Shifting Dominant Narratives: Valuing Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers Through Grow Your Own Programs

• In Event: The Epistemologies of Teachers of Color: Disrupting White-Centered Racial and Linguistic Hierarchies in Schooling

Abstract

Dominant narratives are pervasive, widely accepted, and influenced by those with the power and position to shape and color perception (Brown, Dilworth, & Brown, 2018). And when narratives of teacher development are steeped in whiteness (Sleeter, 2001; Sleeter, 2017), stories about who educators are, and the qualities they bring (or not) to the profession, have consequences for teachers’ lives. Educator preparation programs play an important role in shaping scholarly narratives through the program designs they develop for teachers (Feiman-Nemser, 2011). Milner and Howard (2013) utilized critical race theory to examine narratives in teacher education grounded in whiteness that must be challenged such as: a) a lack of teacher candidate and teacher diversity is not an issue; b) teacher educator diversity is irrelevant; c) best and brightest should teach; d) short-term commitment to teaching is acceptable; e) higher standardized test exams equates to better teachers; and f) curriculum should focus exclusively on subject area content.

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs, however, are not as commonplace in narratives regarding educator preparation (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Further, their program commitments to attract people of Color from the local school and community (Toshalis, 2014) to become teachers position them to challenge dominant narratives about who teachers are, how they are prepared, and what is most important for supporting their growth (Author et al, 2019). As such, this paper explores a conceptual orientation of how the ontological experiences and epistemologies of TOCIT can be valued in GYO programs, providing a counternarrative to program designs that often render the presence of TOCIT invisible and inconsequential.

Using the dominant narratives from Milner and Howard (2013) as a heuristic device, I engaged in a critical analysis of the extant research and aspirational literature on GYO programs, to unpack the ways in which the ontological experiences and epistemologies of TOCIT may be centered in GYO program designs. In contrast to dominant narratives of whiteness in teacher education, the critical analysis revealed that GYO programs have the potential to value the ontological experiences and epistemologies of marginalized teacher pools by: (a) valuing an intersectional view of ethnoracial diversity; (b) valuing resiliency as an important teacher characteristic; (c) valuing multiple modes of assessment as evidence of teacher learning; (d) valuing ethnoracially diverse and community-based teacher educators; (e) valuing culturally sustaining pedagogy and place-based learning; and (f) valuing local community school commitment.

If GYO programs are committed to racial and educational justice in teacher development systems, then dominant narratives in teacher education about who teachers are, especially when considering the nontraditional GYO teacher pools (e.g., local community activists, neighborhood coaches, paraprofessionals, crossing guards, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers) that may enter the profession, must be challenged. Shifting dominant narratives to contemplate how GYO programs with racial and educational justice commitments value the knowledge systems of TOCIT can potentially create space for movement-oriented discourse on reimagining policies and practices that better support access to the profession for nontraditional TOCIT.

Author

• Conra D. Gist, University of Houston