Navigating Teacher Education in Complex and Uncertain Times

Connecting Communities of Practice in a Borderless World

Carmen I. Mercado

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350198784
• eBook ISBN: 9781350069091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Carmen I. Mercado draws on four decades of seminal research and theory on how American children, who come from homes where languages other than English are spoken, learn to read and to write in school to reveal aspects of locally-responsive planning and adaptations that should be central to any teacher education program that hopes to serve its unique, local population base responsibly. Mercado uses a range of theoretical lenses particularly those surrounding critical theory, the approach designed to deconstruct power relationships in society, to capture and explain the complexities of the teaching-learning process making visible institutional, social and political influences clear. She explores an extensive collection of tools and resources for teaching to explore how educators can inform their thinking and shape their own practices to broaden access to people and resources, and to influence classroom instruction as school populations becomes increasingly diverse on a global scale through immigration. Mercado also shows how self-study has been a key aspect of her program's evolution, suggesting that teacher education should be informed by teacher educators' own investigations into their own programs and processes; that each teacher educator ought to be an active reinventor of her own program, based on reflection on current data. Mercado sensitively draws together the technical and emotional dimensions of learning to teach, acknowledging that critical theory can bring up deep, often uncomfortable feelings of anger, guilt, resentment, and other responses to unfair conditions. However, since schools are designed as places of opportunity, facing these responses is essential at a time with the feelings of antagonism that characterize the present-day world and its conflictual social groups. Mercado offers the opportunity to address these facets of educational process in compelling, informed ways.

Part One

Beginnings

1

Introduction

Over the past three decades we have lived through changes many times more rapid and of far greater magnitude than those experienced by any previous generation. We live in an interconnected world, characterized by an explosion of information through new learning technologies and the mass migration of people, ideas, and materials within and across national boundaries (Kellner, 2000; Kress, 1996; Pea, 2009). The global migration of families with children, escaping from political turmoil and desperately searching for work, increases an already diverse student population in major cities around the world. This trend is particularly evident in New York City, the only global city in the western hemisphere where children from the major regions of the world attend schools, in the largest and most segregated public school system in the nation (Kucsera & Orfield, March 2014). This diversity is predominantly hemispheric, primarily from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America, and also from Haiti. Asia is the second largest source of diversity in New York City.

Locally, this linguistic, cultural, religious, and experiential diversity also includes American citizens from national origin minority groups originating in North America, Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and Asia who, together with recent immigrants, forge new transnational communities. Through extended contact and exchange, children who live in homes where Spanish and other languages are central to intergenerational family life develop complex cultural identities and create new forms of communicating in English, Spanish, and other languages. However, this type of contact is less common among children and families who reside in relatively homogeneous ethnic enclaves, as many Asian families do, and also Orthodox Hassidic Jews. Unlike the first immigrant communities in the city, these transnational or diasporic communities maintain productive and emotional ties with their country of origin as they sustain, adapt, or create new cultural practices in multiple locations (Brittain, 2009; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001), with assistance from broadcast and electronic media.

Although this complex diversity also gives rise to a small number of publicly funded dual language programs in English and Spanish, Haitian Creole or Chinese, the majority of children find themselves in classrooms with new and inexperienced teachers recruited, since the turn of the twenty-first century, through alternative, expedited pathways into teaching. The New York City Teaching Fellows Program is by far the largest, and Teach for America the older of the two. Shaped by the influence of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002, both recruit and prepare accomplished adults or elite college graduates with high grade point averages (GPAs) from prestigious universities and majors that correspond to local needs. These recruits commit to teaching in high poverty schools for no fewer than two years, but most do not commit to teaching beyond a few years. Consequently, many are not adequately prepared to understand the diversity they will likely encounter in the classroom, and how it informs the teaching of the core content area of reading and language arts in English. Novices and even experienced educators may need assistance, because “the first essential of a good teaching and learning situation is the teacher’s knowledge of children” (The Board of Education of the City of New York, 1967–1968, p. 1).

From my early years as full-time faculty until retirement, I prepared pre- and in-service teachers to address the needs of children from Latinx communities through alternative instructional approaches. My specific focus was on teaching reading and language arts in childhood education, arguably the most important area of the curriculum. This experience exposed me to an international scholarship, predominantly from Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Brazil, and South Africa (in that order). As I discovered, scholars and educators in radically different contexts shared common concerns over how best to address the needs of children from minoritized populations (or ethnic minorities) in locally appropriate ways. Still memorable is Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s book Teacher, about her approach to teaching five-year-old Maori children in New Zealand, as they made the transition from the language and culture of the home to the language and culture of the school. In course notes from 1989, I wrote: “The method of teaching any subject in a Maori infant room may be seen as a plank in a bridge from one culture to another” or one language to another. Similarly, the “shared book experience” that Don Holdaway (1979, 1982) and colleagues developed as preparation for teaching reading in schools in New Zealand, remains fresh all these years later. The shared book experience eventually transformed into the “Interactive Read Aloud,” which is now a core practice in reading and writing instruction through the elementary school years.

Research and practice in the United States has a similar, though now largely forgotten, history dating back to the 1960s, when the federal government assumed an unprecedented role in formulating social policy to address the needs of U.S. citizens who were denied access to an education. Although education in the United States is the responsibility of each of its fifty states, access to instruction in a language a child is able to understand is a right that is protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Locally, these children were predominantly of Puerto Rican origin in classrooms with teachers who were unprepared to teach them, even though some participated in summer institutes held on the island, to learn about children’s language and culture.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968, the largest of a series of legislative initiatives over a ten-year period, led to experimentation with bilingual and culturally relevant instruction, the preparation of bilingual educators at all levels, curriculum on U.S. communities that are not well represented in our schoolbooks, and qualitative and mixed-methods studies that capture the experience of learning at home and in school by children and families who live in low-income communities. Some studies reveal that all children use legitimate reading and writing behaviors and practices in the informal setting of the home and community, even though these behaviors and practices remain undetected in school (Moll & Diaz, 1980; Moll, Estrada, Diaz & Lopes, 1980). Studies of effective instructional practices acknowledge children’s primary language is a resource for learning even when the official language of instruction is English. Instruction also promotes participation in culturally sensitive ways, through positive relational practices, collaborative learning, and informal assessments based on observation and analysis of student work (Diaz, Moll & Mehan, 1986; Tikunoff, 1985).

Other federal initiatives that addressed the needs of poor minoritized communities through teacher preparation include the National Institute for Advanced Study in Teaching Disadvantaged Youth, a Task Force of the National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) of 1965. The Task Force outlined a plan to prepare teachers for all children. In the first chapter of the resulting book, Teachers for the Real World, Othaniel Smith (1969) describes attributes of effective teachers of “disadvantaged youth” who live in impoverished communities (a summary appears in Chapter 4). Similarly, The Higher Education Act of 1965 led to the creation of the National Teacher Corps (NTC), a program that recruited graduates of liberal arts colleges and members of minority groups (Travieso, 1975, elaborates on this diversity). After eight weeks of training, interns spent two years engaged simultaneously in university study, work-study in the schools, and work in communities, that included afterschool recreation activities, home visits, and health programs. The nontraditional perspectives of corps members led to curricular innovation in individual instruction and multicultural education. In both name and deed, National Teacher Corps reflected the influence and spirit of the Peace Corps, and some describe it as a social reform movement.

Although comparisons between National Teacher Corps and Teach for America have been made, these programs are philosophically very different. Teach for America (TfA) is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1989 by an undergraduate of Princeton University, Wendy Kopp. In her early twenties, Kopp became TfA’s corporate executive officer, and shortly thereafter successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a teacher quality recruitment criteria of the NCLB bill (see Hess in Russo, 2012). Even with critiques of the preparation TfA recruits receive, and lacking solid evidence for the positive impact they were having in high poverty schools, in 2011 the program received a $100,000,000 endowment and the continued support of many wealthy donors. In 2007 TfA provided the template for preparing teachers in the global education reform movement.

The origin of these and other emerging pathways into teaching dates back to the 1980s when the federal government, under a new administration, shifted gears. This new policy context was shaped by an ideology that favored limiting the size of the federal government (also known as neoliberalism), and privatizing public services, including education, a move that resulted in underfunding of public education. These moves were justified by a misleading report issued by the presidential committee on the poor quality of public education, and the preparation of teachers (see comments by Harvey and Berliner in Valerie Strauss, April 2018). A Nation at Risk also recommended that colleges and universities adopt more rigorous and measurable standards, have higher expectations for academic performance, raise their admissions requirements, and engage master teachers in designing teacher preparation programs. In effect, the report was used as a mandate to refocus teacher preparation and instruction that was accessible to English language learners at a time when we were beginning to demonstrate the positive impact of bilingual instruction, an approach we re-invented from existing models to be locally appropriate, as I describe in Chapter 3.

Gradually the structures of support for minoritized communities that emerged from the social movements of the 1960s were methodically dismantled, as the federal government paved the way for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This was the same law that initially sponsored experimental bilingual and special alternative instructional programs for “Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.” NCLB introduced “Reading First” (see Chapter 5), a program that emphasized putting “proven methods” of early reading instruction in classrooms in high poverty schools, and allocated funds to states and local educational agencies to implement Reading First instruction and assessment. As a singular approach to learning to read in English, Reading First introduced new challenges to English learners through its emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics. English learners may not able to hear and distinguish the sounds that comprise individual words due to language differences and/or because ear infections are a common problem in poor communities, a problem that affects children’s auditory acuity.

However, coming at a time when investments in public education have been drastically reduced, and its privatization gains momentum, underfunded public schools do what is necessary to access supplementary funds regardless of funding requirements. The multi-billion dollar publishing industry is prepared to respond to the needs of school districts for instructional materials that include costly curriculum packages, textbook collections of stories, and test prep materials keyed to program requirements and to the standardized tests used to track student progress.

This is the reality that I confronted in 2008 after more than two decades as a college-based literacy educator experimenting with different approaches and practices. B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Part One Beginnings
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Becoming an Educator
• Part Two Learning to Teach
• 3 Learning to Teach Children
• 4 Becoming a Teaching Educator
• Part Three Teaching to Learn in Community
• 5 Teaching to Learn in a Changing Policy Context
• 6 Teaching as Learning in Practice
• 7 On Reimagining Educator Preparation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright