As a scholar of race and education deeply involved in the work of teacher preparation, I always have been concerned about the education of African-American males and whether the teachers we train are effectively prepared to meet their needs. President Obama’s recent announcement of a task force, in the wake of the murders of Travyon Martin and Jordan Davis, signals the extent to which the public may be prepared to engage in a discussion about the specific challenges and related solutions needed to resolve the crisis facing this population. Right now, there also is considerable focus on teacher education. As politicians continue to increase the accountability demands on teacher preparation, our community continues to seek new ways to better prepare teachers to effectively serve African-American males and other critically underserved populations.
The truth is that teacher preparation programs are struggling. While most teacher preparation programs provide pre-service teachers with some rudimentary knowledge regarding the foundations of education for underserved populations, our real challenge is translating increased awareness about race, culture and student background into effective practices. We convey the information about the student populations teachers will work with, but we don’t make sure that it translates into the skills necessary to effectively teach these populations.
In other words, as a field we too often fail to build links between what is taught, how it is taught and who is being taught.
One of the reasons we struggle with such links is because the knowledge we provide teacher candidates about culture, race, backgrounds and learning is too theoretical and conceptual. It simply is not practical enough to use and have an impact in P-12 classrooms.
Culturally relevant pedagogy and multicultural education must be more than a feel-good or obligatory addition to teacher preparation. Instead, it must be embedded throughout the teacher preparation curriculum with the ultimate goal being to improve student performance.
We can make this a reality in more programs for more students by moving from talking about diversity and effective multicultural pedagogy to assessing teacher candidates on their ability to demonstrate that they can use this awareness of students’ history and students’ backgrounds to improve learning.
For the first time in my career, we now have a resource developed by educators for educators that gives me hope for wide-scale progress.
