Conceptualizing Equity-Centered Teacher Education

• In Event: Putting Equity Front and Center in Teacher Education: Innovative Program Design and Research

Abstract

Objectives and Educational Significance
Paper 1 argues that there are four tasks involved in conceptualizing equity-centered initial teacher education: (1) conceptualizing educational inequity and the role of teachers/teacher preparation in challenging this problem; (2) defining “practice for equity” as a major outcome of preparation; (3) designing curricula and program structures that are equity-centered, complex, and appropriate to local patterns of inequality; and, (4) conducting research about equity-centered preparation and using the results both to improve practice and contribute to theory. For this symposium, Paper 1 concentrates on the first and fourth tasks. (Paper 2 addresses the second and third tasks as they are instantiated in the innovative MTchg Program; Papers 3 and 4 are, respectively, an illustration and a tool related to the fourth task.)
Perspectives and Conceptual Analysis
To accomplish the first task, Paper 1 conceptualizes educational equity from a “sociohistorical” perspective as opposed to an “equity-as-equality” stance (Tan & Barton, 2012). The latter assumes that equal access to teachers and school resources produces equity (Tan and Barton, 2012), while the former recognizes the critical role of teachers but acknowledges that long-standing intersecting systems of inequality mediate who has access in the first place (Gadsden, Davis & Artiles, 2009; Snook & O’Neill, 2014; Walby, 2007). This paper conceptualizes equity-centered teacher education with the twin goals of preparing teachers who enhance marginalized students’ learning and who, simultaneously, recognize and challenge the systems of inequality that reproduce inequity. This perspective sets the MTchg Program (and similarly-oriented programs) apart from other programs/pathways that use the language of “equity” but assume that school factors are the primary cause and the solution to inequality.
Accomplishing the fourth task—conducting and using empirical research about equity-centered preparation—requires both a powerful theoretical framework to guide the research and a diversified portfolio of conceptual, empirical, and methodological studies. Paper 1 overviews the framework the research team developed (Cochran-Smith et al, 2014)—complexity theory (Cilliers, 1998; Davis & Sumara, 2006; Morrison, 2008) integrated with critical realism (Byrne, 1998; Byrne & Callaghan, 2014; Walby, 2007), a research platform we refer to as CT-CR, which accounts for the complexity of teaching, learning and inequality and also allows examination of how the complex “causal” mechanisms of learning to teach occur (Cochran-Smith et al, 2014). Across the team’s portfolio of studies informed by this framework, two sets of questions are addressed. One asks about what is actually happening in equity-centered programs by analyzing the patterns of practice that emerge. The second aims to explain how it is happening by identifying the conditions that prompt the emergence of practice and the contingent causal mechanisms that operate. Both sets of questions contribute to local program improvement and to broader understandings.
Contribution to the Field
This paper contributes a framework for understanding what it means to make equity the center of teacher preparation by raising four key questions. These questions are aimed to be simultaneously general and particular by connecting conceptual, practical, empirical and methodological issues in the context of local histories and goals.

Author

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College