical consciousness (Freire, 1970), Yosso’s (2005) framework for community cultural wealth, and notions of critical literacy as critical textual production (Morrell, 2008) to frame their analysis of the design, the practices, and the early outcomes at the small school. They will present the findings from the first two years of a longitudinal case study of the development of the small school. Data include personal reflections, field notes, observations in classrooms, analysis of school documents, analysis of student work, and notes from conversations with faculty, staff, students, and community members.

The authors contend that teachers create opportunities for leadership and educational advancement through organizing. While the system often rewards educators for focusing on their own careers and personal aspirations, and traditional teacher leaders often step out of the classroom and become status quo administrators who quickly lose touch with teachers, transformational educators do not learn to navigate the system to advance themselves, but rather to become change agents.

The paper will explore how the small school attempted to develop its own leadership through cultivating and supporting teachers who knew and engaged the students and community. Teachers built networks of leadership through their initiatives and the support they provided to each other. The authors argue that good administrators recognize and value this initiative and that teacher leaders are naturally positioned to challenge that power structure. This paper also documents the processes through which teacher leaders create opportunities for youth to engage in praxis, organizing, and civic engagement. Teacher leaders created partnerships, alliances, and sought resources to support youth programs, and clubs that built student leadership that possessed the academic skills and affirmed identities needed to successfully advocate for social justice. Teacher leaders collaborated with grass roots organizations that understood the community and knew how to mobilize support. They practiced “relational power as opposed to unilateral power,” in the words of Ernesto Cortes. Finally, this paper will analyze how these newly formed relationships between teachers, students, and the community translated into classroom instruction and student production across the disciplines.

Authors

• Ben Gertner, School of Communications, New Media, and Technology

• Jorge Lopez, UCLA/CNMT, Roosevelt High School