The Poetic Humanity of Teacher Education: Holistic Mentoring for Beginning Teachers.
This qualitative study explores the holistic approaches that seven mentors use to attend to the well-being of new professionals as they transition into the classroom. We define holistic mentoring as practices that intertwine the professional with the personal, and bring together the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral in supporting beginning teachers. We call these practices the ‘poetics of mentoring,’ and used them as analytic lenses to theorise mentors’ unique approaches to working with mentees. Data included individual semi-structured interviews, a focus group interview, and expressive artefacts that mentors created to illustrate their practice holistically.
Lessons from a teacher residency
Teacher residencies, based on the medical school training model, are emerging as an innovative model of educator preparation. The authors describe one such program in New York City, the Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC). They say the program has been successful in recruiting nontraditional candidates (including minorities) into teaching and giving them a rich clinical experience that prepares them for work in inner-city schools. Part of a theme issue on "Bolstering the Teacher Pipeline."
Teacher candidates’ intentions to teach: Implications for recruiting and retaining teachers in urban schools
This study addresses how teacher candidates committed to a social-justice-oriented urban teacher residency programme articulate and reflect why they want to be teachers in high-need public schools and what they expect from teaching so as to ascertain what they expect to do. The study illuminates committed teachers’ reasons for entering the teaching profession so as to inform better recruitment strategies, and has implications for how initial teacher education (ITE) programme could specifically improve their professional preparation and practices to recruit and retain qualified teachers who intend to stay.
Reimagining social justice-oriented teacher preparation in current sociopolitical contexts.
In this collaborative autoethnography, written by multiple stakeholders involved in a teacher residency program, we address the complexities of preparing and supporting social justice-oriented teachers. We identify three tensions faced in the design and (re)development of the teacher preparation program. These tensions include preparing teachers to work in a specific context, collaborating with mentor teachers to support social justice-oriented practice, and offering university-based induction to support novice teachers’ work. We describe the ways in which we attempted to navigate these tensions, and we highlight the difficulties and possibilities of the work. We offer implications for the field and, for us, as teacher educators, to continue to grapple with concepts of social justice.
Urban residents’ place-based funds of knowledge: An untapped resource in urban teacher residencies.
Teachers who attended urban schools as students are uniquely positioned to understand both the structural context that urban schools operate within and the many funds of knowledge that urban students bring to school. The purpose of this study is to examine the funds of knowledge that individuals who have been students in urban schools and now wish to teach in a particular city in the northeastern United States bring to an urban teacher residency program. In this article, we describe these urban residents’ funds of knowledge, and argue that residents describe an emerging place-based pedagogical content knowledge.
Curriculum, social justice, and inquiry in the field: Investigating retention in an urban teacher residency
This qualitative study analyzes the retention data of an urban teacher residency program, a recent approach to developing quality teachers. The authors identify patterns of movers, leavers, and stayers and draw on interview data to better understand residents’ (program graduates) perspectives on ways the program informs their practice after graduation. Using the university conceptual framework of curriculum, inquiry, and social justice, the authors examine how residents might demonstrate retention and practice of key concepts and principles that undergirded their residency program. This study furthers our understanding of how residencies support the preparation of new teachers in high-needs schools and shortage areas.