Community-based Teacher Education Research Articles

Community-Based Teacher Education: The Experiences of Teacher Candidates Learning Alongside Grassroots Youth Organizers

This community-based action research (CBAR) project acknowledges and disrupts existing systemic barriers to bring teacher candidates and grassroots youth organizers together through dialogue and reflection for transformative action. The practice of community-based pedagogy is described and utilized to demonstrate how critical understandings of community may imagine new ways of learning in conventional teacher education programs. This process enhances teacher candidates’ understanding and use of community-based pedagogy while supporting youth organizers in social justice initiatives within schools and communities. The findings, which draw from the CBAR project of a white, cis-gender woman who is a teacher educator-scholar-community organizer, provide implications for teacher educators aiming to foster collaborative partnerships with youth-centered grassroots community organizations and intergenerational community members. Teacher educators are invited to engage in paradigm shifts to curate community-based teacher education programs that are stimulated by and benefit local schools and communities.

Inuit Preservice Teachers: A Lesson in Community Learning

While some current teacher-education programs emphasize community-based learning, Inuit preservice teachers on Baffin Island already operate in a genial and collaborative atmosphere. Within these strong Arctic communities three important conditions frequently emerge in Inuit teacher education programs. First, Inuit preservice teachers tend to use a variety of learning approaches; second, the novice teachers typically create collaborative activities; and third, the Northern teachers tend to emerge from the isolation of classrooms to include more natural learning environments. My hope in this essay, is that Inuit teacher ideas about community-based teacher education, might extend to our Southern odyssey about learning and teaching within a community setting.

Preparing Teachers for Diversity: A Literature Review and Implications from Community-Based Teacher Education

This study reviewed current issues in preparing qualified teachers for increasing diverse student populations in the U.S. and in other multicultural and multiethnic countries. Based on the framework of community-based and multicultural teacher education, this literature review paper analyzed issues and problems existed in the current curriculum, content, and practicum in traditional teacher education programs in addressing cultural knowledge and competence of preparing pre-service teachers in a multicultural society. Drawing from implications from community-based teacher education, this paper proposed several suggested strategies to reform traditional teacher education programs to meet the needs from multicultural and multiracial student populations and instructional context.

“Into the Realm of the Politically Incorrect”: Intercultural Encounters in a Service-Learning Program

Now more than ever, teachers of world languages are encouraged to become intercultural mediators in their communities and classrooms. This study describes the impact of an innovative community-based teacher education program for developing participants' interculturality. Building on narrative methods of investigation, we explore the potential of community-based service-learning as a social space in which participants learn to recognize and mediate worldviews. The data come primarily from field observations and pre-service teachers’ journaled reflections. We illustrate our findings through a series of narratives that serve as a frame for locating cultural recognition and learning.

Community-Based Urban Teacher Education: Theoretical Frameworks and Practical Considerations for Developing Promising Practices

Traditional campus-based teacher education programs, located on college or university campuses, have been criticized for being removed from the “real world” of community life, and a number of programs have moved directly into urban communities in order for preservice teachers to become immersed in the life of the community. This article describes common theoretical frameworks and practical considerations for developing community-based urban teacher education programs and presents four programs that exemplify how community-based teacher education programs prepare future teachers to teach within the context of a community's cultural life. The article discusses theoretical frameworks of culturally relevant pedagogy, funds of knowledge, community cultural wealth, communities of practice, and the community teacher. It then raises several practical considerations that need to be addressed when preparing to initiate or reposition teacher education programs directly within the community: how much of the program should be located directly in the community, where should it be located, who should be the instructors, and who should participate in the decision-making process for the program. Finally, the four exemplary community-based programs presented exemplify how teacher education programs can prepare preservice teachers become community-embedded teachers.

Teaching Bodies in Place

Background/Context This piece draws on literature in justice-oriented teacher education, feminist pedagogy, and postmodern notions of bodies and place to make sense of data generated from a three-year study of an undergraduate teacher education course. A feminist lens was used to engage a body- and place-focused pedagogy that aimed to engage students in recognizing themselves as full-bodied and cultured beings who can work to better understand and expand their perceptions of themselves and others in place. Purpose The authors argue that postmodern theories of bodies and place can provide complex insights for both theorizing and practicing teacher education. Readers have the opportunity to experience alternative community-based teacher education practice through a graphic presentation and consider both the theoretical and practice implications in the broader field of education. Research Design This three-year study is an arts-based qualitative inquiry into the experiences of a course where feminist and postmodern notions of bodies and place informed the pedagogical decision-making of their professor (Stephanie Jones). Data were generated across three years and those focused specifically on or around the community bus ride were used to ask questions about how bodies and places interact with one another to produce sense-making about people, places, and the purposes of education. As part of the inquiry, Stephanie produced visual images in comics-form presenting pedagogical interactions and experiences that illuminated theoretical insights and then engaged Jim in conversations and sketch-sharing about theory and practice related to the data and how it was experienced in real-time by Stephanie. After numerous conversations looking over each panel and analytical discussions about bodies, place, and pedagogies as they were produced on the page and multiple revisions of both images and print text, Stephanie and Jim settled on the graphic production published here as both a representation of the research and a provocation for reimagining teacher education practice and scholarship. Conclusions The study is an example of how pedagogies informed by theoretical understandings of bodies and place can produce practices that help teacher education students recognize their bodies as central sites for critical change inside and outside institutions. Tending to, documenting, and discussing their bodily-ways-of-being in different places and how bodies/places produce perceptions of others were powerful practices that helped students think deeply about power and their roles as future teachers.

Programa de fortalecimiento de capacidades: reflections on a case study of community-based teacher education set in rural northern Peru

This article explores distinctive features of a 5-year international education development project set in rural northern Peru (PROMEB, the Proyecto de Mejoramiento de la Educacion Basica). Grounded within a partnership between teacher educators from Peru, Mexico and Canada, and rural Peruvian teachers, students and their communities, we offer reflections on a teacher education initiative which sought to support action-orientated inquiries as a mechanism for school/community development. Set against a background of poverty, hunger, isolation and an “educational crisis”, we outline our pedagogy and describe two projects. We then reflect on the influences of our engagements and on associated tensions and ambiguities in our methods. We hope that such discussions might offer insights for others involved in international school/community development projects of this type.

Toward a Collaborative Praxis of Multiple Literacies

Margie (Margaret Gallego) and I (Sam-or Sandra Hollingsworth) are collaborative colleagues and good friends. Margie is a Latina woman who, brought up in mainstream schools in Arizona, was surprised to discover that she had a special gift for Spanish discourse in high school. I am a Caucasian woman, born in the South and raised in part in Europe, who was surprised to discover a special attraction to feminist discourse as a new professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Our life stories connected in East Lansing, Michigan, where-sitting on the carpeted, hardwood floors of my home in the late afternoon autumn sun five years ago-we found that we. both had hopes of creating a community-based teacher education partnership for urban schools in Lansing's Latino community. We saw the project as an example of a critical praxis-or the dialectical relationship between thought and action/subjectivity and objectivity/theory and practice (Freire 1972; Weiner 1994)-intended to make literacy opportunities in schools more sociallyjust. Although the plan did not go as we had hoped, we learned quite a bit about the dimensions of collaboration and praxis to reform urban schools for literacies-a term we initiated that afternoon in East Lansing in our attempt to frame our collaboration. The major intent of this article is to define and elaborate a nested set of multiple literacies that have been useful for our work as teachers, women, and scholars with personal and professional concerns for social justice. Through a critical exploration of the theoretical and personal experiential perspectives that inform our views of literacy and through the use of a case example of the failure of our work, we hope to give energy and direction to future conversations about the centrality of literacy in school reform efforts. One important comment about authorship before we begin: as I have already indicated, this article grew out of conversations and contemplations about our work together as collaborative colleagues. I (Sam Hollings-