Moving From Cultural Deficits to Cultural Strengths: Addressing Deficit Ideologies Among Preservice Educators Through Community-Based Education

• In Event: Community-Based Teaching and Teacher Education as Transformative Praxis for Educational Equity

Abstract

Objectives
Community-based education is a method of connecting future educators with the communities they will serve as a way to develop cultural understanding and responsive pedagogy. Furthermore, community-based education has been argued as a way to shape some of the deficit views preservice educators might have of diverse communities (Lowenstein et al., 2018; Noel, 2016; Yuan, 2018). This study examines how undergraduate students taking a community-based education course make sense of their experience working in a culturally and linguistically diverse community. In particular, this paper examines the students’ beliefs and knowledge of the community, including the deficit-based views employed by the students, and how these beliefs and knowledge evolve over the duration of the course. The paper also describes the context of the community-based education course and examines the opportunities and challenges of community-based education towards improving the cultural competencies and dispositions of future educators.

Theory
Community-based education is a broad term for a range of educational experiences that create opportunities for future educators to better understand how to support the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse youth (McInerney et al., 2011). Of particular interest in this paper is the use of community-based educational experiences as attempts to address deficit views that future educators might have of culturally diverse communities. To do so a community-based experience might draw upon asset based theoretical approaches to support student’s understanding of the community (Noel, 2016) including identifying community strengths, local funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth (Gonzalez & Moll, 2002; Lowenstein et al., 2018; McDonald et al., 2011; Yosso, 2005; Yuan, 2018). Furthermore, community-based educational experiences can also serve as a critical pedagogy where preservice educators can develop a critical reading of the world, reflect on their biases and deficit thinking, as well as implications for professional practice (Lowenstein et al., 2018; McInerney et al., 2011).

Methods
The data presented in this paper comes from a qualitative study examining the experiences and meaning making of 13 undergraduate students participating in a community-based course held at an after-school program in southern California. Data sources include visual and narrative data from a photovoice project students completed at the beginning of the semester as part of a community walk activity assignment designed to capture the students’ initial beliefs about the culture, language, and community of the youth. Additional data sources included the final written reports produced by the students at the conclusion of the course which described their new understanding of the community, including the community cultural knowledge, structural inequalities, and opportunity gaps that exist for the community.
Results
The study findings include students’ initial understandings and beliefs about the community’s strengths and challenges, which were often rooted in deficit discourses. Additionally, findings from the students’ final reports point to their emerging understanding of the community cultural wealth, language practices, and their own positionality as future educators. Implications and recommendations for addressing racial inequalities and creating new narratives through community-based teacher education will be discussed.

Author

• Quaylan Allen, Chapman University