Preparing and Supporting New Teachers During the Trump Era

Our call for manuscripts for this special issue was released immediately after the 2016 presidential election. We, the editors of The New Educator, asked how President Trump’s statements and actions would shape the work of teacher educators. We wanted to know what it means to support and prepare new educators during this period of turbulent transformation in education policy and practice.

In the eight months since we conceived of this issue, a long list of statements and actions have come from the White House that, indeed, influence the work of teacher educators. From the appointment of Betsy DeVos—a secretary of education who supports charter schools, virtual schools, vouchers for private schools, and home schooling over public schools (Kamanetz, 2017), in addition to allowing schools to discriminate against LGBTQ students—to the discussion of revoking DACA (Shear & Hirshfeld Davis, 2017), to the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 and Trump’s refusal to single out the white supremacists for blame (Borchers, 2017), to the anti-Muslim and anti-Latino rhetoric, the new president has had a dramatic influence on education, educational policy, the culture in schools, and the safety of children. We found that teacher educators across the United States are adapting their practices to cope with how this language and these threats affect our lives and the lives of those in our communities and schools.

To paraphrase Vincent Boudreau, the interim president of City College (the academic home of this journal), our stance is not partisan, but it’s also not neutral. On the day after the 2016 election, Boudreau wrote to The City College of New York community:

To many of you, the world today must feel a colder and more lonely place. Over the past months, we have watched the parameters of what is acceptable in our political and social life, and in the speech acts associated with that life, shift radically away from established norms of racial justice, gender fairness and basic equality before the law. I write these lines not as a partisan in our political process, but as someone who has been asked to steward, for the time being, an institution that is not neutral on these questions, and that cannot remain neutral.

Educators have long known that our actions, whether we choose to resist or to support the status quo, are not neutral. Freire wrote, “When the teacher is seen as a political person, then the political nature of education requires that the teacher either serve whoever is in power or present options to those in power” (1987, p. 212.) Freire made it clear that simply deciding to do nothing is supporting the status quo. Teachers and teacher educators have to make a choice about how they proceed.

At the same time, it important to note, as Elizabeth Currin and Stephanie Schroeder argue in the issue, that many of these political issues that are of concern with this new administration are a continuation of conflicts and challenges with which educators have long grappled. Currin and Schroeder write, “Each of the threats surfacing within the Trump administration—including racism, nativism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and unbridled neoliberalism—has its own history.” While recognizing a history to these problems in schools and society, teacher educators are responding to a new situation that is confronting us. The election brought these issues forcefully out into the open in a new way that many of our country’s students and educators find frightening.

We found in our call that many want to see these changes acknowledged and resisted in our classrooms. The story that Daniela Alulema, an undocumented college student, wrote in her testimonio in this issue highlights the need many of our students feel for these issues to be named in our classrooms:

I remember walking into the first day of class after Trump’s presidential win feeling riddled with troubling thoughts and heart-wrenching emotions. I was waiting for the moment my professor would ask the class about our thoughts and opinions on the current situation. To my disappointment, that never occurred, and no one in the class had the courage to initiate a discussion about what was happening; everyone was too afraid to share their feelings in case they might interfere with someone else’s. I had very troubling and confusing emotions that I direly needed to address.

This issue aims to start the conversation about how the election and the consequences of the election can be addressed in the teacher education classroom.

We received an unprecedented number of submissions. We selected manuscripts that represented a variety of aspects of teacher support and preparation, and that addressed practices such as rejecting xenophobia, developing critical thinking, and responding to children’s emotional lives. In “Taking the Long View: Cultivating Historical Thinking in Elementary Teacher Education,” Currin and Schroeder write that, although we may be tempted to juxtapose Trump’s administration with Obama’s administration, we must take a longer view. They argue for an infusion of historical thinking in elementary education. Historical thinking promotes multiple perspectives and takes up an interdependent view of the past and present. They describe how teacher educators can help new educators understand the importance of recognizing how history proceeds from multiple causes.

In “Learning from Undocumented Students: Testimonios for Strategies to Support and Resist,” Tatyana Kleyn, Daniela Alulema, Farah Khalifa, and Areli Morales Romero—three undocumented immigrant college students and graduates and one education professor—describe experiences as undocumented students in high school and college that particularly influenced them, and provide lessons for K–12 and higher education educators. The piece ends with a description of how educators can take steps to support undocumented students and push for chances in partnership with the communities they search.

In “Problematizing Silence, Practicing Dissent: Engaging Preservice Teachers in a Critique of the Current Political Times,” Katherine Crawford-Garrett, Rebecca M. Sánchez, and Richard J. Meyer articulate their efforts to situate the learning of their preservice teachers within the current political climate by organizing a conference aimed at “re(engaging)” their students in the critical conversations they feel are essential to the profession. This conference was intended to create a new space and activate critical consciousness in a time when their university had been focusing on state-mandated requirements and standards. Conference attendees discussed the political nature of the teaching profession and their uncertainty about how to address political issues in the elementary and secondary school settings. The attendees also expressed their desire for more attention on topics that affect children and communities in their teacher preparation program.

In “When Politics Comes to School: Emotionally Responsive Educator Preparation,” Wendi Williams and Lesley Koplow position educational practices that attend to the emotional life of children and adults in schools, enacting an emotional responsive practice as a political act of resistance. They describe how young children absorb societal anxiety and how they teach teachers to buffer the effects of the intense emotions expressed by adults around children.

Finally, in “Willful Ignorance and the Death Knell of Critical Thought,” Daniel Ian Rubin describes the concept of willful ignorance and its prevalence in US society, then explains how the concept of dialectical thought may work to combat such thinking in the K–12 and higher education classroom. Rubin shares how he works to teach his own higher education students to think dialectically and draws connections to both the elementary and secondary classrooms.

As this volume goes to press, we feel distinct alarm at the threats to freedom and democracy that have surfaced through Trump’s candidacy, victory, and the inaugural months of the his administration. We also feel hope. As teacher educators, one key source of hope is in the power of education to support citizens to act with empathy, historical knowledge, and critical consciousness. The pieces that follow present visions and tangible teaching ideas that can make this possible.

Due to the nature of the call—which was released in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election—the pieces represent authors’ relatively immediate thinking on teacher education during the beginning of the Trump administration. Many of them take the form of commentaries that present critical theoretical ideas and literature to guide teacher educators. We feel privileged to have been able to capture this moment in time, but it is crucial that researchers see these pieces as invitations for further study. More empirical data and analysis is needed to understand the impact of the Trump administration on schooling and the ways that the values, goals, and pedagogical methods portrayed in these articles can take shape in schools in the months and years to come.