Centering Equity and Justice in a Community-Engaged Residency Program

• In Event: Teacher Residencies in California: Addressing Inequities and Promoting Change in Education in Rural and Urban Areas

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines an urban residency program in California that focuses on:
(1) infusing a collaborative, community-engaged, inclusive and integrated model for teacher education, and
(2) preparing teachers with a critical social justice lens who commit to legitimizing students’ rightful presence in their classrooms by building a culturally sustaining classroom culture

Perspective/Methods: Given the importance put on a critical social justice lens and building a culturally sustaining classroom culture, our emphasis is placed on on Critical Community Literacy, understood as community-engaged critical learning of/with/for the communities, including neighborhood(s) spaces and political & social struggles. Residents learn to “read and write {the word and the world} as part of the process of becoming conscious of one's experience as historically constructed within specific power relations" (Anderson & Irvine, 1993 p. 82). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017), when the cultural ways of being in communities of color are sustained rather than eradicated, serve as the framework for our program.

Data sources: We have engaged in multiple data collections using a Mixed Methodological Approach using both qualitative, our implementation of the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique used for monitoring and evaluating social change across our program via a participatory approach through survey data and interviews, as well as our RT 360, and annual survey and interviews.

Findings: Results related to our data sources garnered important information with which we have been able to systematically refer to for program improvement as well as in applying for subsequent grants. Some of the most critical results come in the way of the RT 360 where resident perspectives included responses such as, “The RT 360…provided me feedback that improved my preparation for teaching,” and “provided me feedback that will help make me a better teacher,” and “addresses the right areas for improving my capacity to teach,” and “the survey and debrief action planning made me reflect with more intensity about how to improve my teaching capacity,“ as well as, “it can improve the rapport between a resident and students.”

Results from the MSC technique shared that residents more so than typical student teachers, “Integrated culturally relevant instructional approaches in lessons more effectively, and “Addressed challenges to student learning in the school and community more effectively,” and were “more often connected to students’ interests to learning, and were “more often integrated students’ cultural practices and beliefs into lessons.” Finally, the annual survey and interviews demonstrated that Cohorts 6-9 demonstrated higher levels of Community Literacy than typical student teachers exhibiting a mean rating of 2.8 to 3.2, respectively, on a 4-point scale.

Significance: Feedback from residents in Cohorts 6-9 scored on average around 3.7 for coursework about social justice as well as community and family engagement. This feedback led us to consider ways in which we could more fully encompass our work in the program using a social justice lens to legitimizing students’ rightful presence in their classrooms by infusing a collaborative community-engaged inclusive and integrated model for teacher education.

Authors

• A.Dee Williams, California State University - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Kimberly A. Persiani, California State University - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author