Abstract
The National Center for Education Statistics has indicated that the vast majority of New York State teaching positions remain disproportionately reflective of and populated by members of the dominant culture even while student populations grow increasingly diverse. New York has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of racially and ethnically diverse students, including many immigrant groups, in nearly all regions of the state. Consistently, teacher education research has underscored the importance of having multilingual, multiethnic, and multiracial teacher candidates successfully enter the teaching profession. Yet it appears that too few teacher preparation programs have altered preparation practices to accommodate this need. While acknowledging the need for a more diverse teaching force, this chapter examines 5 years of teacher candidates' educational outcomes in an urban community college. The empirical data underscore a complicated and often exclusionary teacher preparation pathway. This pathway, inadvertently, often precludes racially and ethnically diverse teacher candidates.
TopThe Need To Reframe And Reposition The Current Career Prepraration Discourse For Diverse Teaching Candidates
Let us follow the logic of things from the beginning. Or, rather, from the end: modern times. We are, as I am writing these lines, witnessing a complete riot against some class of experts, in domains that are too difficult for us to understand . . . and in which not only the expert is not an expert, but he doesn’t know it. (Taleb, 2018, p. xiii)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Critical Pedagogy: An approach to teaching that encourages students to analyze and question dominant and oppressive modes of thought and practice.
Ontology: The philosophical study of the nature of reality and being in the world.
Hegemony: Political or cultural domination maintained through ideology and dominant norms in place of or in addition to any violence or economic control.
Social Reproduction: The transmission of inequality from one generation to the next through stratification of wealth, knowledge, skills, education, training, and social networks.
Naturalistic Inquiry: A method of social research in which the researcher observes and interacts with subjects in the course of their own lived experience in their everyday contexts.
African Diaspora: Primarily refers to communities that are descended from Africans dispersed by the slave trade from the 15th through 19th centuries; also less commonly refers to people of African origin who live outside of Africa.
Ethnography: The study of a culture or society based on observation of its members.
Critical Race Theory: A theoretical approach to social and cultural analysis that acknowledges the institutional rather than individual nature of racism.
Epistemology: The philosophical study of the nature of knowledge, including its limits and how people know.