Historical Mentors of Community Teaching: Looking Back for Our Journey Forward

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: The Urgency of the Past: Teaching History to Respond to the Politics of the Present

Abstract

Objectives: This paper is situated within a scholarly conversation about preparing teacher candidates (TCs) to be community teachers: teachers who “draw on richly contextualized knowledge of culture, community, and identity in their professional work with children and families.” We believe that the present moment demands that teacher education make strong curricular link to the roots of community teaching; to generations of educators who have fought against injustices in public schools while creating vibrant, critical, and humane classrooms and relationships.

Perspectives: In this paper, we describe and analyze our use of historical cases with TCs as a tool in developing ‘richly contextualized knowledge’ and an explicit political identity. We ask two primary questions. First: what features of historical cases have the potential to deepen our understanding of community teaching? Second: what is the significance of these historical cases for contemporary community teaching?

While the literature on community teaching acknowledges its origins in Black Reconstruction, Dewey-inspired ‘progressive schools,’ and/or Civil Rights-era freedom schools, no scholarship has yet examined how cases of community teaching in these historical contexts might be used as pedagogical tools within teacher education programs or courses promoting community teaching.

Methods: This is a descriptive and analytic paper of a number of pedagogical materials the authors have used in foundations courses within several teacher education programs over the past five years.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: In this paper, we describe and analyze six historical cases used with TCs: four derived from journal articles/book chapters; one from an archive collection; and another from an online digital archive. These historical cases all have some connection to the concept of “community teaching” and provide a linkage to students of how educators throughout history have addressed their own political and social contexts.

Conclusions/warrants: Regarding our first question, we argue that successful historical cases of community teaching share three features. They
1. challenge ‘traditional’ historical narratives of time and place;
2. contain a strong situated biography of an educator (which we dub “an historical mentor”);
3. locate persisting educational problems in a particular historical and geographic context.

In response to our second question, we contend that the examination of historical cases of community teaching can have three impacts. They can
1. jar us into rethinking the past, the purposes of schooling, and the role of educators, students, and communities
2. sharpen our ability to identify and interpret the contextual forces that push and pull on teaching, learning, and schooling;
3. center our own work in a tradition of community teaching.

Significance: We argue that historical mentors serve as guideposts for troubling times. They also contribute to the concept of community teaching and its positive impact on public schools, students, families, and communities.

Authors

• Kate Napolitan, Evergreen State College

• Michael Bowman, Iowa State University