Recentering Community and Racial Justice in Grow Your Own Models

• In Event: Growing Your Own Teachers: Building Community-Focused Teacher Pipelines

Abstract

While Grow Your Own (GYO) programs are on the rise nationally, many of the foundational elements remain contested. In this paper, we reflect on the definitions provided of “community teachers” (Author, 2019; Murrell, 2000) within the context of GYO. We engage, problematize, and add dimension to the definitions provided. We also re-center the voices of local community leaders and teacher candidates in envisioning the community-based teacher (CT) of today.
GYO programs are unique in their intentionality and design to recruit parent and community leaders to enroll in teacher licensure programs. Emerging from community organizing work, GYO programs are also distinctive in their support of teacher candidates to continue to make commitments to their communities. GYO teachers are often prepared in environments that foster critical perspectives that disrupt anti-humanizing discourses, policies, and practices (Valenzuela, 2017), and without institutionalized policies and practices valuing local community ways of knowing and being from culturally sustaining standpoints, the promise of GYO programs may fall short (Author, 2022b). However, there has been a wide and “loose” range of definitions/constructs of community in the literature and practice, and there is no clear guidance on how programs guide community teachers.
We conducted a systematic review of literature in conversation with testimonials from the field. We surveyed approximately 200 sources from public (Google scholar) and subscription-based databases and narrowed these to 20 articles for our current discussion. We also collected testimonials from ten individuals who have been involved with GYO programs historically. Thus, our investigation combines a survey of literature pertaining to “community teachers” as well as reflections from practitioners in the field on how they operationalize community teachers within and beyond GYO programs.
Our primary source of evidence is scholarship on community teachers within Grow Your Own Programs. Articles were selected based on their relevance to our primary focus on how scholars define the term. Discussions with practitioners were culled for their experiential knowledge of community-based teaching from the field.
Within scholarship, the term community teacher is often used implicitly and explicitly to refer to a wide range of assumptions relating to teacher identities and practice. For example, CT is often used to refer to race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and age, as well as ideological commitments to social justice. The term has also hinted at commitments and actions for racial justice practice in education. However, the literature does not provide clear guidance on what constitutes community-based teachers and how programs can best develop and center them.
Our investigation advances the field by encouraging scholars and practitioners alike to move beyond assumed priorities and make more explicit commitments to social and racial justice within GYO program design and delivery. This would provide more clarity on recruitment, preparation, and support for community-based teacher candidates.

Authors

• David A. Castro, Grow Your Own Illinois
  Presenting Author

• Liza Pappas, Grow Your Own Illinois
  Non-Presenting Author