Finding strategies to bring Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers into the profession

Abstract

Across the United States, traditional university-based teacher preparation programs tend to enroll disproportionately large numbers of white students. In recent years, many of those programs have ramped up their efforts to diversify their enrollments. Further, a number of other pathways into the profession have become prominent, and advocates hope that some of them will bring more diverse populations into the teacher workforce.These include the many grow-your-own programs established by states and districts, which aim to recruit new teachers from the ranks of paraeducators and teacher aides (Abbate-Vaughn & Paugh, 2009); community activists (Skinner, Garreton, & Schultz, 2011), and high school students (Goings & Bianco, 2016). Further, they include various federally funded initiatives such as the Mini-Corps Teacher Assistant Program (which aims to recruit bilingual educators; Ginsberg, Gasman, & Samayoa, 2018); teacher residency programs (LiBetti & Trinidad, 2018); alternative certification programs (Gist, 2017), and programs that focus on increasing the number of men in the educator workforce (Jones, Holton, & Joseph, 2019; Waite, Mentor, & Bristol, 2018). However, as it pertains to Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers, the research into these kinds of programs has aimed mostly to keep track of who participates in them to see which of them tend to enroll a particularly diverse population of teaching candidates. To date, relatively few studies have examined how those programs are designed and implemented to see how responsive they are to the needs, interests, and motivations of potential Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers. Two important strands of research on the recruitment of Teachers of Color have recently emerged, one focusing on the recruitment of high school students and the other on eorts by schools and districts to recruit college and university students enrolled in preservice teacher education programs. Six recent studies on recruitment, described at greater length in the Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (Gist & Bristol, forthcoming, 2022), expand the research base in this area.