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Evolving Partnerships:
Universities, Urban Schools, and Community Organizations in Teacher Education
Gail Burnaford, Northwestern University, John Kretzmann, Northwestern University, Charles Meyers, Facing History and Ourselves
2003
American Educational Research Association
Chicago, IL
Gail Burnaford –
John Kretzmann –
Charles Meyers -
Introduction
The theme of this year’s AERA is Accountability for Educational Quality: Shared Responsibility. The theme evokes a particular reaction as we view the dilemmas of educating a new generation of teachers – one that remains typically white, female, and middle class - who will find themselves teaching in diverse, multilingual, multiethnic communities in which they do not live. Our response has been to rethink the term ‘shared responsibility’ and to assess what it is that we are doing and not doing at the university level to design our programs as ‘shared responsibilities.’ We were challenged to consider the issue of who engages in teacher preparation, for what purposes, and to what ends.
The question that logically follows is, shared responsibility with whom? We have come to understand that communities and community organizations can become a part of the education of future teachers – if the agenda for doing so is a mutual one and if teacher candidates can contribute to the welfare of the organizations while learning how best to work in neighborhood schools.
Nationally, the INTASC principles/standards regarding community suggest that this approach to shared responsibility is both beneficial and essential, particularly for university programs that work directly with urban schools. Peter Murrell’s work, articulates the notion of ‘the community teacher’ as a profile of what we need to develop in educational professionals (2001). NortheasternUniversity’s undergraduate Secondary Teaching program has begun to define partnerships that contribute to the development of such a community teacher. These partnerships are both within the university and in the communities that surround it.
At NorthwesternUniversity, we have taken the challenge embedded in the INTASC standards, coupled with our university’s commitment to community development, collaboration, and engagement in urban schools, to design the first step in a process that engages our undergraduates in learning to teach in and through community interaction.
In my section of the paper, I will describe the guided internship and work in a course called Introduction to Schooling in Communities from the perspective of the School of Education and Social Policy’s undergraduate teacher education program. I will discuss what was missing in our rather conservative approach to teacher education, what was the impetus for engaging in a new approach, and what we hope to move toward in the next five years. I will also raise the issues that are problematic in suggesting that teachers can learn about teaching in experiences outside the scope of traditional classrooms and the research base that continues to inform our work.
John (Jody) Kretzmann is the co-instructor, with Gail Burnaford of the Schooling in Communities course we are describing. For more than three decades, Kretzmann has worked with urban neighborhoods. He has been a community organizer and developer, and has consulted and conducted research with scores of community-based organizations across North America and beyond. For the last 15 years, his community-focused policy work has been centered at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research, where he founded and co-directs the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute. The ABCD Institute builds on the analyses and strategies outlined in his popular book Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, (with John L. McKnight), and works to discover and analyze the ongoing community building inventions which continue to emerge in diverse settings across the globe.
The very fact that we have an education course in the School of Education and Social Policy that integrates Dr. Kretzmann’s prospective, not just for social policy majors, but also for teacher education students, speaks to the commitment that the school has to interdisciplinary education with a purpose. In Jody’s presentation, he will describe the types of community partnerships we have been exploring over the past two years and how his own work intersects with the goals of the teacher education program. He will describe the notion of asset-based community development as a core principle of our program that shapes our students’ views of the schools and the students they will encounter during their university program and future teaching careers.
The third perspective is offered by Chuck Meyers, Senior Program Associate for the professional development organization, Facing History and Ourselves. Facing History and Ourselves ( uses the historical case study of the Holocaust to explore the intricacies of democracy. By concentrating upon such themes as identity and community, inclusion and exclusion, judgment and legacy, Facing History forges a connection between the past and the present, between the lives of students and the greater world around them. Through the study of history, Facing History suggests that knowing is the key to doing and that participation is a critical element of democratic behavior.
Chuck is an experienced classroom teacher who believes in the need to connect ongoing professional development of teachers with pre-service teacher education. He will describe how content-based experiences can be mutually satisfying and enriching when pre-service and experienced teachers learn and plan together – with help from a community partner. He will also describe what it may take for a professional development organization to successfully partner with a university. While Facing History is not necessarily typical of the community organizations that we have identified as partners, in that our students do not work directly with children or young people in Facing History internships, it is with Facing History and Chuck Meyers that we have truly conceptualized what could happen in meaningful and rich community partnerships.
Finally, we will briefly discuss our findings regarding student response to the approach and perspective offered by a community teaching model for teacher preparation.
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TEACHER EDUCATION PERSPECTIVE
Murrell’s text on community teaching begins with several statistics. He notes that the nation’s public schools will have to hire 2.5 million teachers over the next decade – about the same as the numbers now working (2.8 million) (Murrell, 2001, p. 11). Students in those schools, he continues, are increasingly culturally diverse and non-White, and the population of teacher candidates is increasingly monocultural and White. Our university teacher candidate profile is consistent with that description of the teacher population; we work with schools in metropolitan Chicago that reflect the diversity indicated by this national view.
By some accounts, of the students who enter four-year teacher education programs, only 50-70 percent actually graduate with degrees in education; of these, only 60 to 70 percent enter teaching the year after graduation; and only about 70 percent are still teaching three to five years later (NCTAF, 1996). Research seems to indicate that five year programs or master’s degree teacher certification programs have more success with teacher preparation in that candidates tend to enter and stay in teaching longer than their four-year program peers (Andrew and Schwab, 1995). At our institution, we are addressing this challenge and examining what undergraduate teacher education might look like if it addresses the particular developmental needs of this student population, the current demographics of the teaching profession, and the needs of partner urban schools.
Can teacher education be accomplished well in a four-year undergraduate program? Should it even be attempted? The enormous popularity of the Teach for America program would indicate that there is tremendous appeal in teaching among well-educated, passionate young people…for the short term. Darling-Hammond has, however, critiqued the program for its failure to fully prepare teachers for urban classrooms (1994). She writes: It is clear from the evidence that TFA is bad policy and bad education. It is bad for the recruits because they are ill-prepared. …It is bad for the schools in which they teach because the recruits often create staffing disruptions and drain on school resources….It is bad for the children because they are often poorly taught (p. 33).
Many of the undergraduates at our institution aretarget candidates for Teach for America. What does the School of Education and Social Policy have to offer that students cannot find in such a program? How can we design a program that appeals to such undergraduates and also prepares them for teaching in diverse schools? What kinds of experiences belong in such a program at the undergraduate level? That has been our challenge.
Within the field of teacher education, we are often encumbered by traditional systems for preparing future teachers that are enormously difficult to dismantle. We are not the only university in town and schools are very accustomed to juggling multiple student interns from several higher education institutions. They are not expected to be able to adjust their schedules and experiences in any radical way to ensure that our university’s teacher candidates have a particular kind of experience in their school community. For some of our partner schools, it is challenge enough to remember how many weeks a teacher candidate will be there and whether the experience is a practicum or a student teaching assignment.
While some universities have been successful in establishing professional development schools as an alternative to mass placement, even professional development schools have offered little in the way of meaningful frameworks for looking deeply at partnerships. They are structures that serve teacher education, but they do not begin to offer the necessary theoretical perspective on partnering on multiple levels, for multiple purposes, and with a variety of constituencies in and outside of the school building (Murrell, 1998).
To provide a bit more context, teacher education programs typically find it extremely difficult to challenge the norms that candidates hold fast from their own considerable experiences as students. These experiences reinforce what Ball and Cohen have termed the ‘conservatism of practice’ (1999) that is their only frame of reference for fashioning their own identities as teachers.
School districts and their communities do not exist independently of one another, even though their structures and cultures may be different and complex (Annenberg Institute, 2002). Our investigation of teacher education in our community began with the acceptance of the connections between schools and communities, which while obvious has often been ignored in our profession. We also began with a guiding belief and considerable experience in partnerships (for Burnaford, partnerships in the arts, for Kretzmann, partnerships in community organizations, and for Meyers, partnerships with school districts and teachers) as a means to develop, implement, and critique pre-service teacher education. We approach this challenge in a manner consistent with the culture of our own institutions, the urban center in which we live, and the students that we teach.
First, we acknowledge our sense of what our university undergraduates want and need. It seems self-evident that prospective teachers need to see their future students as individual learners and honor differences among them. Our students have most often entered the academy equipped with multiple advanced placement credits from well-resourced public and private schools who are committed to making a difference, but who have had little or no experience with students without the social capital that they blithely possess. In teacher education in such institutions, our primary task may well be the challenge of helping such candidates for the teaching profession not to see the students as the ‘other’ (Ball and Cohen, 1999). What kinds of experiences do students need during their four years at an institution in order to be prepared to know young people in such ways that they do see commonalities with themselves and that they do set expectations that all students can learn?
From our view, it is the university’s role to assist teacher candidates in exploring communities – not just classrooms – in order to begin this lifelong process of knowing a world view that may not be their own but which hold some possible connections with their own that will allow them to teach with success. This means that the study of teaching need not take place in a classroom exclusively or first. For us, this means studying what teaching means by beginning outside a classroom – in the community. We are investigating the courses, processes, research opportunities, field experiences, and relationships that can help teacher candidates move from outside the school into the classroom, better prepared to address the learning needs of urban students.
We are therefore minimizing the value of long periods of observation in classrooms, favoring instead the implementation of internships prior to practicum/student teaching in which teachers are sometimes in schools, but most often in after school drop in centers, media development organizations, structured recess programs, museums, parent/neighborhood associations, and alternative school programs. In order to design a teacher education system around elements beyond the apprenticeship of observation (Darling-Hammond, 2000) followed by what is often a ‘sink or swim’ student teaching assignment, it is necessary to develop the relationships in communities of practice beyond the university. We have begun to establish dialogues with people and partnership organizations that have not typically been involved in teacher education. While these partners may not see themselves as teacher educators, that is the role that is emerging for them. Similarly, although we in the academy have not always typically been engaged in communities of practice beyond our institutions, that is where we see a new practice for teacher education emerging in which responsibility for teacher education is authentically shared.
The Arts Education Partnership is a national coalition of arts, education, business, philanthropic, and government organizations that promotes the essential role of the arts in schools. Recently, AEP released a report of a National Forum on Partnerships Improving Teaching of the Arts (2002). In that report, collaboratives from across the country discussed this topic: The practices of professional development and pre-service education and why partnerships should integrate them. They write: Universities have the primary responsibility for pre-service training. While universities work closely with k-12 districts to prepare pre-service teachers, collaboration with other partners is sparse. The report continues, noting the essential contributions that partnership with cultural and community organizations can make to pre-service education, acknowledging the similar value of involving higher education faculty and programs in course work, professional development, and research.
Remer describes a form of partnership that across constituencies that invites further consideration in teacher education program design (1996). In her analysis, a partnership that is a joint venture moves beyond a one-time event and becomes sustained and focused around student learning needs over time. In such joint ventures, there are mutual interests addressed and mutual benefits in terms of program and capacity. For teacher educators, a joint venture suggests multiple mentors for teacher candidates beyond the traditional classroom teacher. Where can one learn to teach and how does learning happen? Bringing others into the pedagogical mix will help our field to further develop our often narrow, standards-based scope on what teaching is and how we know it is happening. Joint ventures bring multiple perspectives and definitions to the table.
This approach to teacher education also draws on the perspective of teacher-as-researcher – a stance which charges pre-service candidates, as well as their professional teacher mentors to investigate their own practices through careful data collection on their teaching and learning. Teacher research also challenges practitioners to see teaching as listening – to students, to peers, and to community members who have something to contribute to what we know about teaching and learning (Burnaford, Fischer, and Hobson, 2001). In Schooling in Communities, students begin to develop skills in taking field notes and observing intentionally and carefully in their sites. They are also assigned to interview someone in their internship sites, after preparing a protocol that is informed by readings and experiences in the course, but also provides for the unique contribution of the site and the informant. Upon completing the interview this term, one candidate commented: I’ve never been asked to actually talk to someone before since I’ve been in college. We’re usually just asked to read and research online or in the library. Active interviewing has resulted in relationships with students, teachers, community organizers, parents, and youth workers that would otherwise never have occurred.