Remapping Power Relations in Teacher Development: Centering Community and Reimagining the Community Teacher

• In Event: Reimagining the Educator Pipeline: Strengths-Based Approaches to Studying Teacher Preparation, Recruitment, Diversity, and Retention

Abstract

There is a paucity of conceptual scholarship on community teacher development initiatives that prepare nontraditional community members to become teachers and are designed to eradicate inequity in education systems (Author et al, 2019; Toshalis, 2014). An intersectional framework allows for analyzing community teacher development initiatives with critical equity lenses to engage in a radical reimagining of teacher development systems. This paper explores how the field’s nascent understanding of growing community teachers from nontraditional backgrounds can be advanced by utilizing core intersectionality constructs to interrogate historical and contemporary preparation approaches and consider a responsive methodology for nurturing community teacher development initiatives.

A critical conceptualization of community teacher development grounded in intersectional concepts of relationality, context, social inequity, complexity, social justice, and power (Collins & Bilge, 2016) offers a way of sense making a radical reimagining of teacher development. These constructs were applied to examine historical and contemporary cases of community teacher development initiatives. Specifically, community teacher development initiatives were investigated through a case analysis of the community teacher as (a) recruited from among community members in the design of New Careers for the Poor (Dunning, 2018), (b) transplanted from outside the community in the case of the National Teacher Corps (Eckert, 2011), and (c) prepared in traditional teacher education programs through community engagement (Skinner, Garreton, & Schultz, 2011; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016). A critical intersectional analysis of community teacher approaches in these cases surfaced the following themes:
1. Community teacher development places community at the center, situates community as the primary source of power, and establishes open and reciprocal relationships that modulate power dynamics.
2. Community teacher development creates equitable policies and regulations that expand access and eradicate practices that result in community disenfranchisement.
3. Community teacher development requires responsive program designs through the engagement of local community epistemologies, school-based teacher educators, and embedding culturally sustaining learning in the community.

Undergirding these themes is the recognition that communities will differ across race, class, language, and other geographic and social markers, and these distinctions will significantly influence the program formation. As such, community teacher development initiatives could be cultivated via research practitioner partnerships (RPP) to ensure the strengths and desires of the community are centered in the design and implementation. Taking an intersectional stance, through a co-design and solidarity process (Ishimaru, Bang, Valladares, Nolan, Tavares, Rajendran, & Chang, 2019), the community can be positioned to grapple with the localized complexity of power structures for nontraditional teacher pools, the sociopolitical context of inequity in teacher education, and create opportunities for teacher development systems to be iteratively refined at each stage of the design process. Cultivating innovation beyond the status quo requires the creation of space for a radical reimagining of teacher development. The intersectional framing of community teacher development can create possibilities for critical researchers concerned about working in solidarity with community to unearth new ways of thinking about expanding access to the profession, and ultimately, ensuring responsive and rigorous educational experiences for all students.

Author

• Conra D. Gist, University of Houston