Young teachers — fresh out of college and eager to save the world — often find themselves in large, metropolitan public schools, where they inherit students with significant learning deficits and whose cultural backgrounds look very different from their own. If colleges don’t reform their education-school curricula to prepare these teachers to be culturally responsive — aware that students’ cultural backgrounds can and should play a role in how they learn — the consequences are twofold: student achievement will suffer, and teachers will leave the profession within the first few years — a significant problem, because the United States already faces a shortage of teachers.
I was once in a similar position right out of college — though in my case it wasn’t at an urban school. My first teaching job was in a coal-mining and farming town in Western Pennsylvania. While my skin color was the same as my first-grade students’, I was an outsider. I’d grown up in a suburb of a major city on the East coast. My hometown was middle class, and I took public transportation to and from high school. Upon graduating from college, I found myself in a very small town where everyone knew everyone else. There was no mass transit. I didn’t know the vernacular, and I didn’t understand why the miners, covered in soot, poured into local bars at sunrise.
That first winter in rural Appalachia was eye-opening. The miners went on strike. It was also unusually cold, and schools were closed most of February because of snow. That put a burden on working parents, who struggled to care for their children while still working enough to heat their homes. As a result, my students went hungry. I could try to teach them how to read and do arithmetic, but I couldn’t fill their stomachs — much less understand the values, behaviors, language, and culture that defined them and their families.
Having never been taught to look at others through a cultural lens, I decided that the children I was working with, most of whom were not where they ought to have been academically, were simply in need of schooling on how to do things in the correct way. I had just graduated from a prestigious teacher-preparation program, so I used the general practices I had learned, which included drilling phonics and math facts into their heads. Some learned in spite of me, while others struggled because there was no room in my worldview for considering diversity and differentiation.
Fast-forward 40 years, and my mind-set couldn’t be more different. I now see the important but subtle distinction between saying “I teach reading, math, and science” and saying “I teach children.” If I had realized the importance of knowing my students and their families in that first teaching job, I would have provided richer and more meaningful learning. I now tell that story to my education students before they begin a semester teaching in a diverse elementary school here in Chester, Pa., between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del.
Widener University’s teaching program, called Community Engaged Teacher Education, gives seniors majoring in education the opportunity to connect with elementary-school children by getting involved with the children’s community. The program is modeled after Ball State University’s immersive Schools Within the Context of Community program, which emphasizes that knowledge of the communities in which children are growing and learning is essential to being a good teacher.
In our version, education students not only teach but also partner with mentors — African-American longtime residents from Chester. They meet with the students regularly, including on campus for social gatherings and in their homes for one-on-one talks. They share personal stories of segregation and oppression or advice on teaching in Chester.
The experiences and conversations help shape the education students’ perspectives. For example, Widener students and mentors recently visited a predominantly African-American congregation on a Sunday morning — and then discussed ways that the call-and-response nature of the church service could play out in a classroom. Teacher candidates talked about how this experience opened their eyes to failures in their own management practices.
We need more such out-of-the-box thinking in order to prepare future teachers and reverse troubling trends in this country. There is a growing achievement gap between children of color and their white counterparts in elementary and secondary schools. Even as education researchers identify this as one of the most pressing issue in education, the teaching force remains largely white, middle class, monolingual, and female, even in increasingly diverse urban schools.
As achievement suffers, teachers are left feeling inadequate and ineffective, a feeling that is compounded by the scarcity of resources they are given in urban schools. Just as I entered into my first year of teaching without any appreciation for the differences among people, new teachers are entering into situations in which they find themselves unsuccessful and ready to leave the profession with feelings of self-doubt and low self-esteem.
Throughout my career as a teacher educator, I have watched our best and brightest graduates unable to succeed in diverse, urban environments. It has not been because they lacked commitment or deep caring for their students. It has been because they did not have the skills necessary to be successful in this environment.
We need to ensure that all children — regardless of race — have qualified teachers, enough resources to learn, and people who cherish and value their differences. It starts by teaching teachers how to understand not just the child but also the child’s family, the community, and the strengths that children bring to the classroom.
That strength-based approach, key for the success of any teacher, translates into any setting. Examining individual students, their families, their schools, and their neighborhoods from a position that reveals their assets, rather than focusing on what is missing or inadequate, is one way that people can develop mutual self-respect and grow together toward adequate and equal education for all students.
Nadine McHenry is a professor of education at Widener University. She coordinates its Community Engaged Teacher Education pro gram.
