Community Immersion for Homegrown Teachers: Learning “There are Never Just Negatives…”

Abstract

The authors describe an initiative between an urban public school district, a city college, and a college of education to establish a pipeline of teachers of color from and for the school district. The qualitative research occurred during the teacher candidates’ participation in a community immersion program. Centering the teacher candidates’ experiences and reactions to the community immersion highlights their identity, commitment to teaching, and the importance of exposing homegrown teachers to communities beyond their own. The authors discuss community-based curriculum in the preparation of teachers and consider how the experiences of teacher candidates of color impact program implementation.

You shouldn’t be a teacher, because the kids are too much to deal with, especially here in the city of Chicago.

Hearing discouraging comments like the one above will not dissuade a group of Chicago public high school graduates from pursuing their goal of becoming teachers. They are earning their college degrees and teaching credentials as part of an emergent teacher preparation program intended to create a pipeline of teachers of color who will teach in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Teach Chicago Tomorrow (TCT) is a collaborative effort between CPS, City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), and three 4-year higher education institutions, designed to recruit and prepare annual cohorts of CPS students to become teachers. The initiative resembles other such efforts (Goings & Bianco, 2016; Hill & Gillette, 2005; Irizarry, 2007; Skinner et al., 2011; Williams & Skinner, 2022) but is unique in that it strives for long-term systemic change through institutionalization. TCT is not limited in duration by external funding agreements, but rather the original participating institutions aim to sustain the pipeline over time.

TCT was conceptualized during the 2020–2021 academic year as schools were beginning to reopen following the pandemic closures and as the national teacher shortage began attracting mainstream attention (Fortin & Fawcett, 2022; Mather, 2020; Treleaven, 2020). Prior to this public attention, teacher preparation institutions and school districts had been working to address not just the looming teacher shortage, but more specifically the shortage of teachers of color (both general and special educators) and bilingual teachers that has long plagued the profession. While programs addressing the issue have been implemented for years (Goings & Bianco, 2016; Irizarry, 2007; Patton et al., 2003; Skinner et al., 2011; Williams & Skinner, 2022), discrepancies between the number of students of color and the number of teachers of color persist and are exacerbated through attrition and school closings in urban districts, including Philadelphia (Steinberg & MacDonald, 2019), Detroit (Wilson et al., 2023; Zernike, 2016), New Orleans (Lincove et al., 2017), Milwaukee (Lee & Lubienski, 2017), and Chicago, where in 2013, 50 schools were closed, impacting majority Black students and teachers (Lee & Sartain, 2020; Todd-Breland, 2018). This comports with Ewing and Green's (2022) broad review of the research on school closings, concluding that the majority of school closings impact Black students in what Milner (2012) and others describe as urban-intensive districts. It follows and is supported by evidence that the teachers in those closed schools were Black (Hill & Jones, 2021).

Urban-intensive school districts share characteristics beyond their size and density, including out-of-school contexts and sociopolitical factors, such as school closings, that impact education (Milner, 2012; Welsh & Swain, 2020). Furthermore, school closings may be the result of many such external issues converging in communities. Research shows that in Chicago, the communities most affected by school closings had higher rates of crime, unemployment, and housing instability (de la Torre et al., 2015). Understanding Chicago as the site of extensive school closings that more than 10 years later remain part of the public consciousness and discourse (Brown & Ervin, 2024; Wilson, 2024) is an important context in which we may view TCT as a corrective response initiated by the district. We also conceive TCT as an active effort at systemic change designed to address the attrition of teachers of color in Chicago that contributes to educational inequities at all levels of schooling, and in particular, teacher preparation. However, the systemic change we seek must include an examination and revision of the teacher preparation curriculum to not only include but make foundational the characteristics of urban-intensive schools and their unique social and cultural contexts, including the sociopolitical forces that result in communities characterized by negative stereotypes. The TCT initiative aims to attract local high school students to the teaching profession and provide a clear pathway to employment, year after year.

Throughout the yearlong implementation of TCT, it will be crucial to not only document administrative decisions and curricular practices but also the lived experiences of the TCT students as they progress from CPS high school students to college students, to CPS teachers. The questions guiding the research project are as follows:

What structures, policies, and practices support the establishment of a pipeline of teachers of color from and for an urban school district?

What challenges or obstacles threaten the successful implementation of the program and/or student success (retention to graduation and teaching job in CPS)?

In this paper, we focus on a specific curricular practice, summer community immersion, and explore its impact on TCT students and what we, as teacher educators learned from them.

Literature Review

TCT evolved out of a need identified by the school district to increase the number of teachers of color to better reflect the student population. The goal is supported by research on same-race teachers, and it is widely understood that students of color benefit from having teachers who speak their language and share their cultural and racial identity (Alcalá et al., 2022; Dee, 2005; Redding, 2019; Villegas & Irvine, 2010). The implementation of TCT relies on research on teacher pipelines and Grow Your Own (GYO) teacher programs (Gist et al., 2019; Leech et al., 2019; Skinner et al., 2011), which may or may not focus on the preparation of teachers of color.

Same-Race Teachers

Educators have long considered the impact of cultural and/or racial mismatch between teachers and students, and research on the topic demonstrates the negative perceptions that White teachers have regarding the behavior and school performance of Black students (Dee, 2005; Downey & Pribesh, 2004). Further studies examine the effectiveness of same-race teachers in meeting the academic and socioemotional needs of Black and Latinx students and in a review of such research, Redding (2019) concluded that same-race teachers perceive Black and Latinx students more positively in terms of both behavior and academic ability than do White teachers. Additionally, Black students demonstrate improved achievement when assigned a Black teacher (Redding, 2019). In their literature review, Villegas and Irvine (2010) concluded that empirical research “suggests that students of color accrue academic benefits when taught by a same-race teacher or when exposed to a teaching force (at the school or district level) that is racially/ethnically representative of the student population” (p. 180). They went on to identify five practices that contributed to student success. These teaching practices include high expectations for students, culturally relevant teaching, caring relationships, confronting issues of racism, and advocacy for students (Villegas & Irvine, 2010). For Latinx students, the importance of same-race and same-language teachers means they have teachers who understand “…that Latinx communities possess cultural and linguistic attributes that should be acknowledged, included, and affirmed in the classroom” (Alcalá et al., 2022, p. 777). Significantly, when considering the impact of a teacher pipeline program like TCT, research also demonstrates that there is a long-term impact for students, particularly Black males, of having a same-race teacher, thus impacting college aspirations (Gershenson et al., 2022). The persisting discrepancy between the number of teachers of color and the number of students of color in districts like Chicago, where most students are Black and Latinx, means that students’ academic and socioemotional needs largely continue to go unmet.

The positive impact teachers of color have on same-race students is well established, as is the need for more Black and Latinx teachers, particularly in urban school districts. Despite this, enrollment in colleges of education remains largely White and female, and the curriculum reflects that (Sleeter, 2001, 2017), often discounting the cultural and linguistic assets of Black and Latinx teacher candidates (Morales, 2018). Lack of interest in the teaching profession may be due in part to the Whiteness of teacher education (Sleeter, 2017), access to other, more lucrative career opportunities (Goings & Bianco, 2016), and the public disparagement of teachers and the teaching profession. However, barriers that limit access to 4-year teacher preparation institutions, including financial and academic, also contribute to low enrollment. Additionally, costly state-wide mandated tests, required for admission and licensure, also serve as a barrier for students of color (Goings & Bianco, 2016; Irizarry, 2007; Williams & Skinner, 2022).

Grow Your Own Teachers

Efforts to increase interest and create access for students of color, including several collaborations between colleges of education, school districts, and/or community-based organizations (CBOs), have emerged in recent years. Several of these programs are referred to as GYO teacher programs because they focus on recruiting and preparing teacher candidates from and for a specific city or geographic area. One GYO initiative in Illinois focused on recruiting and preparing non-traditional aged teacher candidates, who often have other school employment experience (teacher aides, coaches, tutors, etc.) or connections with CBOs (Skinner et al., 2011). A review of the research on GYO programs identifies two approaches to developing a pipeline of teachers of color (Gist et al., 2019). One strategy is referred to as “community-driven” and the other as a “pre-collegiate pipeline” (p. 14). TCT has elements of both approaches, although it fits more accurately into the pre-collegiate descriptor, based on the students recruited and served.

TCT recruitment efforts, focused on Black males and bilingual Latinx high school students, distinguish it from most programs identified in the research as pre-collegiate (Gist et al., 2019). Furthermore, recruitment efforts are not focused on the best and brightest students from select enrollment high schools in the district, but rather on students who attend high schools in communities identified as under-resourced who want to return to teach in those same communities and schools (Brantlinger, 2020). Milner and Howard (2013) contend that this approach may contribute to a counternarrative that disrupts the notion of who can be an effective teacher. In addition to disrupting the idea of who can be an effective teacher, TCT also aims to disrupt traditional teacher preparation curriculum and borrow practices from so-called “community- driven” (Gist et al., 2019, p. 14) GYO programs that center the “community cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2005, p. 77) of non-traditional teacher candidates, thus viewing cultural and linguistic diversity as strengths on which to prepare teachers.

In this effort, the quality and content of the teacher preparation program become as important as the number of Black and Latinx students the program enrolls and retains. According to Morales (2018), “teacher preparation programs recruit for diversity but seldom are equipped to support CLD pre-service teachers in using their cultural and linguistic assets in purposeful and effective instruction” (p. 358). Understanding and having witnessed this, we must enact culturally sustaining pedagogy in the TCT teacher preparation curriculum that will build upon teacher candidates’ inclination to “give back to communities” (Quiñones, 2018, p. 35) and not replicate the status quo in teacher preparation.

Conceptual Framework

The rationale and structure of TCT are grounded in the literature on same-race teachers and GYO programs. The foundation for the curriculum of urban teacher preparation, and specifically TCT, lies in the concepts of community teachers (Murrell, 2001), funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). This is an approach that is asset-based, both in our beliefs about the communities where we work and the students we teach.

Community Teachers

Attracting and recruiting students of color from CPS is the initial task of the program, but representation is not enough, and “Recruiting teachers of color, yet failing to prepare them to promote educational equity, does little to alter a system of education characterized by significant disparities in opportunity and achievement” (Irizarry, 2007, p. 91). Furthermore, research demonstrates that “teacher candidates of color are not intrinsically ready to teach students of color” (Chávez-Moreno et al., 2022, p. 173). In designing the community immersion curriculum, we did not assume that the TCT students, the majority of whom are Black and Latinx and from different neighborhoods in the city, possessed the cross-cultural or even cross-community knowledge and awareness needed to connect with and effectively teach students in CPS. Warren's (2021) description of his own experience teaching Black students on the West Side of Chicago, when he is from the South Side is a testament to this. He writes that it was assumed that he “automatically knew what was best for every student on day one of school, even though I’d never met them” (p. 25). We resisted assumptions about the TCT students and looked to Murrell's (2001) framework for developing community teachers. A community teacher “possesses contextualized knowledge of the culture, community, and identity of the children and families he or she serves and draws on this knowledge to create the core teaching practices necessary for effectiveness in diverse settings” (Murrell, 2001, p. 52).

Grounding our work in Murrell's (2001) concept of a community teacher, we understand that the TCT students bring contextual knowledge of their Chicago communities, as well as their own experiences as CPS students, with them to the teacher preparation program. Their “funds of knowledge,” defined by Moll et al. (1992) as “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of skills” (p. 133) are the foundation on which teacher education faculty must enact and teach culturally sustaining pedagogy, anti-racist teaching practices, and collaboration with families and the school community. These approaches that capitalize on students’ sociocultural backgrounds, skills, and experiences also serve to model what we want TCT students to believe in and practice as teachers of Black and Latinx students. The bilingual teacher candidates will also learn the complex skills necessary to teach in bilingual and dual language classrooms.

Much of the teacher candidates’ teaching and learning will occur in coursework, but just as important will be the learning that happens through professional development designed to engage them in the examination of distinct Chicago communities and reflection of their own educational backgrounds both inside and outside of schools. Yosso's (2005) conceptualization of community cultural wealth encompasses the knowledge and skills that students possess that often go unrecognized in schools and teacher preparation programs. Framing TCT students’ Chicago communities and their experiences as locales of community cultural wealth will serve to disrupt traditional teacher preparation because it will center their experiences. While the university where we work, Illinois State University (ISU), has been implementing immersive community programming for years, too few homegrown Chicago students have participated as undergraduates.

Research Methods

The Chicago Context

Over 15 years ago, ISU, which is not located in Chicago, established a presence in the district in an effort to attract and prepare its graduates to teach in CPS. Grant funding supported this new urban education initiative, which included a summer community immersion program in Chicago neighborhoods and schools for undergraduate teacher candidates. As part of the initiative, an increased number of teacher candidates began to complete student teaching in CPS, in either a semester- or yearlong program. The summer community immersion program relied on collaborative relationships with CBOs and community members, including parents of CPS students. The relationships that ISU staff and faculty established and continue to maintain with community members provide an insider perspective that supports an asset-based urban teacher preparation curriculum. While the ISU urban education initiative resulted in a greater number of graduates working as teachers in CPS, most of those teachers were White and female, and very few were from Chicago.

Although ISU has failed to institutionalize and maintain the formerly grant-funded urban education programs, TCT will provide a pathway into the teaching profession for students of color graduating from CPS high schools, who will ultimately graduate from ISU with a degree in elementary education. TCT students will begin their college careers attending a CCC for 2 years and then transfer to ISU's Elementary or Bilingual Education Programs, which will offer classes in Chicago. This trajectory will allow students to study at home and incur fewer expenses for housing while ensuring and facilitating their transfer to the 4-year teacher preparation institution.

In CPS, 83% of the students are Black or Latinx and 49% of the teachers are White (Illinois State Board of Education, 2022), and a shift in commitment to prepare Black and Latinx teachers for CPS is overdue for ISU, the largest preparer of teachers in the state. Chicago is often noted as the epicenter of neoliberal school reform that resulted in school closings amidst the proliferation of charter schools (Todd-Breland, 2018, 2022), which disproportionately impacted schools with a majority of Black students and teachers (Lee & Sartain, 2020). It is important to consider that the TCT students experienced those school closings in their neighborhoods and witnessed the emergence of the activist Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which fought (and continues to fight) for better learning conditions for CPS students and communities. Their lived experiences as Chicago residents and CPS students provide a promising foundation on which to prepare teachers. Within the context of the TCT program, the research discussed in this paper is grounded in the students’ lives and examines how they experienced the summer community immersion program that is a curricular component of their preparation as ISU teacher candidates.

The understanding is important to us, as teacher educators, because for years we implemented community immersion programming in Chicago for campus-based ISU teacher candidates and faculty. Initially, we questioned the need to include the community immersion in the TCT curriculum and then wondered how to adapt the curriculum and embed experiences for our local TCT students. We understood that the impact of the community immersion on the first cohort of TCT students would inform all future implementation, so evaluation is crucial. Furthermore, as Chicagoans ourselves, we had an inherent interest in TCT students’ reactions to the community immersion, and we looked forward to hearing and learning from them.

The first cohort of TCT students was recruited during the Covid-19 pandemic while the entire CPS district was teaching and learning remotely. Recruitment efforts were limited to informational emails sent to high school principals and counselors, which they then shared with seniors. Due in part to the remote recruitment and the fact that the partnering institutions were “building the plane while flying,” as one CPS employee put it, the first cohort was small, well under the goal of enrolling 100 CPS graduates each year. Once enrolled in the City College, TCT participants chose one of two pathways; one led students to ISU, and the other option allowed students to transfer to one of the local universities. There were 23 students in the first TCT cohort overall. By the summer of 2022, nine students remained in the first ISU cohort.

Data Collection

This is an ongoing qualitative ethnographic study, and the data included and discussed here are a subset of data collected during summer 2022. This study examines the first cohort of TCT students’ participation in and reactions to the summer community immersion program. The methods employed included participant observation, document review, survey, and interviews.

The first summer community immersion program was modeled on ISU's previous urban education initiative and relied on established relationships with community leaders and members. In collaboration with members from a CBO in each partner neighborhood, ISU's staff in Chicago designed the 9-day program, which took place over a 3-week period. TCT students explored and experienced different Chicago neighborhoods and learned from community leaders in each one. In addition to community visits, culturally responsive teaching and restorative practices were introduced and modeled as approaches to implement in their future classrooms. This initial immersion in Chicago neighborhoods introduced the TCT students to what it means to be a community teacher (Murrell, 2001).

As participant observers during the summer community immersion, we had different roles. While one of us facilitated the community visits and activities, the other attended all nine sessions, observing and participating occasionally. At the outset of the summer community immersion program, we sent a survey to all the enrolled students, which included informed consent documentation, requesting demographic information, and asking open-ended questions about prior school experience. The survey responses helped us learn more about the students, their educational backgrounds, and perceptions of teaching. This knowledge informed the open-ended interviews that we conducted with the students who consented to participate in the study. We conducted one interview with each consenting participant over Zoom, outside of the scheduled community immersion events. We recorded the interviews with captions, which produced a transcript, that we later reviewed for accuracy. Document review included the evaluations completed at the end of each session and artifacts the students created while completing activities. Additionally, all the TCT students completed a final summative evaluation about specific immersion experiences they felt were most impactful.

Positionality

We are Chicagoans and former CPS teachers who share a commitment to the city and the public schools with the TCT students. Elizabeth Skinner identifies as a White woman, and she taught in a dual language (Spanish/English) elementary school on the north side of the city. She has been a teacher educator for over 20 years, working primarily with bilingual teacher candidates, many of them in GYO programs. Apryl Riley, who identifies as a Black woman, taught high school English at a school on the south side of Chicago. Apryl has worked in teacher induction and mentoring and the preparation of teachers for urban schools. Having both spent several years preparing ISU's primarily White and female teacher candidates to teach in CPS, we view TCT as an opportunity to change the status quo in teacher preparation, both at our institution and beyond. At the time of the study, we were both employed in the College of Education at ISU, Elizabeth as a Chicago-based faculty member and Apryl as a program manager, also based in Chicago. Our roles put us in direct contact with the TCT students even before the summer community immersion program began and we were cognizant of the real and perceived power imbalances that could influence the research. We repeatedly worked to allay those concerns, not only through the participant consent process, but also throughout the community immersion program.

Participants

Six TCT students signed consent forms to participate in the study. The research participants included five self-identified Latinx females and one self-identified Asian male. The participants hail from various Chicago neighborhoods, including two on the far north side, three from the northwest side, and one on the southeast side, all demographically different communities. The six research participants are identified by pseudonyms throughout the paper, while anonymous comments from session evaluation forms and group activities, which we reviewed as program documentation, are not attributed to specific students.

Analysis

Our ground-up approach to analysis focused on the data we collected during the summer 2022 community immersion program. LeCompte (2000) describes the need to “tidy up” (p. 148) qualitative data prior to analysis, and this was our first task. We checked the accuracy of the transcriptions of the recorded Zoom interviews by listening to the interviews and checking the audio against printed copies. Once we agreed that the transcripts were accurate, we conducted an initial microanalysis by reading them line by line (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We also read and reread our other data sources, including the open-ended survey responses, program evaluation tools, and field notes. From this “sifting and sorting” (LeCompte, 2000, p. 148), items relevant to our research questions began to emerge. Next, we each engaged in open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). When we met to discuss this first cycle of coding (Saldaña, 2013), although we had created different labels, we concurred on three initial categories: cohort/peer group, institutional support, and community. During the second cycle of coding (Saldaña, 2013), we applied the three initial categories and continued weekly data meetings. During the data meetings, we compared notes and provided “reality checks” to arrive at intercoder agreement (Saldaña, 2013). As we worked through this iterative process, the community immersion program, as a curricular practice, emerged as our central organizing category. At this point, we eliminated the inclusion of institutional support as a category because the story emerging from the data was not about the institution, but rather the students and their experiences. Through axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), we generated subcategories related to the students’ experience in the community immersion program. Those subcategories, which we identify as themes included the TCT students’ commitment to Chicago and CPS, a valuing of cultural diversity, and the significance of membership in a cohort. With the data organized according to the three themes, we were able to address our research questions as related to the summer community immersion program curriculum and describe the students’ experiences as future community teachers (Murrell, 2001).

Summer Community Immersion Curriculum

The summer community immersion program and curriculum rely on a “trilateral collaboration among community-based, university-based, and school-based partners,” as described by Murrell (2001, p. 55). As such, ISU staff, in collaboration with community and school-based partners, planned a varied and engaging schedule (see Appendix). Most days included a visit to a distinct Chicago neighborhood. The first day was spent in Albany Park, a northwest side community known as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, where 30 different languages are spoken throughout the neighborhood schools. Students met at the now closed ISU Chicago office to get acquainted and share lunch. Their first activity included learning about ISU's 15-year history of collaboration with Chicago communities. Next, students explored a historical education timeline. Designed as a gallery walk around the office, students viewed and offered quiet discussion, in the form of anonymous questions and comments on post-it notes about the history of education in the United States and concluded with the history of public education in Chicago. During the debrief, students discussed the various events that were documented and their first-hand accounts of those as CPS graduates. Next, a community partner from North River Commission, a CBO in Albany Park, shared details about the organization and history of the neighborhood. Students then went on a walking tour of the community with an emphasis on the history of the architecture and highlighting the importance of small businesses throughout. During a pause on the walk, students completed an activity at 2nd Story, an organization that hosts storytelling events in and around Chicago, where students shared their own unique stories as Chicagoans and discussed how to bring that experience into the classroom. The final stops included an introduction to Global Gardens, a community garden popular amongst immigrants in the neighborhood, and a tour of the Sculpture Garden in Peterson Park.

On the second day, students met in East Garfield Park, on the west side of Chicago. We convened at the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the largest botanical conservatories in the country and a landmark for Chicagoans. Before exploring the gardens, students circled up, a restorative justice practice we implemented and modeled throughout the summer. An ISU Chicago staff member led the talking circle that allowed students space to share their thoughts about the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which happened the previous day. Following somber and insightful comments, one which pointed out the hypocrisy of police not being willing to enter a school building to protect students from an overpoliced Latinx community, students explored the gardens on their own. The group then proceeded to Breakthrough Familyplex, home of another community partner, that serves the East Garfield Park community. Upon arrival, students were greeted by an organizer, who shared the history of the organization, and then by elementary-aged students arriving for after-school activities. The TCT students participated in two arts and crafts activities with the elementary students. The day ended with a closing talking circle, during which the TCT students took turns sharing their reflections, prompted by questions from an ISU staff member, who was leading the discussion.

During the next visit, students went to Pilsen and Little Village, both recognized as Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods in Chicago. Students met at an elementary school for a welcome circle and learned more about our partner community organization, Latinos Progresando. Next, students did a self-guided tour of the National Museum of Mexican Art, which included a special exhibit, Frida Kahlo, Her Photos. Students left the museum, and a local artist led the group on a walking mural tour around Pilsen, which is known for culturally expressive murals displayed on businesses and residences, depicting Mexican culture. After a brief snack, the day ended at the Open Center for the Arts. Students learned the purpose of the center and the impact it makes on the Pilsen/Little Village community.

The last community immersion took place in Auburn Gresham, located on the south side of Chicago. On a rainy day, students were welcomed to the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation by the community liaison at St. Sabina Church and again started the visit with an opening circle. While the rain held off for a while, students took a quick walking tour and ended with a presentation from a community member who coordinates youth programs within the neighborhood. After a snack break, students assisted with putting bags together for the upcoming Biannual Mental Health Fair and Play Streets Event. After learning about the advocacy work done in the community, students participated in a closing circle.

On days when the TCT students were not immersed in different communities, they took part in virtual professional development sessions. The first session included social-emotional learning and was provided by the organization SEL Chicago. During the 2-hour presentation, students learned the importance of social-emotional learning in building relationships with their future students and creating community within their future classrooms. A panel of family members from our partner communities then talked with the students about the importance of partnering with families in the communities where they will teach. Another virtual professional development session introduced the indigenous roots of the restorative practices the students had been experiencing at each community visit. Students learned how to implement a circle and the community and cultural significance of such a practice. On Shadow Day, students spent a day with a CPS teacher and their students. In most cases, the teacher being shadowed was the same race and taught in the same specialization area (bilingual education or elementary education) as the TCT student. The CPS teachers were also ISU graduates, who had participated in ISU's urban education programming at some point during their preparation. The TCT students also spent a day on ISU's campus to experience the support services available to students of color at the institution. The community immersion program ended with a day of professional development, reflection, and a closing circle.

Findings

The summer community immersion for TCT students was planned based on curriculum implemented and adapted over the years to meet the needs of ISU's mostly White teacher candidates, from Chicago suburbs and exurbs. This approach is a common but problematic practice in teacher education programs (Chávez-Moreno et al., 2022) that often claim to be grounded in social justice but fail “to support CLD [culturally and linguistically diverse] pre-service teachers in using their cultural and linguistic assets in purposeful and effective instruction” (Morales, 2018, p. 358). We understood that the TCT cohort members would experience the community immersion activities from their perspectives, and we revised them to some extent, not knowing at the outset how intently they identified as Chicagoans and how they experienced highly segregated Chicago communities and schools. Having a better understanding of TCT students’ identities and commitment to the city informs our future programming and course content, so that we center their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), and their lived experiences.

A Chicago Identity and Commitment: “I want to teach in CPS because I want to give back to my community.”

One theme that emerged from the data collected during the summer community immersion is TCT student identity as Chicagoans and their commitment to the city and public schools. The students’ identities were shaped by their lived experience in a city and a school system that invests in some neighborhoods and schools and under resources others. When studying the historical educational timeline on the first day of the community immersion, the students reacted to events, such as the closing of 50 schools in 2013 (Vevea, 2013) and the teachers’ strike in 2019. One post-it comment read, “Closing of the schools in our communities that really affected us; it's sad to know they would rather invest in charter schools.” During the debrief of the activity, Dana questioned the school closings she experienced, “Where I live near Riis Park, they’re building a new school, one high school; why not reopen one of the schools they closed there? They should build one someplace else.”

Outsiders may view the school closings in the abstract, but TCT students understand first-hand the pain such closings wrought in school communities, including their own. The contradiction of an administrative school closing policy “rooted in racism,” (Ewing, 2018, p. 91) with the community and stability that a school provides (Ewing, 2018) is not lost on the TCT students who witnessed the massive school closings and community reaction. One anonymous statement, written in response to a reading about the 2001 hunger strike by grandmothers in the Little Village neighborhood for a new school, read, “Hunger strikes, it's crazy the lengths people have to go in order to get heard!” A similar sentiment was expressed in response to reading about the more recent Dyett (High School) hunger strikers in 2015 (Ewing, 2018).

In spite of, or maybe because of, growing up in a system that devalued their home language and culture and closed schools in their communities (Alcalá et al., 2022; Chu, 2023; Ewing, 2018), TCT students overwhelmingly expressed a commitment to the city and public schools and admiration for their teachers. The 2019 teacher strike, during the cohort's junior year of high school, was supported, as evidenced by statements written while reviewing the timeline, such as, “I support the movement of teachers striking,” and “They are fighting for something!” The something that CTU members were fighting for in 2019 included not only salary increases but also limits on class size, school nurses, social workers, and librarians (Will, 2019). Recognizing this, one TCT student asked, “Why not do more for them?”

Having experienced school closings, teacher strikes, and systemic inequities as students, the TCT cohort members expressed solidarity with teachers and a commitment to the work of teaching in CPS. These are not teacher candidates who are saying, “I want to teach because I love kids,” and “I used to play teacher when I was little.” While those sentiments may hold true, they are shaped by their own schooling experiences within the context of a large public district and have goals for the greater good in mind. This echoes the ideals of the rank-and-file members of the CTU, whom they admire. One student summed it up thusly:

As a student in public education, I know that there are many things that our system lacks, and many future educators might shy away from teaching at public schools because of the lack of resources within the schools. Students in public schools do not have a choice on where they go to school, and I believe they all deserve a fulfilling education. I hope that I can achieve in reaching that for future students.

A Diverse and Segregated City: “I am very excited by working in schools in culturally rich communities”

One recruiting target for TCT is Latinx, Spanish, and English-speaking candidates who will earn their bilingual endorsement along with their elementary teaching license. Due to poorly implemented bilingual education throughout the district (Cardona-Maguigad, 2020), many bilingual students, including some in the TCT cohort, struggle while learning English in school. This experience served as a motivator for Elena, who explained, “After having to learn English without the support necessary to help grow my Spanish, I decided I wanted to become a bilingual teacher.”

The bilingual teacher candidates’ awareness of the systematic devaluing of their language and culture in schools demonstrates an understanding of their identities, which is part of a broader understanding of their “contextualized pedagogical knowledge” (Murrell, 2001, p. 52), a goal of the community immersion. Their understanding was countered with enthusiasm for serving a diverse student population and serving as a role model for students (Alcalá et al., 2022). Elena spent teacher shadow day at a dual language school where Spanish/English bilingualism is inherently valued. In reflecting on the experience, she stated, “My absolute favorite part was when the teacher asked me if I spoke Spanish in front of the class, and after responding yes, all the kids got super excited, and I heard a bunch of ‘yays.’ It warmed my heart.” This affirmation, by students, of her own linguistic capital (Yosso, 2005) stayed with Elena. Another TCT student, Sam, said during the discussion in Auburn Gresham that he never had any South Asian teachers who “looked like him,” and that serves as his motivation. He wants to be the same-race teacher he never experienced as a student of color in CPS.

While Chicago is a diverse city, it is also one of the most segregated. This segregation may be attributed to resident choice, but it is also the result of resource allocation and redlining. (Moser, 2017). While the TCT students have grown up in these segregated communities and schools, they expressed a value for multiculturalism and multilingualism, a testament to living in a city with a diverse population. During the interview, while talking about his high school experience, Sam exemplified this when he said, “I was really always curious to learn Arabic as a language. I think it's definitely one of the languages I’m going to need in the future, along with Chinese.”

The visits to different communities in the city nudged the TCT students out of their comfort zones and asked them to consider ways to connect understanding of culture with teaching. The visits also demonstrated how to actively pursue knowledge of communities and cultures different from their own, a requisite skill for community teachers (Murrell, 2001). For example, Dana said, “Becoming culturally aware — that's not something I’ve always thought about as I grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community. I haven’t really opened my eyes to different cultures.” This experience is supported by research that analyzed the neighborhood preferences of Black, White, and Latinx populations, which found that while the residents may decide where to live based on non-racial community factors, they prefer communities based on their level of familiarity and comfort (Bader & Krysan, 2015). Reflecting on this while processing her experience in a new community, Ana said, “You have to be okay with understanding the community you’re working in - understand that people come from different backgrounds. That's not something I’ve always thought about.”

As TCT students began to understand the importance of knowing Chicago neighborhoods outside of their own, not all of them were able to attend the more distant community immersion events. Some hesitation to venture into unfamiliar and unknown neighborhoods may have been based on stereotypes perpetuated by family, friends, and popular media. For example, during a closing circle, Dana shared that she had never been to the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods, located on the south side, because she was from the north side. Students traveled via public transit or ride share services to unknown communities and on the day we were scheduled to meet in Auburn Gresham, turnout was low. Auburn Gresham is a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago with a majority Black population. The day of our visit was cold and rainy, and that may have contributed to the low turnout, but one student explained her absence due to not being allowed to take public transit from her neighborhood to the south side community. Similarly, another student explained that her family was apprehensive about the activities we had planned in the Little Village neighborhood, which is a largely Mexican and Mexican American community. Caution on the part of families and even students was not unanticipated, and in our years of working with majority White teacher candidates, we have come to expect some resistance to spending time in unfamiliar Chicago communities. Although Ana reflected, “There are never just negatives” in any given neighborhood, such reactions confirmed the importance of the summer community immersion experiences as part of our commitment to preparing community teachers.

Cohort: “I feel like I’m not learning everything on my own”

The summer community immersion curriculum engaged TCT students in dialogue and activities during which they examined their own experiences as students within the context of the public school system and stretched their understanding of and familiarity with segregated city neighborhoods. As we (students and authors) moved through the curriculum and community visits, the small group began to feel like a cohort, and relationships evolved and deepened. While not the intent of the summer community immersion, it is an outcome worth noting and replicating as a program. For students who had completed at least some of their last 2 years of high school remotely and started college taking mostly online courses, the community immersion brought them together, in person (while masking and taking precautions). Sam noted, “I remember the first day it was like, I knew no one else except a few people from the meetings we used to have at City College. But, after like the nine days, I remember just talking with them without hesitation, and it was fun.” In addition to noting the “fun” of participating in the cohort, TCT students also feel solidarity as future teachers, a much-maligned profession. For example, one student said at the conclusion of the summer immersion, “I felt like I have people who know what I want and will help me get there. Especially because I feel like growing up as an education major, you always get people being like, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be a teacher. You’re not gonna get paid well enough’.” Her peers echoed that, stating, “I feel like I’m not learning everything on my own. And especially because I have peers that have the same goals as me. So, I feel like we’re all working together to get through all of it.” The summer community immersion went from something that had to be done to something they appreciated doing. This sense of solidarity developed over the course of the summer, during which student identity and experiences were valued and centered, is not the norm for teacher candidates of color in teacher preparation (Chávez-Moreno et al., 2022) but we consider it crucial for new teachers in urban districts (Borrero et al., 2016).

Discussion

Preparing community teachers (Murrell, 2001) requires not only a rethinking but a reenacting of teacher preparation at the institutional level. The implementation of the summer community immersion curriculum for TCT students is one way we respond to the question that Murrell (2001) poses, “How to prepare students to develop successful practice within the complexity of urban schools and communities in an era in which racism and poverty still fuel educational inequality” (p. 13). Murrell's (2001) question has guided the implementation of our community-based curriculum for years but takes on a different, and significant, urgency as we adapt our practices and curriculum to highlight the assets and meet the needs of our TCT students. In documenting the inclusion of the summer community immersion curriculum, and examining the impact of the practice on students, we began to answer our research questions. We learned that the TCT students aspire to teach in Chicago communities and public schools where they had varied, and both positive and negative, experiences. At the same time, they recognize the inequities in the system and how their home languages and cultures were devalued, they also recognize what the schools and certain teachers did for them. As one student put it, “I have depended heavily upon Chicago Public Schools throughout my childhood.”

While this commitment to CPS and expressed interest in teaching students who share their cultural and linguistic assets is an important foundation from which to start their teacher preparation program, we learned that growing up in a segregated city and schools impacted their cross-cultural competencies and experiences in different communities. Again, Murrell (2001) provides guidance and suggests that “if they do not share cultural understanding through shared membership in a cultural community, candidates must develop this understanding through other means” (p. 58). In collaboration with community partners, we designed and implemented the summer community immersion experience to do just that. In analyzing students’ responses, we conclude that it is an important curricular component to continue to include in TCT students’ preparation. However, collaboration with CBO partners and community members is crucial to the implementation of the curriculum. Our reliance on community partners and organizations is evident throughout the description of the community immersion curriculum and as teacher educators, we must continue those partnerships as we prepare teachers for those same communities.

As a result of what we now know about the TCT students’ “culturally informed mindsets” (Kazembe, 2022, p. 713) their experiences as Chicagoans and CPS students, and how they reacted and reflected upon their first community immersion experience, we consider ways to further support the development of their cross-cultural competencies and use it as a foundation for their teaching practice. For example, critically examining their preconceived notions about communities before we visit them and unpacking the origins of those misconceptions is an important exercise to add to the curriculum. This would contribute to the need to “create organizational and curricular spaces that acknowledge and capitalize on the experiences candidates of color bring to teacher preparation while simultaneously addressing their specific needs” (Chávez-Moreno et al., 2022, p. 168).

The significance of the cohort model, which fostered a sense of community for students who had recently lived through the isolation of the pandemic, was a byproduct that we realized is an important practice for TCT implementation. The next opportunity for us to do that occurred during the 2023 summer community immersion, the second for the first cohort. Community visits, activities, and interactions with community members incorporated what we learned from the teacher candidates in 2022. The community visits occurred concurrently with the students’ first ISU course, entitled “Cross-Cultural Teaching and Learning.” By focusing on community wealth (Yosso, 2005) and assets, as well as challenges, the course allowed students to explore their own identities and “cultural memory” (Kazembe, 2022, p. 715) within the cohort and their own communities, where they are not a numerical minority (Chávez-Moreno et al., 2022). Paired with the course content, the intent was that the learning taking place in the communities could be applied to their own teaching practices and observed in the classrooms of their mentor teachers. During the summer teacher shadow day, when possible, teacher candidates were matched with mentor teachers who share their linguistic and cultural background and racial identity. This will also be the case when the TCT students are assigned to mentor teachers during their yearlong internship and student teaching in their senior year. They will be matched with same-race mentors while they complete required clinical hours and student teaching in schools and communities where their students will look and sound like them.

Implications

We contend that the summer community immersion curriculum served two important outcomes relevant to teacher preparation. First, the immersion challenged TCT students to look outward and beyond their own schooling and neighborhoods, thus beginning their transformation as community teachers. Second, the immersion in unfamiliar communities, facilitated by community members and ISU staff, revealed students’ own identities and lived experiences. As a result, their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) were centered throughout the summer. As teacher educators, we learned about the TCT students while they learned about different Chicago communities.

Our description of the students’ experiences in, and reaction to, the summer community immersion highlights the importance of intentionally getting to know teacher candidates and their educational and life experiences, as well as their mindsets and dispositions toward teaching (Kazembe, 2022). Black and Latinx students bring diverse experiences and histories to teacher preparation that impact their motives to teach. Additionally, their experiences in highly segregated schools and communities within a diverse city inform who they are as teacher candidates. Knowing Black and Latinx teacher candidates leads to necessarily decentering Whiteness in teacher preparation. As a result, the language, culture, and experiences of the teacher candidates become integral to the program and curriculum.

Teacher preparation institutions can and should approach the application of these lessons differently depending upon the context and their students. For example, we implemented the community immersion curriculum again during the summer of 2023, for both the initial TCT student cohort and the incoming group. This time the first cohort focused on their own communities, in conjunction with their coursework. And while it is our intention to provide the community immersion for all TCT students every summer, the funding that supports this aspect of TCT is not guaranteed by either the university or CPS. This lack of guaranteed funding is an obstacle in both the planning and implementation of the community immersion. As a result, we find ourselves defending a curricular innovation that we feel is crucial to the success of TCT but also has broad implications for teacher preparation.

The need to justify the expense associated with implementing the summer community immersion program points to the need for both further research and policy changes at the institutional level. In their research, Gist et al. (2019) call for an expansion of GYO program descriptions to better understand the potential in such preparation strategies and our ongoing research into TCT will provide some of those necessary descriptions. As we continue to examine the implementation of TCT and the resultant student experience, additional new knowledge will be documented to include recruitment practices, cross-institutional partnership, and students’ transition to teaching in a large urban district. Additionally, we hope that our research will expand upon the understanding of the challenges 4-year teacher preparation institutions, school districts, and Black and Latinx students face in the creation and institutionalization of such a pipeline. Given the limitations of our study, including the small size of the first TCT cohort, which had only nine students, and the Chicago-specific context, we concur that more research, in different contexts and with more participants, is called for. Only with such research might teacher preparation programs consider institutionalizing such initiatives. Relying on external funding and/or individual faculty members to implement curricular innovations like the summer community immersion program maintains the tenuous status of teacher preparation designed for teacher candidates of color.

Conclusion

The first cohort of TCT students will graduate this spring and begin their CPS teaching careers in the fall of 2025. The implementation of TCT has evolved but the commitment to maintain the pipeline for teachers of color remains. The ongoing work to prepare teachers of color from and for CPS takes place within the current context of public contract negotiations between CTU and the CPS administration. Additionally, the moratorium on school closings expires in January 2025. With the issue of school closings once again in the headlines and on the conscience of those of us working in public education in the city (Wilson, 2024), we pose TCT as a hopeful response to the damage already done in communities where the need for Black and Latinx bilingual teachers persists. We undertook this research to document and understand both the effective practices and the inherent challenges in the implementation of TCT. In highlighting the summer community immersion program, our findings contribute to the understandings of practices to be considered in the implementation of programs with similar goals. However, we echo Quiñones (2018) who noted the “enduring challenges in home growing approaches to urban teacher preparation” (p. 635). TCT is supported by the partnering institutions, but that support does not necessarily include curricular innovations that center Black and Latinx teacher candidates. As we apply for grant money to support next summer's community immersion program for incoming TCT students, we remain committed to the work to provoke the systemic change needed to transform teacher education and city schools.