Exploring the impact of an urban teacher education program on teachers' professional practices

The majority of the teacher preparation programs in the US adhere to a traditional curriculum that includes foundational work, liberal arts classes, methods courses, and student teaching (Boyer & Baptiste, 1996; Kozleski, Gonzalez, Atkinson, Lacy, & Mruczek, 2013). Unfortunately, this approach rarely provides sudent teachers with opportunities to explore the role that culture plays in identity, learning, and community building--activities that are considered hallmarks of culturally responsive teaching (Artiles & Kozleski, 2007). To address this issue, Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) was created in 2010. UTEP was a one-year program designed to better prepare teachers currently in the classroom to work with children who have been marginalized. The present study examined the opportunities that UTEP provided for teachers to interrogate their own thinking about issues related to (1) identity, (2) culture, (3) learning, and (4) assessment, and the impact it has had on their professional practices in urban settings four years later. To understand if the teachers' experiences in UTEP were transformative and sustained this study addressed one primary question: In what ways have teachers professional practices changed as a result of being in UTEP? Using a grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) lens, the study used a constant comparative method (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) in which codes were developed, categorized, and analyzed to identify themes. The teachers were interviewed, their classroom teaching practices were observed, and their applied projects (archived documents) were examined. Thematic analysis (Riessman, 2008) was used for the applied projects to categorize themes during each semester across all participants. The study revealed that as a result of UTEP all five teachers' made a transformation in their thinking, which is still maintained today and continues to impact their professional practices.