Loyola University Chicago's Teaching, Learning, and Leading With Schools and Communities (TLLSC) program is an ambitious break from traditional university-based teacher preparation models. This clinically based initial teacher preparation program, fully embedded in local schools and community organizations, takes an ecological perspective on…

This article summarizes how a group of undergraduate regional university faculty built a program for rigorous and research-based science teacher preparation at the elementary level--namely, the "Model of Research-Based Education for Teachers" (MORE for Teachers). First, we discuss the research upon which the program is built: (1) a…

According to recent U.S. Census Bureau (2009) data, more than 20% of residents speak a language other than English. Today, 22.3% of U.S. children in Grades K-12 are Latino, and 21% speak a language other than English at home (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010). In California, nearly half (44.8%) of all children in the K-12 system…

For this creative scholarly project, preservice teachers were invited to participate with two instructors by offering their sociopolitical autobiographies and reflective-reflexive reading responses for group discussion and analysis to explore the journal's theme "Immigration and Teacher Education: The Crisis and the Opportunity." The goal was to…

This article draws into specific relief current perspectives of teacher education and the ongoing debates over how best to prepare teachers for the integration of immigrant children into society--in particular, into schools and classrooms. Equally important is preparing teachers for working with undocumented populations that enter society and are…

Because early childhood education sets the stage for children's academic trajectory, it is important to think carefully about how schools treat, position, and instruct young children of immigrants as well as immigrant parents and teachers. The relational and pedagogical imperatives shared in this article are meant to extend an invitation to…

Since the 1980s, well more than half of all immigrants and children of recent immigrants are of people of color. Many recent immigrants of color communicate in their daily lives via a language (or via languages) other than English, and many immigrant children of color are emerging bilinguals, who acquire hybrid varieties of English. While almost…

For teachers to effectively teach students who enter the U.S. educational system from other countries, they must first learn about the complexity of the immigrant experience, taking into account themes such as race, generational immigration, class, formal education, and language. When these themes are taught through the immigrant narrative, they…

The author is grateful that this journal has taken on the production of a special theme issue entitled "Immigration and Teacher Education: The Crisis and the Opportunity." In her estimation, the "crisis" is not so much that the United States may indeed continue to enroll more immigrant children and youth in its schooling system or that districts…

The author often teaches a course titled "Teaching ELLs in the Content Areas," including this past summer (2012). Acknowledging that education of English-language learners (ELLs) and immigrant education are overlapping rather than fully synonymous, students in a recent rendering of this class raised a number of interesting issues that connect to…

At the author's institution, the majority of preservice teachers pursuing a master's degree in education curriculum and instruction are White middle-class students, so preparing them to be reflective practitioners with adequate knowledge, skills, and dispositions to teach English learners, whose cultural perspectives often differ significantly…

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the nation's children population. According to the U.S. Census (2007), approximately 16.4 million children, more than 1 in 5, are children of immigrants, most of whom are school-age population (aged 3-17 years). This large demographic shift is fundamentally changing the nation's schools and…

Immigration is often framed as a problem, yet it is also a time of remarkable opportunity. While immigrants come to the United States from all over the world, the author focuses on the unique and urgent issues related to Latino immigration. Immigrant Latinos have changed the face of America and U.S. schools. Approximately one in five K-12 students…

The metaphor of the popular television shows "CSI: New York," "CSI: Miami," and "CSI: Las Vegas" (CSI stands for "crime scene investigation") is applicable to investigating issues of immigrant children in teacher preparation programs (TPP). One of the fundamental principles of CSI is to solve the crime by critically examining clues as evidence…

The 1965 Immigration Act and its 1976 amendments paved the way for the fourth wave of immigration, the largest ever in U.S. history. From 1970 to 2010, about 35 million immigrants entered a postindustrial and service-oriented U.S. society. However, a new and striking trend of the fourth wave of immigration has swept rapidly beyond the coastal,…