Teacher Education as a Vehicle for Social Justice and Transformation: Lessons Learned from

Contemporary Theorists and Current Research on Teacher Disposition, Funds of Knowledge, and

Race

Jose Lalas, Ph.D.Professor of Literacy and Teacher Education

Director, Center for Educational Justice

To institutionalize teacher preparation as a vehicle for

social justice and transformation,

we have to expose our teachers to relevant,

appropriate, critical, and provocative ideas!

Sources of Relevant Ideas

**Contemporary Theorists/Ideas

**My Current Research Work in Collaboration with other Colleagues:

-teacher disposition

-funds of knowledge

-race

1st and 4th Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

James Banks: Multicultural Education

“We can get a full view of our own backgrounds and behaviors only by viewing them from the perspectives of other racial and ethnic cultures”

“the essence of culture is not its artifacts, tools, or

other tangible cultural elements but how the members of the group interpret, use, and perceive them. It is the values, symbols, interpretations, and perspectives that distinguish one people from another in modernized societies.”

Dr. Banks extends his ideas of multicultural teaching

which involves equity pedagogy and prejudice reduction into citizenship education within a global context.

2005 &

2008

2nd. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

2006

“We must engage with new terminology and concepts such as border culture, heterosexism, wholistc visioning, bridge people, cultural capital, equity audits, hybridity, ... and others that go beyond the dominant view of school leadership.”

Dr. Marshall seeks to build capacity and collaboraton among scholars, practtoners, policymakers, and students to infuence the existng powerful school structures to incorporate social justce ideas, incentves, and mandates.

Catherine Marshall: Leadership for Social Justice

3rd. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

Luis Moll: Funds of knowledge

The students’ multiple identities, social backgrounds,

and lived experiences are dynamic sources of “funds of knowledge.” A variety of community and household experiences as well as networks of friends, relatives, and community contacts for any economic assistance and social participation shape the strengths students bring into classrooms.

Dr. Moll encourages researchers and teachers to build from the “funds of knowledge” students already have by openly acknowledging diversity in language, culture, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and class backgrounds as valuable points of reference.

2007

5th. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

Jean Anyon: Social class, Urban education, neighborhood poverty, critical social explanation

“As education policymakers and practitioners, we can act on the power of urban poverty, low-wage work, and housing segregation to dwarf most curricular, pedagogical, and other educational reforms.”

Aside from her work on social class and

hidden curriculum in the classroom, Dr. Anyon argues that we need not only better schools but also the reform of public policies concerning job, wage, housing, tax, and transportation.

2009

6th. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

Donaldo Macedo: Critical pedagogy; co-author with Freire

“Our colonial literacy model is designed to domesticate so as to enable the “manufacture of consent.”

Dr. Macedo challenges educators to examine “potentially dangerous educational practices” and engage in critical literacy to avoid “literacy for stupidification.” He co-authored the book “Reading the Word, Reading the World.”

2010

7th. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

Gloria Ladson-Billings:Critical Race Theory

“My decision to deploy a critical race theoretical framework in my scholarship is intimately linked to my understanding of the potential and personal stake I have in the education of Black children…”

“… culturally relevant teaching uses student culture in order to maintain it and to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.”

2011

2012 8th. Annual Institute on Educational Leadership for Social Justice

David Berliner: Out-of-school factors

“Although the power of schools and educators to infuence individual students is never to be underestmated, the out-of-school factors associated with poverty play both a powerful and a limitng role in what can actually be achieved.”

Dr. Berliner asserts that “among the lowest social classes environmental factors, partcularly family and neighborhood infuences, not genetcs, is strongly associated with academic performance.”

Teacher Disposition Research (Lalas & Bustos, 2012)

• Behaviors, characteristics, and perceptions teachers possess and demonstrate as they work with students

• Fairly resistant to change and is consistent with the social realities under which it was produced

• Influences the characteristics, observed behaviors and practices of an individual in dealing with the realities around them

• Generates values, beliefs, traits, and perceptions that correspond to his or her socialization, training, and community practices

Teacher Disposition: Key Findings

• Teaching reading was mainly the school’s responsibility

• Responses revealed “bottom-up” procedures that facilitate reading through the acquisition of a series of hierarchical skills

• Being energetic, motivated, patience, encouraging, cooperative, and hardworking, resourcefulness, loving, and respectful were associated with effective teaching reading and writing.

Teacher Disposition: Key Findings

• Limited access of teachers and the overall community to different types of books and literacy-related materials

• Teacher orientation in teaching reading was more affective than cognitive or skill-based

• Writing was synonymous to penmanship

Teacher Disposition: Lessons Learned

• Teachers who are unable to think beyond the “bottom up” and fail to consider vocabulary development, comprehension, literature response, and other meaning-based strategies, might have made the lack of success in achieving advanced proficiency in reading a predictable outcome.

Teacher Disposition: Lessons Learned

• A teacher with an excellent disposition in teaching reading ---

involves all students in worthy meaningful and purposeful activities

Promotes the recognition of the value of each individual

creates a learning environment that is democratic, just, equitable, and caring.

• Funds of knowledge – practices that are embedded in the labor, domestic, family, and community affairs of Mexican American families

• Students’ multiple identities, social backgrounds, and lived experiences are dynamic sources of “funds of knowledge.”

Funds of Knowledge

• The notion of funds of knowledge is a recognition and affirmation of home and community practices including survival practices.

• It builds positive social identities for students and informs teachers about the harmful ways in which the school curriculum may exclude some and privilege others.

Funds of Knowledge as it relates to poverty…

Funds of Knowledge: Key Findings

Funds of Knowledge: Key Findings

Funds of Knowledge: Key Findings

Funds of Knowledge: Key Findings

Lessons Learned

• Students are given very adult-like roles in the home, take on a mentor role with siblings and relatives, develop networking skills for support, and work in a team-like setting to solve problems and pass on family values.

• This “funds of knowledge”—may go unused if students are expected to remain passive, quiet, and have little influence on the decisions made in class.

Race: Outcast Phenomenon(Clay & Lalas, 2012)

Race: Key Findings

Tolerated :

• “I did not feel as isolated as I did in my original program, but there still was not a feeling of being welcomed, it was more of a feeling of being tolerated.”

Proving themselves

• “The professor told me he was not sure that I would be able to do well in the program... Of course I had to prove him wrong.”

Race: Key Findings

Isolated

• “I felt isolated and lonely most of the time…”

• “Not only did I feel ostracized by the other White Americans, but the international students (mostly Chinese) were not very friendly to me either.”

Invisible

• I guess that just comes with the territory of being a Black student on a predominantly white university campus.”

Race: Key Findings

Overcoming stereotypes

• “I didn't want to leave them [white classmates] with a bad experience and cause them to think that all blacks are overbearing loudmouths.”

• “I wanted to avoid the misconceptions of being in the "all black" group… and purposely joined the group of students sitting closest to me.”

Feeling judged

• “Instead of being welcomed by the professor, I was interrogated about what I was doing there, if I met the criteria for enrolling…”

Race: Lessons Learned

Diversity is a challenging issue because some groups are either

culturally or structurally empowered or disadvantaged due to their:

Race Ethnicity Religion Language Handicapping conditions Gender Sexual orientation Social class Citizenship status

Any questions

• Maraming Salamat Po!

Send me an email at:

jose_lalas@redlands.edu

Dr. Jose Lalas

University of Redlands

School of Education Professor of Literacy and Teacher Education Director, Center for Educational Justice