a framework for embracing diversity

8/2/2019 A Framework for Embracing Diversity

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Theorize teacher preparation for inclusive teaching andlearning

Describe a teacher education program based ontheoretical principles

Detail how teacher identity, understanding culture,employing a sociocultural lens for learning andassessment set the stage for teacher candidates andtheir praxis


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Teaching for Inclusive Education

Teacher Education

Professional Learning Schools

The PLS Curriculum


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A global movement that emerged as a response tosignificant equity concerns in education regardingstudents viewed as differentby educational systems

Access to learning has been the purview of students

from dominant cultures, advantaging specific groupswhile disadvantaging others.

Constructed in many nations as an achievement gapdue to cultural mismatches and the poverty of thecultures that distinguish marginalized groups, schoolreform efforts have had little or no impact on changingoutcomes for subordinate groups (Lee, 2007).


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Inclusive education that conceptualizes learning

as cultural work anchored in everydaycommunities of practice offers a transformativecounterpoint to efforts to track, sort andcategorize students by what they cannot do.

Inclusive education will remain an ideal not areality if its proponents ignore histories of ethnicoppression and stratification.

Understand the moral, political and intellectual

challenges in order to introduce atransformative agenda into a mainstreameducational communities that reify socialinequalities through incomplete and rarelycontested educational, psychological, andcognitive theories.


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Race, class, gender, language, andpowerissues tendto be ignored in this literature. Thus, it is not surprisingthat tensions and struggles over these contentious andhistorically charged sources of difference are invisiblein this work.

Although some scholars acknowledge conflict andtension as part of life in inclusive school communities,not enough attention has been paid to this facet ofcommunities.

For the most part, a prototypical inclusive communityis deemed to be cohesive and harmoniousi.e.,personnel commit to a shared view of inclusiveeducation, and resources and efforts are devoted to

engineer inclusive school cultures.


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A students participation is both marginal, with respect tothe legitimate practices in the classroom, and central withrespect to his or her experience and learning (p. 40).

Margins

Center


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In spite of the exclusion from quality education of many vulnerablegroups who are viewed as different, inclusive education in manynations (including the United States) tends to focus only on studentswith disabilities and special needs.

Therefore, we argue that inclusive education agendas must not focus

only on students with disabilities, but rather on the access,participation, and outcomes for allstudents who are marginalized ineducational systems due to gender, cast, ethnic identity,socioeconomic status, language, and ability level.

Consequentially, teacher preparation programs for inclusiveeducational systems must support the development of teachers who

have the skills, contextual awareness, and critical sensibilities to teacha wide variety of students that are being denied full participation insociety.


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Suarez-Orozco (2003) defined globalization as a changingprocess that is influenced by geographical, political, economicand social boundaries.

Globalization has four main distinguishing characteristics

that have relevance for the preparation of inclusive teachers: the re-organization of markets,

a new generation of massive diaspora,

the use of new technologies, and

the hegemony of English as the global language.


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Te a c h e r E d u c a t i o n


The PLS Curriculum


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GeneralEducation SpecialEducation


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1. Practitioners poorly developed collaborativeand co-teaching skills. Where practitionersare able to create connections they do so as

an exception rather than as typical practice.2. Poorly understood and therefore,

undervalued, understanding of the skills andcapacities that special and general educatorsbring to the design and implementation ofacademic and social learning.


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Lived experiences, mediated

thoughtfully and consistentlyby skilled practitioners,teacher educators, teachercandidates, and their P-12students provides a better

context for atransformative teachereducation experience.

Learning to teach

involves developing the

formal theories that helpground conceptualframeworks and organizedecision making.

requires the type of

knowledge that iscontextualized and local

We argue the best way to

establish a coherentprogram, balanced betweentheory and practice, andgrounded in a closeconnection between P-12

student outcomes andteacher practice is to do thiswork within the construct of

a professional

learning school(PLS).


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Teacher Education

P r o f e s s i o n a l L e a r n i n gS c h o o l s

The PLS Curriculum


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An apprenticeshipapproach to developing

practitioners and professional

learning communities. Socialization

Career long learners, honing

their practice as students

challenge them to understand

more about the complex

relationships between identity,

culture, engagement, ability,

content, context, and skill

development and mastery.

The best environments for realizing

this are created in professional

learning schools where families,

children, practitioners, school

leaders, and researchers work

together to develop

sophisticated multilayered,

multidimensional approaches

to learning that address and resolvesome of the persistent challenges in

urban schools.


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1980s

Teaching Hospitals

YR 1 Coursework &Labs

Multiple Yrs ofInternship &Residency

Increasing Levels ofResponsibility

1990s Transformati

on ofuniversity

and P-12faculties

2000s: PDS graduates use morepedagogical methods and practices, aremore reflective, feel better equipped to

instruct ethnically and linguisticallydiverse student population and are morelikely to seek work in inner-city schools

than their traditionally prepared peers


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Teacher

Preparation

Professional

Learning

TransformationCurriculumInquiry on& for Equity


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Built on a series of assumptions around the process of change

and improvement within a community.

1. The change and innovation mission must be distributed

throughout the organization and held both by individuals in

positions of organizational and informal authority.

2. Since change within organizations that provide complex sets

of services to students and their families is complex, the

institutional, attitudinal, technical and critical features that

need to be addressed are myriad.

Therefore, the change work and the change processes must

be simultaneously engaged by different groups of people who

converge through communication and reciprocal action.


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Cultures we

bring

Institutional

Culture

Negotiated

Cultures

PLS as Cultural Work

Professionalcommunities, then,

have a culture, a shared

language, a set of tools

that engage data

collection, analysis,

interpretation and

change, a process for

apprenticeship, and

local, specific contextsthat must be navigated.


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Faculty

Site Liaison Site Professor

LeadershipTeam

Principals University Faculty

Site Faculties

Schools

Diverse P-6 students Low Income

Structural & Material Problems


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Teacher Education


I d e n t i t y

C u l t u r e

L e a r n i n g

A s s e s s m e n t

T h e P L S C u r r i c u l u m


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My

CulturalTraditions

ReframeNormative

Assumptions

BridgeEverydayPractices


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TeacherIdentity the imagining of self

in worlds of action, associal products;indeed, we begin withthe premise thatidentity is constructedin and through activityand so must beconceptualized as thework of

apprenticeship(Holland & Lave,2001).

Teacheride

ntities Identity is constantly

negotiated throughthe activities in whichteacher candidatesparticipate with othercommunity members(e.g., students,parents, othercolleagues).

T

eacherCandidates Are shaped by what

they bring to school,by how they interprettheir role in theschool, and what dothey see the purposeof education is andhow they fit withinthis purpose.


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From an identity perspective, however,

it means to transform oneself, mediatingideals to the realities of institutionalcontexts, and deciding how toparticipate in classroom activities .Learning skills is necessary but notsufficient to prepare teachers forlearning environments where differencesare considered assets for learning.

Most policy documents

and most teacherprograms describe

teacher development asno more that acquiring a

set of skills and

technicalities

Teacher candidates learn in the present

by drawing from the past and byimagining the future, creating new tools

for future situations (Stard & Prusak,

2005).

The importance ofidentity work


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Teachers act according to their imaginary worlds (Holland & Lave,2001).

Teacher identities are revealed constantly in the positions and actions

that teachers adopt in their daily life.

Teachers histories of experiences in similar situations theirbiographies inform their expectations and actions about what can

be said, who can say it, and their engagement in particular contexts.

However, these expectations are negotiated in teachers dailypractices. So, teacher candidates engagement in preservice activitiesand discourses shapes their expectations of what it means to be an

expert, and mediates how they see themselves and others.


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Inclusive settings are complex contexts.Creating learning environments that

provide robust education for students infull understanding of ability, ethnicity,gender, language, and socioeconomic

differences, demands a deep

understanding of how teachersbiographies inform practice.

Through their own biographies teachersinternalize normative assumptions

about difference. These assumptionsundergird how teachers facilitate and

constrain learning for students based on

their ethnicity, gender, social class,language, or ability.

Bringing these assumptions aboutdifferences to the surface creates spaces

where they can be contested and newinclusive assumptions can come about.


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Teachers must search out how multiple interpretations of social experience cometo become part of ones identity as a teacher. This is a self-empowering enterprise.

There is a distinction between learning to teach and becoming a teacher. We canunderstand becoming a teacher as an identity formation process where the

individual and the context surroundings them writes another page of the subjectsbiography.

Learning implies becoming a different person and constructing a different identity.

Teachers and students, in this way, will develop identities as learners together.When teacher identity is co-constructed with students, we may consider teacher

and student learning as two sides of the same coin (Kelly, 2006, p. 516).


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Teacher candidates focus on specific aspects of their own biographies

in the first semester of their program as they concurrently build a

biography of one of their students. They compare and contrast their

biographies in weekly seminars, deepening their understanding of how

action and reaction in the classroom is anchored by these biographies.As the semester develops, teacher candidates learn to contest these

identity constructions so that they can develop the concept maps and

heuristics that they will need to continue to contest their own biases

as they teach their students to do the same thing.


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The PLS program sees everyday experiences in the classroom as apart of teachers identity construction workhow they experiencethe world, how they interpret and give meaning to practice withinthe complex contexts of inclusive settings.

In the same way that social contexts elicit certain kinds ofknowledge, they also elicit certain kinds of identities (Kelly, 2006).

Extensive experience working in partnering inclusive schools willcreate spaces for developing inclusive identities in which teacher

candidates will develop a sense of responsibility and ownership forall the students in the school, and not only for a specific grade orability level.


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Identity Culture Learning

Assessment


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Inclusive classroom by nature are sites where multiplecultures merge. In the Urban PLS Initiative, we defineculture as a distributed, self-regulating system consisting of

partial solutions to previously encountered problems(Cole, 1998, p.294).

This involves many different ways of learning, participating,communicating, and many different cognitive and materialtools to solve problems. However, the cultural work of

classrooms tends to be informed by the dominant culture ofthe surrounding community. Thus, teacher candidates needto understand the cultural work that occurs in schooling sothat it can be transform into an inclusive culture.


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Cole (1998) reminded us that there are two broad views of how to

deal with this diversity: one is to make it go away and the other is

make use of it (p. 293).

The first one has been embodied, for instance, in English-only

legislations in states such as California, Arizona, and

Massachusetts, and in assimilationist curricula that aim to socialize

students into the dominant culture.

The second one utilizes the rich resources that students and their

families possess (Gonzales, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Inclusiveeducators make diversity transparent by adopting this second

option.


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The Urban PLS Initiative prepares teacher

candidates to weave difference through

designing cultural responsive learning

environments and collaborating with diversefamilies.


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Cultural work is not always smooth or safe because peopleadopt alternative identities across time and settings on inclusiveeducation emphasizes the building of cohesive cultures aroundvalues and practices that respect diversity. It seems as thoughthis scholarship identifies a clearly defined and static end pointfor inclusive communitiesi.e., participants are expected toembrace a communitys normative practices and becomeenculturated as a means to arrive at the end point of thecommunity. However, we explained above that such .

We extend this criticism here to argue that even whenindividuals engage with a communitys normative practices, theydo not merely reproduce such practices. If this were the case,cultures would not change over time. Contemporary work onculture theory envisions dialectical tensions in the dimensions ofculture so that people reproduce and produce culturesimultaneously


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PLSes are constructed as sites ofcultural confluence in which thecultures that students, families,

teachers, and administrators bringwith them to school interact with theculture of schooling and the culturesthat are built in interaction with the

people, policies, and practices.

In this semester of their program,teacher candidates explore the culturalwork of teaching and learning through

observation, lesson study, focusgroups with students, and tutoringsessions with individuals students.

Teacher candidates become weaversof different cultures, identity, and

abilities, languages and schoolactivities.

Graduates move beyond culturaltransmission models into new frontiers

of cultural modeling (Lee, 2007) inwhich what students know and bring

to school becomes the anchor forspecific subject matter learning.


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Assessment


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To create and sustain alearning environment that

fosters positive socialinteraction, active

engagement in learning, andself-motivation.

Develop skills needed tolink new concepts to a

variety of priorexperiences and cultural

backgrounds.

Monitor and adjustinstruction to meet

instructional goals for alltheir students.

Engage the design,planning, and

implementation phases ofinstruction

Problem based learning,inquiry, observation, andreflection is embeddedin the organization of

curriculum.


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HPL makes the casefor a complex

understanding of

learning in whichhow learners cometo know becomes

the focus ofknowledge

development.

They propose thatlearning

environments areconstructed of

three interlappingconstructs: what isto be learned (theknowledge base),

what is to beassessed, and who

the learner is.

Learning isexperienced in a

cyclical process inwhich experience

or activitychallenges thelearner, who in turn

interprets andpuzzles over whatthe experience oractivity proposes.

At that point, thelearner is ready to

learn newinformation, test it

in real lifesituations, andthen, self-assess to

gauge the matchbetween the

experience and thelearned skill.


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Assessment


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Assumptions embedded in cultural

assumptions and practices

The Role of Stereotype Threat

Make consciences of the constant presence of

our internal assessments

Assessment is cultural work

Assessment as a critical project


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Inclusive education efforts, then, dare torecast, redefine and revise the very notionof . . . mainstream, margins, difference,

otherness (West, 1999, p. 139).

As classroom cultures and the curriculumare negotiated and as students enter

inclusive contexts, attention must alwaysbe given to the margins.

If inclusive education is concerned with

access, participation, and the achievementof outcomes for students whose identitieshave been constructed under oppressiveconditions, then continued vigilance and

action are needed to ensure that studentswho are thrust to the margins are brought

into the school community.

This is a challenging task because of theubiquity and invisibility of racial oppression


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For individuals who inhabitmarginal positions due to social

class, language, gender, and race,though, questions will arise:

Inclusion into what? Do I want tobe included in a system that is

fraught with systematic barriersfor certain groups?

attuned to the best of what themainstream has to offeritsparadigms, viewpoints, and

methodsyet maintain agrounding in affirming and

enabling subcultures of criticism(p. 136).


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[email protected] equityallianceatasu.org

niusileadscape.org

Urbanschools.org

tolerance.org carnegiefoundation.org/programs

Authors Note: The authors acknowledge the support of

the Urban Professional Learning Schools Initiative awardedby the U.S. Department of Educations Office of SpecialEducation Programs. Funding agency endorsement of theideas presented in this article should not be inferred.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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a framework for embracing diversity

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