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- Convenors:
-
Edmund Hamann
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Socorro Herrera (Kansas State University)
Ursula Nguyen (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Amanda Morales (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
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- Chair:
-
Jenelle Reeves
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Brunswick G7
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 26 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Faculty from two American universities describe Project RAÍCES, a multifaceted teacher education program that engages high school students, preservice teachers, and new teachers, explaining how anthropology informs program design and the design-study self-assessment strategy guiding implementation.
Long Abstract:
Worries about the teachers leaving the profession in high numbers, too few new teachers entering the profession, and teacher demographics being increasingly out of synch with student enrollments and implicated in the higher likelihood of students of color being less-well served at school are all extant in the contemporary Global North. In response to these challenges, can anthropology inform the expansion and diversification of who becomes a teacher and then successfully stays in the profession? Short answer: Yes. With these tasks relevant to both North American and European contexts, this five-paper panel describes the multiple dimensions of Project RAÍCES (Re-envisioning Action and Innovation through Community collaboration for Equity across Systems), a federally-funded, multifaceted, $5 million (USD), two-university initiative that reimagines teacher preparation as beginning in high school and continuing into the early years of induction into the profession. Each paper also illuminates how anthropology informs various design components of the project and how those components’ implementation is evaluated in cycles of ongoing review and improvement. With its attention to the role of culture in extant conceptions of who should be a teacher and how, its assertion that students’ background knowledge—e.g.., their “funds of knowledge”—merits attention for effective instructional design, and its long-time concern with intercultural communication, anthropology is integral to the design of programs that will enduringly place more responsive and more receptive educators in diverse classrooms. This panel depicts various dimension of how.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 26 June, 2024, -Edmund Hamann (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Paper short abstract:
In the US there is a growing gap between the race/ethnicity/economic class/family educational attainment backgrounds of teachers and of the students they teach. This paper reviews how shared backgrounds and/or overt efforts to value different backgrounds from one's own matter for student success
Paper long abstract:
Using student and teacher demographic data from the US states of Nebraska and Kansas (the implementation sites for a multifaceted teacher diversification and support initiative) as one grounding and a review of anthropology of education research (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1993) on the other, this paper lays out why efforts to diversify who goes into teaching and changing teacher preparation strategies are both likely to support greater student educational achievement, particularly achievement by students from backgrounds that historically have been poorly served by US schools. Returning to Erickson's (1987) use of Vygotsky to reconcile assertions by those (e.g., Heath [1983]) who noted cultural mismatch between teacher and learner as a prospective source of educational challenge and cultural ecology proponents (notably Ogbu and Fordham), the paper notes the long tradition in the anthropology of education for considering patterns of exclusion and academic struggle by students of various backgrounds. Understanding the whys and hows of these struggles sets up a consideration of how changed teacher recruitment and changed teacher preparation can both be harnessed to change the orientations, strategies, and skills of the teachers who work in classrooms where most/all students are from minoritized backgrounds and too often are expected to struggle. The paper also considers how 'grow your own' initiatives (another label that applies in project sites) can help districts find new teachers who are more likely to be attracted to the district where they used to be a student, more likely to succeed, and more likely to stay.
Jenelle Reeves (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Paper short abstract:
With new teachers often leaving the profession before finding success with it, more attention to teacher induction—to the cultural task of welcoming new teachers to schools and helping them succeed at and find affirmation from it—is merited. I examine the design logic for induction in a US project.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers how a cultural orientation to teacher induction, the early career phase new teachers negotiate as they enter the profession, can inform the design of university-based induction support efforts for US teachers in schools with high enrollments of students from non-dominant backgrounds. Such schools more often struggle academically and have higher teacher turnover rates making for fraught cycles where new teachers come, struggle, leave, and then are replaced by more new and novice teachers. The described induction efforts are university-based and part of a larger, multi-faceted engagement attempting both to reverse hard-to-staff dynamics and to assure that new teachers who do stay become more and more efficacious as educators of the diverse enrollments they are charged with teaching. The paper considers tools (e.g., online graduate classes, formation of an 'induction cohort' of new practitioners, partnership with school district HR teams) that university-based practitioners can enact to support successful teacher induction and how they are grounded by various cultural logics. To become members of a "community of practice" (Wenger 1998), new practitioners need to figure out what the norms are for teaching professionals in their environment and (a) how to meet those norms, but (b) how to transcend those norms if/when they include deficit ideologies or other hazards that propose that some students cannot succeed and/or do not merit attention. Induction lends itself to both anthropological scrutiny and application of anthropological lessons as it focuses on how one is welcomed by and finds their place in school.
Ursula Nguyen (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Stephanie Wessels (University of Nebraska Lincoln)
Paper short abstract:
Both authors are university-based teacher educators and former elementary teachers, here we reflect on our new work with high school students. Unlike our 'regular' work, this connects us to students more like our college students and allows to consider how high schools now socialize our students.
Paper long abstract:
Both authors are teacher educators in an elementary education pathway, and both are former elementary school teachers. While the content expertise needed to perform our elementary teacher preparation tasks comes from our biographical experience and current lines of inquiry, that expertise does not per se help us imagine the current and recent high school student, i.e., the recent academic identity of most of our preservice teachers (i.e., of our college students). College students are not high school students, but they are often not far removed from being high school students in terms of chronology, but also in terms of their socialization to how learning environments should be structured. With more emphasis on student mental health and technology in high school (both catalyzed by schools' negotiation of the COVID pandemic) than when we were high school students, it follows that we both can update and expand our expertise vis-a-vis high schooling and vis-a-vis our arriving new college students by working with high school students at their high schools on youth participatory action research project. This paper is composed of two auto-ethnographic reflections (one by each coauthor) about how working with high school students on YPAR matters for our (re)design of preservice elementary teacher education praxis. Because the YPAR projects are primarily with students from non-dominant backgrounds, the reflections also consider how we use that experience to inform considerations of welcoming college students from non-dominant backgrounds. Ultimately, we consider how the YPAR experience makes us less isolated from contemporary PK-12 practice.
Melissa Holmes (Kansas State University) Socorro Herrera (Kansas State University)
Paper short abstract:
Teacher professional development for intercultural and multilingual advocacy entails noting teachers' cultural backgrounds, biographies, and socialized expectations even while reorienting them with new knowledge, strategies, and impetuses to better support students long neglected in US schools.
Paper long abstract:
In US schools too often students' academic and social success are patterned, with students from minoritized backgrounds more likely to fare less well. Interrupting such patterns and serving all students well is possible (Edmonds 1979, Holmes et al. 2018, Kearney et al. 2012, Reeves 2004), but it requires educators to understand and approach their task in new ways. Changing what educators do requires professional development and support that helps teachers understand their tasks, responsibilities, and possibilities differently. It also requires them to work differently with students, parents, and colleagues (Bajaj et al. 2023). This paper describes professional development strategies that have been fine-tuned as part of the federally-supported Project RAÍCES, explicitly engaging with Geertz's (1973) classic definition of culture as “shared webs of meaning.” In brief, the professional development endeavors to change the webs of meaning shared by core creators of schools' attributions of who deserves what, and how tasks of schooling should be approached. The paper considers where and why teachers can struggle with developing new meaning perspectives (Mezirow 1991) toward their learners. It then lays out processes of how professional development centered on the learner’s biography (Herrera 2022) can change how teachers see and respond to culturally and linguistically diverse students and families. Changing the trajectory of how students fare requires changing teacher, parent, student, and community beliefs regarding learners’ potential. This includes valuing and leveraging the cultural assets (i.e., languages, literacies, histories) that students bring to advance the learning of the classroom and school community.