Teacher candidates must know their students’ home communities intimately, especially amid racial teacher-student mismatches.
Evidence
The course encourages TCs to see the possibilities of how the community can be an equal teacher and partner in the cultivation of place-conscious learning experiences. This is particularly important in Southeast Michigan where an overwhelming majority of the teaching force is white, while schools in Detroit and some in the surrounding suburbs are composed of predominantly African American, Latinx, and Arab American students (Stackhouse, 2018). Given this context, sharing in community-based pedagogy with TCs becomes an opportunity for them to enter a space in which they may begin to see the importance of intimately knowing their students and the communities in which they teach. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 341
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Connects to the place-conscious, community-rooted pedagogy themes in the Grafting article’s argument that deeply local knowledge of one’s environment is underused.
- XREF: connects to: Racial identity requires shared history and community, not just culture or phenotype.