Working to Create Community Connections That Matter

• In Event: Grow-Your-Own Programming in Bilingual Contexts: Engaging Stakeholders to Address Inequality in the Educational Pipeline

Abstract

Objective & Theoretical Framework
In an attempt to diversify the teaching force, school districts and teacher education programs are explicitly recruiting “homegrown” teachers of color to teach in their local communities by partnering with community-based organizations (Valenzuela, 2017). Unfortunately, teacher education-community partnerships have fallen short of valuing community members’ voice and knowledge bases in the preparation of teacher candidates (Lees, 2016). The purpose of this study was to examine a teacher education program’s effort to support Latinx bilingual teachers and students through a three-way community-based partnership between a local Latinx serving education foundation and a bilingual charter school organization.

We employ Vygotskian sociocultural theories of learning and language development (Vygotsky, 1978) and Critical Race Theory (CRT; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001) to guide our understanding of the community connections and partner engagement between the teacher education program and the community partners. The question guiding this study was How do community and teacher education program partners collaborate to advance a mutually beneficial relationship dedicated to meeting the needs of bilingual Latinx students?

Methods & Data Sources
This study took place within a teacher education program with an explicit social justice mission and specific mission to serve the local Latinx community. Wanting to immerse faculty and teacher candidates in the Latinx community, the program offered teacher education courses at a satellite campus shared with the Latinx serving education foundation’s high schools and elementary bilingual charter school partners in a heavily Latinx populated neighborhood. The close proximity to community partners and location within the Latinx community provided enhanced partnership opportunities and collaborations.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with university participants (e.g., teacher candidates, teacher education faculty) and community partners (e.g., foundation and school leaders, students, parents) to solicit their views on the partnership and issues related to Latinx teacher and student retention and success. In addition, we collected and analyzed program and partnership documents to understand the history of the partnership and transcribed and analyzed the interviews and field notes using emic coding. We also employed member-checks to verify our findings.

Results and Scholarly Significance
Preliminary findings show that select program faculty and community leaders took concrete steps to ensure a mutually beneficial partnership. For example, a program faculty member conducted research with the bilingual charter school, developed relationships with school parents and helped parents tap into their wealth of knowledge and abilities to support their children’s mathematical understandings. The bilingual program coordinator invited community teachers and parents to participate in the bilingual teacher preparation courses taught in Spanish and to serve as guest speakers and panelists on various topics related to bilingual and Latinx education. The community partners’ school leaders also served as guest speakers, opened their schools for teacher candidate field placements and in some instances, served as bilingual university field supervisors. This work is significant because it demonstrates the possibilities of teacher education-community partnerships grounded in a shared understanding of the value of the bilingual Latinx community’s voice and knowledge bases.

Authors

• Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica, Santa Clara University

• Kathleen Jablon Stoehr, Santa Clara University