Chezare A. Warren

Conflicts and Contradictions: Conceptions of Empathy and the Work of Good-Intentioned Early Career White Female Teachers

Empathy is theorized to help teachers build strategic student–teacher relationships, develop productive parent partnerships, and acquire professionally informed social and cultural perspectives of students and families. However, this literature offers little empirical evidence regarding how practicing teachers conceive of and enact empathy in their work with students of color in urban schools. This article examines early career White female teachers’ conceptions or beliefs about empathy, and how those conceptions inform their professional decision making. Findings suggest several conflicts and contradictions exist between teacher participants’ conceptions of empathy’s relevance to her teaching, and what they do in their actual teaching practice.

Making it relevant: how a black male teacher sustained professional relationships through culturally responsive discourse

Abstract What we know about the experiences of black teachers is limited, especially considering the vast amount of research conducted on and about black boys and young men. This article describes and analyzes how a black teacher at a suburban high school in the Midwestern United States negotiated professional relationships through culturally relevant discourse. Anthony Bell was the only black male teacher participating in a classroom discourse analysis study group at a diverse suburban high school. Throughout the course of the semester, Anthony’s stated objective for learning discourse analysis was to understand, structure, and facilitate more productive conversations with a struggling student teacher he was mentoring. Yet Anthony also used his discursive inquiry to “trouble the water” in his classroom and in the study group workshops. Participation in the study group provided Anthony with metalinguistic tools to critique his interactions with his students, student teacher, and professional peers. Anthony’s analyses of his own teaching, his student teacher’s work, the study group, and the school index themes in critical and critical race theory in education. As he became a teacher researcher, Anthony reported a greater sense of professional self-efficacy, eventually facilitating a successful workshop at a national teacher conference. Anthony’s case is an exemplar of the unique and critical role of black men who teach, as well as the imperative of practitioner research within the current climate in teacher education.

Being Black, Being Male, and Choosing to Teach in the 21st Century: Understanding My Role, Embracing My Call

Teaching has been a passion of mine from an early age. Making the decision to teach was challenging enough without the hardships of completing my degree as a race and gender minority in the elementary education program at a predominately White institution. Nor was I prepared to manage the many challenges associated with transition into the teaching profession. This chapter is a memoir of a few significant lessons learned during my teacher preparation and early professional teaching practice. Specific recommendations are made to support Black males’ ability to: build and cultivate professional relationships with school stakeholders; capitalize on the range of professional opportunities available in the field of education; and sustain an impactful career in K-12 teaching. Finally, this narrative is revelation of the personal and professional perspectives useful to individual(s) desiring to better recruit, retain, prepare, support, and nurture Black males aspiring to teach.

Empathy, Teacher Dispositions, and Preparation for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy:

Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) offers elaborate empirical and theoretical conventions for becoming an effective teacher of diverse youth. Empathy has been found to improve classroom teachers’ capacity to (re)act or respond to youth in ways that produce evidence of CRP. However, there are too few instructive models in teacher education that help connect teacher candidates’ knowledge of students and communities to development of efficacious physical habits, tendencies, and trends in observable behavior or teacher dispositions. The application of empathy operationalized through perspective taking is one such model useful to preparing teacher candidates to make professional decisions that produce evidence of CRP. Engaging teacher candidates in perspective taking—adopting the social perspectives of others as an act and process of knowing—invites them to obtain (and reason with) new knowledge of students and the sociocultural context where she or he will teach. Recommendations for modeling and practicing perspective taking in teacher education are discussed.

Activating student voice through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): policy-making that strengthens urban education reform

Abstract CC Vision – an urban education reform effort launched to strengthen the cradle-to-career education pipeline in Central City – provides the impetus for our use of youth participatory action research (YPAR) to gather and activate student voice in the fight for education justice. Student voice can significantly enhance the quality of policy designed to expand access to education opportunity for poor and/or youth of color attending urban schools. Fifteen youth from seven different high schools in the Central City metropolitan area spent 18 weeks participating in the Central City Youth Co-Researcher Project as co-researchers. We aim to demonstrate the tensions of facilitating YPAR projects with diverse youth, and the benefits of YPAR as a student voice initiative intended to bolster justice-oriented education research. The influence of their scholarship vis-à-vis YPAR on wide-scale education policy-making, and education reform, in Central City is discussed.

A Call to Action for Teacher Preparation Programs: Supporting Critical Conversations and Democratic Action in Safe Learning Environments

We write this editorial at a time when the political polarization in the United States and elsewhere leaves very little room for having complex and reasoned discussions that help establish trust in a diverse democracy. This is most recently evidenced by opposing views on gun control. As Hess and McAvoy (2015) state, “polarization causes distrust, and distrust causes polarization” (p. 8, citing research by McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2006). Moreover, the current polarization creates a culture where coming to a compromise that all can accept is seen as a loss for both sides, rather than as a victory for all. Reactions to recent episodes of school violence are, sadly, reflections of this growing polarization. This editorial is a continuation of conversations related to critical democracy and educational justice that have been expressed in several of our editorials (e.g., Carter Andrews, Richmond, & Floden, 2018; Richmond, Floden, Bartell, & Petchauer, 2017). These topics have continued salience given the recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and have led us to recognize the need to address critical democracy and educational justice in a more substantive way in the pages of the journal. We acknowledge that, unfortunately, school shootings are not a new phenomenon; yet, the Parkland tragedy has garnered national attention in ways that are elevating not only conversations about gun control and school safety but also other divisive issues such as free speech, environmental policy, and school choice. For these conversations to be productive and lead to democratic decisions, students must learn how to deliberate, work to understand others’ viewpoints, evaluate arguments and evidence in support of each point of view, and engage with others to reach decisions. We believe that teacher preparation programs have a moral obligation to ensure that future teachers understand how to cultivate school and classroom culture and climate that emanate humanity, dignity, and respect for all, and to ensure that teachers can support students’ ability to engage in discussions with those who hold opposing views. In this editorial, we outline three gap areas that currently exist in many teacher preparation programs. These areas are framed by three overarching questions that teacher educators and K-12 educators are asking in these challenging times: (a) How can we ensure student safety in learning environments? (b) How do we help preservice teachers (PSTs) and K-12 students develop foundational skills for critically discussing and analyzing controversial and sensitive topics? (c) How do teacher educators and teachers support students in justice movements and advocacy work that reflect the social justice mindsets and dispositions they aim to enact? We acknowledge that these questions are not easily addressed by program changes or curriculum reform. Collective structural change is required to achieve the type of transformative educational justice to which we aspire. Currently many teacher education programs are not designed with a curricular focus on issues of school safety, youth advocacy and resistance, trauma response, and cultivating teachers’ skills for facilitating conversations related to controversial and/or sensitive topics. Furthermore, many teacher educators are ill-equipped to facilitate dialogues in their classrooms on such topics, which can have implications for maintaining affirming, inclusive, and safe classrooms. Below we describe each of the gap areas facing teacher education programs and offer ways forward for teacher educators and practicing teachers as we collectively work to effectively educate all students in the current national and global sociopolitical climate.