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Aspiring Educators
The mission for the Center for Urban Education is to improve the academic and social success of urban students through the development of the next generation of education teachers and leaders.
To address the challenges of recruiting students to teach in urban schools, TCU’s Center for Urban Education is joining forces with the Fort Worth Independent School District through the Aspiring Educators Initiative. This collaborative effort is being implemented in three targeted schools: Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Polytechnic, and Oscar Dean (O.D.) Wyatt High Schools.
These three schools were selected because they are predominately minority, inner city schools located in a large urban district. The key word here is minority. Although there is a teacher shortage among the majority population, the shortage becomes acute among the minority population. There is also a racial-ethnic gap between students and teachers. As more opportunities have opened for students of color, more of them have decided to major in other areas and not in the traditional education major of their parents and grandparents.
Increasing the number of people of color in the teaching force has many benefits. Teachers of color are likely to provide positive role models to children (Clewell and Villegas, 1998), empower children of color to succeed in school (Cummins, 2001), build bridges and a cultural match between the students’ home and school (Tyrone, 2001), and are more likely to be willing to work in urban settings than white teachers (Darling-Hammond and Scher, 1996).
While the overall goal of the Aspiring Educators Initiative is to increase the total number of students who aspire to be educators, it is hoped that through this recruitment effort, the pool of minority students will increase significantly. Participants selected for this initiative are junior and senior students in the targeted schools who have expressed an interest in the teaching profession. A total of 75 students, 25 from each of the targeted schools are identified and recruited for participation.
A TCU student hosts a question/answer period for Aspiring Educators
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