Challenging Assumptions Through Increased Community Contact

• In Event: Social Justice Comes to Secondary English Teacher Preparation: Historicizing, Understanding, Implementing, and Assessing Standard VI

Abstract

Objectives
The ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds of US PreK-12 students are diversifying. The teacher candidates (TCs) populating teacher education programs are, overall, not representative of this diversity. To provide an opportunity for the TCs in an undergraduate English Education program to better understand the diverse communities in which they would teach and to challenge their assumptions about community members and future students, I developed and incorporated a Community Inquiry Project (CIP) into their required coursework. Ultimately, through their work in the CIP, TCs were encouraged to “plan instruction responsive to students’ local, national and international histories, individual identities…and languages/dialects” (NCTE/NCATE, 2012).

Theoretical Framework
Critical multiculturalism (Berlak & Moyenda, 2001; May & Sleeter, 2010) and contact theory (Allport, 1958; Pettigrew, 1998) informed the CIP’s design and this study’s methodology. Critical multiculturalism encourages TCs to name and challenge hegemonic narratives in society and in schools. Contact theory holds that increased interaction between ingroup and outgroup members may reduce prejudice (Allport, 1958). Taken together, critical multiculturalism and contact theory synergize benefits and affordances that may move students to a more critical and practice-oriented understanding of multicultural teaching.

Methods
To consider the possibility of community inquiry work to encourage students to analyze their expectations of and assumptions about the community, their future students, and of teaching, I analyzed the individual reflections TCs completed during the CIP. TCs reflected at three points during the semester using the class wiki. Reflections followed the DEAL (Describe, Examine, & Articulate Learning) Model common in service-learning (Molee, Henry, Sessa, & McKinney-Prupis, 2010).

Data Sources
After analyzing all 21 participants’ reflections, I selected three participants who I felt best illustrated some of the cross-course themes that arose in the reflections of all participants. By focusing on the reflections of three TCs, Alexis, Dara, and Brody, I was able to attend to the ways that participants described their experiences, the instances of contact these participants had with community members, and the ways that individuals recalculated others and teaching during the CIP.

Results
As the TCs spent more time in contact with the community their reflections evinced recalculations of the physical spaces that surrounded them as well as their understandings of others. Over time the TCs’ tendencies to draw from personal experiences with familiar people and places decreased. TCs also began to focus on newly gained knowledge about the community and to challenge and question this knowledge in terms of their understanding of the larger society. By drawing from their own contact with community members and students over time, TCs began to cultivate a view of education that was more local and contextualized.

Significance
The CIP provided TCs with additional experience in the field beyond the practicum or student teaching. These field experiences can help teacher educators to provide depth and breadth in clinical experiences, potentially introducing TCs to more diverse school settings and encouraging them to recognize how “social justice, diversity, equity, student identities, and schools as institutions” influence the teaching of English Language Arts (NCTE/NCATE, 2012).

Authors

• Meghan E. Barnes, University of Georgia - Athens

• Paul Yoder, Truman State University