The Changing Roles of the Teacher Educator in Community-Engaged Teacher Preparation

• In Event: Community-Engaged Teacher Preparation: Issues and Insights From Teacher Educators

Abstract

Objectives

This paper explores the changing role of the teacher educator within a community-engaged program in which undergraduate students took a semester of coursework in a working-class African American neighborhood. Our goal was to prepare teachers committed to understanding the context in which they teach and look to the wisdom, history, and cultural resources of the community to support their teaching. We asked: What roles did we, as university-based teacher educators, take on in a community-engaged teacher education setting?

Theoretical Framework
Our program is theoretically grounded in the concept of the community teacher (Murrell, 2001). We also draw on community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2000), both of which highlight the ways that knowledge comes from many sources.

Methods & Data Sources
We analyzed our practitioner researcher journals (Lytle & Cochran-Smith, 2009), teaching notes, and artifacts of practice (i.e. meeting agendas) to understand the various roles that we took on as teacher educators. During the semester, our teaching team met regularly to consider issues of practice. Later, the two authors met to analyze our work by noting critical incidents.


Results
When we create new contexts for preservice teachers to learn experientially in communities, there are different roles for teacher educators.

Convener & Co-Creator: Rather than sharing content, we created spaces where students could learn from community members. We organized speaker panels, community mentoring events (e.g., game night, bowling), and trips to local organizations in collaboration with the principal and an advisory group of teachers, community members, and K-8 students.

Model & Guide: We wanted to build authentic, trusting, and mutually beneficial relationships with the school community, while acknowledging the historical patterns of universities exploiting low-income communities by extractive partnerships based on a savior framework. We took a listening stance towards the principal, families, and teachers about what they wanted the partnership to look like so that it could benefit their children. As we interacted with community members in front of our students - through warm greetings, expressions of respect and gratitude, asking about their children, asking how we could help - we modeled the kind of relationship-building we hoped our students would emulate with their students and families. We also guided them as they entered into community spaces through reflective dialogue.

Framer: We also found ourselves doing different kinds of framing work. For the preservice teachers, we framed the significance of the experiences they would encounter. For example, prior to an event at the local environmental center, we reminded them that one of the goals was to learn about resources located in the community. At our university, our framing came in the form of advocacy in meetings with deans and chairs to justify changes, such as rearranging schedules or getting financial support.
Significance

An increase of community-engaged teacher preparation programs requires not only a location shift, but role and paradigm shifts to improve our practice within these new contexts as we ask, What knowledge is important for teachers to learn? Who possesses that knowledge?

Authors

• Kathleen Riley, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

• Kathryn Solic, West Chester University of Pennsylvania