Elizabeth Kozleski Federico Waitoller Arizona State University April 29, 2009

Theorize teacher preparation for inclusive teaching and learning Describe a teacher education program based on theoretical principles Detail how teacher identity, understanding culture, employing a sociocultural lens for learning and assessment set the stage for teacher candidates and their praxis

Teaching for Inclusive Education

Teacher Education

Professional Learning Schools

The PLS Curriculum

A global movement that emerged as a response to significant equity concerns in education regarding students viewed as different by educational systems Access to learning has been the purview of students from dominant cultures, advantaging specific groups while disadvantaging others. Constructed in many nations as an achievement gap due to cultural mismatches and the poverty of the cultures that distinguish marginalized groups, school reform efforts have had little or no impact on changing outcomes for subordinate groups (Lee, 2007).

Inclusive education that conceptualizes learning as cultural work anchored in everyday communities of practice offers a transformative counterpoint to efforts to track, sort and categorize students by what they cannot do. Inclusive education will remain an ideal not a reality if its proponents ignore histories of ethnic oppression and stratification. Understand the moral, political and intellectual challenges in order to introduce a transformative agenda into a mainstream educational communities that reify social inequalities through incomplete and rarely contested educational, psychological, and cognitive theories.

Race, class, gender, language, and power issues tend to be ignored in this literature. Thus, it is not surprising that tensions and struggles over these contentious and historically charged sources of difference are invisible in this work. Although some scholars acknowledge conflict and tension as part of life in inclusive school communities, not enough attention has been paid to this facet of communities. For the most part, a prototypical inclusive community is deemed to be cohesive and harmoniousi.e., personnel commit to a shared view of inclusive education, and resources and efforts are devoted to engineer inclusive school cultures.

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

Margins

Center

In spite of the exclusion from quality education of many vulnerable groups who are viewed as different, inclusive education in many nations (including the United States) tends to focus only on students with 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 all students who are marginalized in educational systems due to gender, cast, ethnic identity, socioeconomic status, language, and ability level. Consequentially, teacher preparation programs for inclusive educational systems must support the development of teachers who have the skills, contextual awareness, and critical sensibilities to teach a wide variety of students that are being denied full participation in society.

Suarez-Orozco (2003) defined globalization as a changing process that is influenced by geographical, political, economic and 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.

Teaching for Inclusive Education

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

The PLS Curriculum

General Education

Special Education

1. Practitioners poorly developed collaborative and co-teaching skills. Where practitioners are 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 and capacities that special and general educators bring to the design and implementation of academic and social learning.

Lived experiences, mediated thoughtfully and consistently by skilled practitioners, teacher educators, teacher candidates, and their P-12 students provides a better context for a transformative teacher education experience. Learning to teach involves developing the formal theories that help ground conceptual frameworks and organize decision making. requires the type of knowledge that is contextualized and local

We argue the best way to establish a coherent program, balanced between theory and practice, and grounded in a close connection between P-12 student outcomes and teacher practice is to do this work within the construct of a (PLS).

professional learning school

Teaching for Inclusive Education

Teacher Education
Professional Learning Schools The PLS Curriculum

An apprenticeship approach 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 resolve some of the persistent challenges in urban schools.

1980s
Teaching Hospitals YR 1 Coursework & Labs Multiple Yrs of Internship & Residency Increasing Levels of Responsibility

PDS graduates use more pedagogical methods and practices, are more reflective, feel better equipped to instruct ethnically and linguistically diverse student population and are more likely to seek work in inner-city schools than their traditionally prepared peers

2000s:

1990s Transformati on of university and P-12 faculties

Teacher Preparation

Professional Learning

Inquiry on & for Equity

Transformation Curriculum

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.

PLS as Cultural Work

Cultures bring
Professional communities, then, we have a culture, a shared language, a set of tools that engage data collection, analysis, interpretation and change, a process for Institutional apprenticeship, and local, specific contexts Culture that must be navigated.

Negotiated Cultures

Faculty

Site Liaison Site Professor

Leadership Team

Principals University Faculty Site Faculties Diverse P-6 students Low Income Structural & Material Problems

Schools

Teaching for Inclusive Education

Teacher Education Professional Learning Schools

The PLS Curriculum Identity Culture Learning Assessment

Bridge Everyday Practices

Reframe
Normative

Assumpti ons

My Cultural Traditions

the imagining of self in worlds of action, as social products; indeed, we begin with the premise that identity is constructed in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as the work of apprenticeship (Holland & Lave, 2001).

Teacher Candidates

Teacher identities

Identity is constantly negotiated through the activities in which teacher candidates participate with other community members (e.g., students, parents, other colleagues).

Are shaped by what they bring to school, by how they interpret their role in the school, and what do they see the purpose of education is and how they fit within this purpose.

Teacher Identity

Most policy documents and most teacher programs describe teacher development as no more that acquiring a set of skills and technicalities

From an identity perspective, however, it means to transform oneself, mediating ideals to the realities of institutional contexts, and deciding how to participate in classroom activities . Learning skills is necessary but not sufficient to prepare teachers for learning environments where differences are considered assets for learning.

The importance of identity work

Teacher candidates learn in the present by drawing from the past and by imagining the future, creating new tools for future situations (Stard & Prusak, 2005).

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 their biographies 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 daily practices. So, teacher candidates engagement in preservice activities and discourses shapes their expectations of what it means to be an expert, and mediates how they see themselves and others.

Inclusive settings are complex contexts. Creating learning environments that provide robust education for students in full understanding of ability, ethnicity, gender, language, and socioeconomic differences, demands a deep understanding of how teachers biographies inform practice.

Through their own biographies teachers internalize normative assumptions about difference. These assumptions undergird how teachers facilitate and constrain learning for students based on their ethnicity, gender, social class, language, or ability.

Bringing these assumptions about differences to the surface creates spaces where they can be contested and new inclusive assumptions can come about.

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).

There is a distinction between learning to teach and becoming a teacher. We can understand becoming a teacher as an identity formation process where the individual and the context surroundings them writes another page of the subjects biography.

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

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.

The PLS program sees everyday experiences in the classroom as a part of teachers identity construction workhow they experience the world, how they interpret and give meaning to practice within the complex contexts of inclusive settings. In the same way that social contexts elicit certain kinds of knowledge, they also elicit certain kinds of identities (Kelly, 2006). Extensive experience working in partnering inclusive schools will create spaces for developing inclusive identities in which teacher candidates will develop a sense of responsibility and ownership for all the students in the school, and not only for a specific grade or ability level.

Identity

Culture

Learning

Assessment

Inclusive classroom by nature are sites where multiple cultures merge. In the Urban PLS Initiative, we define culture 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 material tools to solve problems. However, the cultural work of classrooms tends to be informed by the dominant culture of the surrounding community. Thus, teacher candidates need to understand the cultural work that occurs in schooling so that it can be transform into an inclusive culture.

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). Inclusive educators make diversity transparent by adopting this second option.

The Urban PLS Initiative prepares teacher candidates to weave difference through designing cultural responsive learning environments and collaborating with diverse families.

Cultural work is not always smooth or safe because people adopt alternative identities across time and settings on inclusive education emphasizes the building of cohesive cultures around values and practices that respect diversity. It seems as though this scholarship identifies a clearly defined and static end point for inclusive communitiesi.e., participants are expected to embrace a communitys normative practices and become enculturated as a means to arrive at the end point of the community. However, we explained above that such .

We extend this criticism here to argue that even when individuals engage with a communitys normative practices, they do not merely reproduce such practices. If this were the case, cultures would not change over time. Contemporary work on culture theory envisions dialectical tensions in the dimensions of culture so that people reproduce and produce culture simultaneously

PLSes are constructed as sites of cultural confluence in which the cultures that students, families, teachers, and administrators bring with them to school interact with the culture of schooling and the cultures that are built in interaction with the people, policies, and practices.

In this semester of their program, teacher candidates explore the cultural work of teaching and learning through observation, lesson study, focus groups with students, and tutoring sessions with individuals students.

Teacher candidates become weavers of different cultures, identity, and abilities, languages and school activities.

Graduates move beyond cultural transmission models into new frontiers of cultural modeling (Lee, 2007) in which what students know and bring to school becomes the anchor for specific subject matter learning.

Identity

Culture

Learning

Assessment

To create and sustain a learning environment that fosters positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation.

Develop skills needed to link new concepts to a variety of prior experiences and cultural backgrounds.

Monitor and adjust instruction to meet instructional goals for all their students.

Engage the design, planning, and implementation phases of instruction

Problem based learning, inquiry, observation, and reflection is embedded in the organization of curriculum.

HPL makes the case for a complex understanding of learning in which how learners come to know becomes the focus of knowledge development.

They propose that learning environments are constructed of three interlapping constructs: what is to be learned (the knowledge base), what is to be assessed, and who the learner is.

Learning is experienced in a cyclical process in which experience or activity challenges the learner, who in turn interprets and puzzles over what the experience or activity proposes.

At that point, the learner is ready to learn new information, test it in real life situations, and then, self-assess to gauge the match between the experience and the learned skill.

Identity

Culture

Learning

Assessment

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

Inclusive education efforts, then, dare to recast, redefine and revise the very notion of . . . mainstream, margins, difference, otherness (West, 1999, p. 139).

As classroom cultures and the curriculum are negotiated and as students enter inclusive contexts, attention must always be given to the margins.

If inclusive education is concerned with access, participation, and the achievement of outcomes for students whose identities have been constructed under oppressive conditions, then continued vigilance and action are needed to ensure that students who are thrust to the margins are brought into the school community.

This is a challenging task because of the ubiquity and invisibility of racial oppression

For individuals who inhabit marginal positions due to social class, language, gender, and race, though, questions will arise:

Inclusion into what? Do I want to be included in a system that is fraught with systematic barriers for certain groups?

attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offerits paradigms, viewpoints, and methodsyet maintain a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism (p. 136).

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