“Change your approach”: how youth organizers, adult allies, and teacher candidates engage in the praxis of community-based pedagogy within teacher education

Abstract

In this paper, I share the process of designing, implementing, and analyzing a community-based methods course alongside youth organizers, adult allies, and teacher candidates (TCs) through a critical qualitative research project. Informed by intergenerational grassroots community organizations, community-based pedagogy is a praxis to center the strengths and needs of local people, places, and ecosystems in the classroom. I discuss the framework and use of community-based pedagogy in a teacher education methods course as informed by youth organizers and adult allies of two local youth-centered grassroots organizations. To further the development of community-based pedagogy, I examine how the facilitation of adult ally trainings by youth organizers in a methods course informed their community organizing endeavors and also encouraged TCs to conceptualize community-based pedagogy in PreK-12 classrooms. The findings and implications identify community-based pedagogy as a possible strategy for schools, communities, and teacher education programs to collaborate for transformative social change.

Keywords:

• Social studies
• teacher education
• social justice
• qualitative research
• teacher education preparation
• critical theory/critical pedagogy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dr. Jasmine Ulmer for her mentorship and support in the creation of critical qualitative scholarship. Thank you to the reviewers for their generative and thoughtful feedback in the development of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaitlin E. Popielarz

Kaitlin Popielarz is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests include community-based teacher education and critical qualitative methodology.