Transforming Teacher Education by Integrating the Funds of Knowledge of Teachers of Color

• In Event: 35.042 - "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing": Narratives of Teacher Educators Transforming Practices for Social Justice

Abstract

Purposes
“Diversifying” the public school teaching force is often framed as a demographic and democratic imperative (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012), given the racial and cultural mismatch between the predominantly white teaching force and growing population of students of color (U.S. Department of Education, 2013). While teacher education can be key in challenging these trends (Petchauer & Mawhinney, 2017), it often is not. Instead, teacher educators prioritize the interest and needs of white educators, excluding the experiences of marginalized groups (Montecinos, 2004; Sleeter, 2001), and oftentimes perpetuating microaggressions against prospective teachers of color (TOCs) (Decuir-Gunby & Gunby, 2016), discrediting TOCs’ experiences as having significance to teaching practice (Kohli, 2009). Our paper challenges this dominant paradigm by considering: How can we (teacher educators) develop TOCs by drawing from TOCs’ funds of knowledge (FOK) (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992)?
Perspectives
This project draws on the asset-based frameworks of FOK and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005), which disrupt power dynamics in educational research and practice by highlighting traditionally marginalized students’ lived experiences and honoring culturally-embedded ways of knowing. Furthermore, CCW extends FOK and posits that communities of color possess knowledge and skills used to survive and resist various forms of aggression. This paper builds on this by considering how teacher education might benefit from prospective TOCs’ FOK and CCW as a means of transforming the overwhelming whiteness of teacher education.
Methods and Data Sources
This research employs “collective practitioner inquiry” (Galosy, 2014). As a research team, we systematically and intentionally inquired into our teacher education practices across three institutions, aiming to generate knowledge from the “inside” to transform practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). We aimed to prioritize our prospective TOCs’ FOK, generated shared research questions, then collaboratively (re-)designed each course. Throughout the project, we used reflective journaling to document our experiences as educators, while also using multimodal sources of data that emphasized TOCs’ voice, including written reflections and video assignments. Finally, we met twice monthly to discuss data and analyses methods.
Conclusions
Examining our explicit attempts to center the experiences of prospective TOCs has allowed us to consider how their FOK and CCW can drive our practice, and empower TOCs and education more broadly. We believe that promoting the success and sustainability of this work continues to be an arduous task for all teacher educators, but one that is not impossible if we are intentional about our practice. By modeling the practices we hope that prospective teachers will integrate in their work with K-12 students of color, our findings push back on the current discourse of an overwhelmingly white teaching force.
Significance
Given the overlap and divergences in our settings, identities, and contexts including demographics (our own and those of our institutions), university/program characteristics, and level of TOCs (undergraduate v. post-bac), this collaborative practitioner inquiry will be an important contribution that can be leveraged to address the critical issue of supporting more TOCs throughout the pipeline, in a way, democratizing evidence that can be used to inform teacher education practice.

Authors

• Christine Quince, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Sherry Lynn Deckman, Lehman College, CUNY

• Betina Hsieh, California State University - Long Beach

• Oscar Navarro, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo