Small-town college to big-city school: preparing urban teachers from liberal arts colleges

The Adequacies and Inadequacies of Three Current Strategies to Recruit, Prepare, and Retain the Best Teachers for All Students1

“…Despite what we know from research about the value of closely connecting teacher education programs to diverse communities and of employing community members as teacher educators (e.g., Mahan, 1982Mahan, , 1993Mahan, Fortney, & Garcia, 1983;Zeichner & Melnick, 1996), most teacher education programs continue to operate on the belief that developing interculturally competent teachers is primarily a matter of reading things and discussing them on campus or of placing student teachers in culturally different schools for field experiences. Integrally embedding teacher education programs and teacher education students into diverse communities as has been done by some programs over the last 30 years with much success (e.g., Grinberg & Paz-Goldfarb, 1998;Noordhoff, & Kleinfeld, 1993;Sconzert, Iazzetto, & Purkey, 2000;Stachowski & Mahan, 1998) is not that common in practice today. My experience as a teacher educator in the National Teacher Corps and my research on teacher education programs has convinced me of the importance of making diverse communities central aspects of teacher education for diversity and of openly acknowledging the limitations of what can be accomplished when the center of gravity of teacher education is on a college or university campus.…”

Multicultural apprenticeships in teacher education

“…If experience is to avoid a kind of cultural tourism that simply maintains problematic perspectives and relationships, extended experience with diverse communities is critical (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1993;Sconzert, Iazzetto, & Purkey, 2000;Wiggins, Follo, & Eberly, 2007). Extended experiences allow students to learn enough about a context to see past generalizations and stereotypical representations and to begin to develop bicultural competencies and multicultural frames of reference (Conaway et al, 2007;Stachowski & Mahan, 1998).…”