As educators who work to prepare teachers, particularly for urban schools, we believe that pre-service teachers’ earliest field experiences in classrooms have a profound influence on their professional trajectories. We’ve seen pre-service teachers respond to urban field experiences in a variety of ways. We’ve seen some develop a visceral commitment to educational justice in city schools, and we’ve seen others solidify their existing stereotypes about “other people’s children.” Consequently, as we approached the Philadelphia Urban Seminar this year, we wondered how we could partner across our respective institutions—Emery at Lincoln University, a minority serving institution, and Lynnette at The College of New Jersey, a predominantly White institution—to create a healthy field experience for our pre-service teachers.
The Philadelphia Urban Seminar (https://www.trafford.com/BookStore/BookDetails/198247-our-stories-in-philadelphia) is a two-week immersion field experience where pre-service teachers from 16 different universities live in north Philadelphia and work, teach and serve in an urban school. For 18 years, the purpose of the program has been to provide an urban experience to White, rural pre-service teachers who may not otherwise have the opportunity to step foot in an urban setting. Of course, Urban Seminar participants are not entirely White. Lincoln University brings students of color, and a few other institutions occasionally add to this mix, too. Ideally, we partnered across our institutions in order to get to the core of what we both believe: that friendships and personal interactions across differences enable deeper levels of contemplation, challenge, and realization about individual and structural privilege/oppression.
Logistically, during the Urban Seminar, this meant three things: First, we ran each class period and formal debrief session as one, essentially imposing a co-teaching model on the program regardless of any existing divisions. Second, we ran all non-academic parts of the program together, whether it was trip to the historic National Constitution Center in downtown Philadelphia, our Saturday cookout, or a late night run to Rita’s water ice (a Philly classic!). Perhaps, most important, we paired students across our institutions for an ongoing partner, cross-race and cross-institution dialogue activity. During these 30-minute sessions, oftentimes over meals, the pre-service teachers followed a conversation framework that we created to help them reflect with one another about their points of entry to urban teaching and the personal-professional implications of what was happening in their respective field experience during the Urban Seminar.
Below are three of the many benefits we saw happening from this unofficial cross-institution partnership in urban teacher education.
