Placing Urban Parents at the Center of Teacher Education and Urban School Reform

• In Event: Organizing Parents for Social Justice in Urban Schools: A New Urban Model of Parent Engagement

Abstract

Public schools are becoming increasingly culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse. Yet, the diversity amongst the pool of prospective teachers continues to decrease. The NCES Digest of Education Statistics (1998b) forecast that, in the next decade, the percentage of ethnic minority teachers will shrink to five percent, while the enrollment of ethnic minority children in America's schools will grow to 41% (as cited in Identifying Reference, 2003). Certainly, a major challenge is how to prepare novice and pre-service teachers to work across racial, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic differences. While teacher education programs spend countless hours teaching candidates how to make lesson plans, meet academic content standards/assessments, and develop effective classroom management; they seldom prepare teachers to work within the context of a school community and with students’ families (Baker, 2000). In particular, teacher education programs rarely teach future teachers how to work with urban families and within urban communities (Lynn, 1997; Murrell, 2001).

This paper analyzes data from a five-year longitudinal study that aims to create a community-based model of teacher education that will better prepare pre-service teachers to work in urban schools. In particular, this study was designed to implement and test a critical teacher education model that includes urban parents in the education and mentoring of pre-service teachers (Identifying Source, 2006). This study, called the Urban Parent-Teacher Education Collaborative, is a programmatic effort to include urban parents as teacher educators within a year-long course at a private university in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Mary Johnson, a grass-parent advocate and the chairperson of the LAUSD Parent Collaborative, co-teaches the course with a university professor to provide mentoring for pre-service teachers enrolled in a teacher credential program. The university professor and parent educator seek to provide teacher education students with the skills and confidence to include primarily low-income, culturally-diverse parents in the education process.

This paper will be co-authored by three UPTEC participants—a university professor and two former UPTEC alumni and current teachers. We will use several case studies to explore how the inclusion of urban parents as teacher educators influenced 1) pre-service teachers’ perceptions of urban students, their families, and the local school community; 2) their ability to work with the multiple stakeholders of a school community; and 3) their quality of teaching. This study draws on data gathered through five years of participant observations, student reflections, survey results, extensive interviews, and 200 hours of classroom videotape. This research illustrates how the inclusion of PUT parents within the pre-service phase of teacher education program influenced teachers to develop the cultural competencies necessary to work in urban schools; to become community teachers. Findings indicate that empowering parents as teacher educators positively impacts the parent participants and pre-service teachers. Parent advocates, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and researchers will all benefit from learning about how other collaborative school/community partnerships can create spaces for authentic parent engagement and empowerment.

Authors

• Anthony Collatos, Pepperdine University

• Raymundo Tellez, Pepperdine University

• Sinai Shayan, Fusion Academy