Shared Commitments for Educators: Reclaiming the Public Good in Teacher Education

• In Event: Radical Reimaginings of Teacher Education for the Public Good

Abstract

What are the responsibilities and commitments of teacher education as a field? How can teacher education become answerable to the communities it serves? In this paper, the authors argue that it is the responsibility of teacher educators to commit to and foster justice and equity in and through teacher education as an imperative. Employing Freire’s (1970) approach to reading and transforming words and worlds, the authors engage in critically reading of the landscape of teacher education in the United States and explore how justice and answerability have been peripherally positioned in and by teacher education (Philip et al., 2018).
There is overwhelming evidence that pervasive and persistent patterns of mis-education, inequity, injustice, and educational malpractice continue to harm Black, Brown, and Indigenous students throughout the U.S. (Asante, 1991; Au, Brown, & Calderón, 2016; Author1 et al., 2017a; Author1 et al., 2017b; Woodson, 1933). Rather than the “clear and consistent definition of terms” (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005, p. 32) recommended by the American Educational Research Association Panel on Research and Teacher Education, the authors propose shared commitments grounded in transformative justice to ensure that teacher education programs and teacher educators commit to interrupting an unjust status quo. The authors argue that such shared commitments have the potential to offer teachers, students, and families a path toward equity and justice, as well as opportunities for educators to redress historical and current harm that continues to impact communities of color.
Leveraging a critical read of the literature related to the field of teacher education, the authors intentionally attended to how communities of color have been historically situated. The authors’ review (re)affirmed that teacher education is a field characterized by overwhelming Whiteness, which unveiled how teacher education programs and practices continue to marginalize the long histories and rich legacies of communities of color. Patterns found in a review of the literature unveil teacher education’s (1) epistemological Eurocentrism, which marginalizes intersectionally minoritized communities of color; and (2) dismissal of pedagogical practices emanating from the education of communities of color.
The ready response to discussions about the need to transform teacher education? “Hire more educators of color” or “get more students of color into teacher education programs” (Gay & Howard, 2000). Yet these responses disregard the two key features of teacher education that our review highlighted as problematic norms perpetuating injustice and re-producing racism in and through teacher education.
Though the authors noticed that much of the literature calls for the recruitment of more teachers of color, such narratives blame individuals and communities of color for not entering the teaching profession, an ahistoric but common perspective (Achinstein, Ogawa, Sexton, & Freitas, 2010; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Dillard, 1994; Kohli, 2009; Sleeter, 2001; Villegas, Strom, & Lucas, 2012; Zeichner, 2003). Siddle Walker (1996) has shown that such a consistent narrative thread tenaciously renders invisible the history of Black schools and Black educators in the U.S., for example, and their multiple contributions to the civil rights movement and to democracy itself.

Authors

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lawrence Torry Winn, University of California - Davis