"Whose Job Is It Anyways?" Making Sense of Racial Equity Work in Teacher Education

• In Event: No More "Justice Lip Service": An Improvement Science Approach to Racial Equity in Teacher Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to engage symposia attendees in a dialogue about the beliefs and attitudes about what’s needed and who’s needed to do racial equity work in teacher education programs. As a part of a larger initiative to create a network improvement community (NIC) with three institutions of higher education (IHEs), teacher education faculty were asked to participate in focus groups or interviews to learn more about their experiences in teaching content/courses related to racial equity and social justice and the extent to which professional learning opportunities supported changes in their classrooms. Thirty-two faculty across three IHEs participated in the study yielding important and illuminating findings.

Participants indicated that opportunities to learn about racial equity and social justice are not systemic and accessed equally by all students. These opportunities are typically dependent upon which faculty are teaching the sections of required courses in which students are enrolled and the electives that students choose. One faculty member described the extent to which candidates are prepared well to practice racial equity and social justice as “happenstance.”

Further, faculty suggested that stronger connections are needed between the multiculturalism or human relations course that candidates are required to take early in their teacher education programs and the discipline-specific methods courses that come later in their programs. Some identified an epistemological disconnect between theory or research and teaching practice, and others noted the disconnects between what students hear in their discipline departments and their efforts to infuse racial equity content into their methods courses.

There are significant concerns about the disconnects between university efforts to promote racial equity and social justice in teacher education and the field placements and/or teaching positions in which candidates begin their careers. Some noted that candidates observe inequities or even regress in their field placements; another noted that the university needs to pay more attention to what happens to novice teachers who do not have tenure protection. A number of faculty noted that teacher education programs need to do more to support the selection and growth of mentor teachers and university supervisors and actively recruit more mentor teachers of Color.

There is a critical need to create objective measures to capture candidate—and host/mentor teacher—capacity to practice racial equity and social justice. Faculty cited anecdotal examples of changes they are seeing in students, but there are few, if any, measures that teacher educators can use to determine whether candidates are developing more sophisticated understandings of race, racism, and systems of oppression and exhibiting the abilities to apply these understandings in classrooms. Such measures could also be used to enhance selection of teachers who host field placements.

Findings highlighted in this paper help to paint a fuller picture of the context in which NIC partners are operating as they work toward programmatic changes that will prepare future educators for racial justice work in K-12 schools.

Authors

• Laurie D Inman, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Ed Curammeng, California State University - Dominguez Hills