I've Got Your Back! the Importance of Care in Student Teaching in Urban Environments

Abstract

Research has found that the use of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) can improve academic outcomes for students in urban environments. As teacher educators, we are driven by such findings to understand how to best prepare teacher education students to enact CRP. The Elementary Education department in our university offers an urban immersive program that is meant to prepare students to engage in CRP and work successfully with children from a variety of backgrounds. To investigate what helped students in our program successfully enact CRP, we conducted a series of interviews after they completed the program. While we found that not all of our students enacted CRP, we discovered that our participants valued feeling cared for, and we utilized Nel Noddings’ ethic of care to understand how that care helps our preservice teachers (PSTs) care for their students in a way that could lead to the creation of culturally relevant lessons.