Reflections from ‘Near Peers’ Assisting a Summer ‘Bridge’ Course for New Preservice Teacher Scholarship Recipients

• In Event: Lessons From an Encompassing Teacher Preparation/Diversification Project

Abstract

As Ingersoll et al. (2021) note, even as American teaching remains overwhelmingly White, the field is attempting to diversify. While efforts to promote diversity vary, there is an emergent literature that examines the 3’Rs—recruitment, retention, and rhetoric (Herrera & Holmes, 2015)—that pertain to the preparation of teachers from diverse backgrounds, particularly to first-generation students and students from backgrounds that were historically not central to the design logic of predominantly White institutions (PWIs). That literature describes a welcome range of programs, but in our analysis it does not describe a prospective role for ‘near peers’, i.e., already enrolled preservice teacher educators in the third and fourth years of university who lived with and took classes with newly arriving scholarship recipients in a summer ‘bridge’ program.
Using memos recorded by ‘near peers’ before, during, and after the summer bridge program and considering feedback from 15 new scholarship recipients about their experiences with the near peers, this paper reflects on whether/how the ‘near peer’ role contributed to the favorable ‘onboarding’ of the arriving scholarship students. Like the YPAR-focused paper that is also part of this session, this paper captures student voice (in this case the voices of four undergraduate preservice teachers) as they describe their experience and make recommendations regarding what components of the ‘near peer’ role should be preserved, or tweaked, or substantially revised of eliminated. This paper doubles as a chance to engage undergraduates in design research (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) and to introduce them to AERA.

Authors

• Jenny Castor, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Amanda Morales, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Lu Min, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Cassandra Rodriguez, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Isela Tercero, University of Nebraska - Lincoln