An Anticolonial Framework for Urban Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACT

Our contemporary apprenticeship model of teacher education often places preservice teachers in learning environments where they never witness the types of dynamic and engaged practice they desire to emulate. Either there are structural limits within the classroom placed by school or district leadership or there are preselected veteran mentor teachers who do not value the same kinds of critical practice. These challenges necessitate a radical rethinking of how and where preservice teachers learn their craft. We pose an anticolonial model of teacher development, one that situates teachers and students in collaborative networks where they work powerfully together via Youth Participatory Action Research on projects that have significant social, cultural, and digital relevance. The purposes of this article are (a) to propose the essentiality of anticolonial approaches to reimagine the preparation of preservice teachers and (b) to demonstrate how these approaches are enacted in our own practice within critical, project-based clinical experiences with preservice educators toward the development of an anticolonial model for urban teacher preparation.

Notes

1. According to Caraballo and colleagues (2017, p. 2), “PAR with youth (YPAR) engages in rigorous research inquiries and represents a radical effort in educational research to take inquiry-based knowledge production out of the sole hands of academic institutions and include the youth who directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand.”

2. Pseudonym.

3. Individualized Education Plan. As conveyed by the YPAR collective that created Echoes of Brown (Fine et al., 2004), students of color are disproportionately diagnosed with learning disabilities.

4. All adults within Cyphers For Justice (e.g., preservice educators and teaching artists) are referred to as “adult allies” in effort to sustain the tenet of youth-led praxis within the collective.

5. For example, Sanford and colleagues’ (2012) application of indigenous principles of community, inclusivity, community building, recognition, and celebration of individual uniqueness demonstrates the desire to honor the ways of knowing and relating of the communities in which the future teachers in their program would eventually teach.