ERIC Number: EJ1306111
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jun
Pages: 4
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0276-928X
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
To Dismantle Racism, Make Teacher Education More Inclusive
White, Brandon; Rudat, Amy
Learning Professional, v42 n3 p54-57 Jun 2021
Discriminatory policies and practices create biased beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes among those who stand to benefit from them, thereby reinforcing the policies and practices. Perhaps most insidiously, this process often occurs outside of conscious awareness, creating a societal pattern that, over time, becomes a legacy in and outside of education. To understand and address the inequities of teacher education today, it is critical to examine the track, or "curriculum," on which teacher education has been running since the United States' formation. Just as teachers must deconstruct, reconstruct, and construct traditional academic curriculum for students to achieve equitable outcomes (Ladson-Billings, 2006), the overt and concealed curriculum of teacher education must involve a process of deconstruction, reconstruction, and construction of the new and improve the educational outcomes for more than half of the student population in the United States. In this article, the authors review the following critical actions for each part of this process: (1) The curriculum of teacher education, including recruitment, education, and retention, needs to be first "deconstructed," or taken apart and examined by professionals, as a cultural artifact to illuminate its role in the apartheid-like United States education system; (2) Professionals invested in the education system must "reconstruct" their roles and identities within the system to appropriately re-engineer it; and (3) Using new roles, identities, and patterns of behavior and thought, professionals can "construct" a revised teacher education system inclusive of teachers from all walks of life who are prepared to teach all students.
Descriptors: Racial Discrimination, Inclusion, Educational Policy, Preservice Teacher Education, Educational History, Minority Group Teachers, Educational Change
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A

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