If we want culturally sustaining teachers, we must be culturally sustaining teacher educators: Modeling culturally sustaining pedagogy in a teacher education residency program

If we want culturally sustaining teachers, we must be culturally sustaining teacher educators: Modeling culturally sustaining pedagogy in a teacher education residency program

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) has been espoused by many as a necessary philosophy to adopt in education. Yet beginning teachers often struggle to support the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse children. Some have posited that these struggles can be associated with gaps between clinical practice experiences and the academic content in teacher education courses. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a description of a model wherein the major focus is cohesion of clinical practice and teacher education courses. Our work is premised on the view that to prepare teachers to apply CSP, teacher educators must model these pedagogical stances in their own instruction and in clinical contexts. With this goal in mind, we developed a cohesive teacher education and clinically-based residency program influenced by (a) CSP, (b) teacher inquiry, and (c) teacher beliefs. Four major principles of CSP guided the design of our program and our specific instructional moves: (1) viewing students as resources, (2) creating democratic classrooms, (3) recognizing inequities and critiquing social norms and (4) developing cultural competence.

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