Are you thinking about becoming a teacher? You are considering one of the most important, most demanding, and most gratifying professions. The Rutgers-Newark Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) will prepare and guide you to become an exemplary urban teacher!
The Teacher Education Program at Rutgers-Newark is embedded in a university, part of whose mission is to “reverse the decline of Newark as a metropolitan center and to work with other local university partners to contribute to Newark’s revitalization” (http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/provost/index.php?sId=mission). Preparing teachers who can assist in the transformation of the Newark Public Schools is a crucial contribution to the revitalization of the city. The Rutgers-Newark Urban Teacher Education Program is the only teacher preparation program in New Jersey with the sole mission of improving education in New Jersey’s urban schools. State Education Commissioner Lucille Davey frequently cites the Rutgers-Newark Teacher Education Program as one of the state’s strategies in her plan to address the ongoing problem of equity between urban and non-urban schools (www.nj.gov/njded/data/ht/06/plan.pdf). All readings, texts, and clinical experiences of students in our program are built upon research in and for urban schools.
The Rutgers-Newark Urban Teacher Education Program is a 36-credit curriculum. Our teacher candidates major in a liberal arts and science at Rutgers-Newark or New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). We are in agreement with Kati Haycock at Education Trust that, “if we but took the simple step of assuring that poor and minority children had teachers of the same quality as other children, about half of the achievement gap would disappear.”
We prepare our teacher candidates with a curriculum informed by current research as well as the New Jersey Professional Standards for Teachers. This professional preparation is grounded in the social foundations of education. Consistent with the creation of this field of inquiry at Columbia University in the 1930s, we integrate philosophy, history, and sociology of education throughout our program and challenge our candidates to think critically about the purposes of schooling in a democratic society. We want our candidates to develop foundational dispositions that include a commitment to social justice, emphasizing the ways that teachers can foster a more just society. We nurture this commitment by engaging our students in critical examination of how injustice is fostered both structurally and culturally inside and outside of schools. This commitment includes far more than seeking to level the playing field and increasing academic achievement; it includes repositioning our students to be able to reposition their students as powerful agents and co-creators of the learning process.
We challenge our students with an academically rigorous curriculum. We also challenge them with an intensely personal learning experience where they are required to critically narrate their past educational journeys to uncover their assumptions and contradictions about the teaching and learning process and about urban schools, urban students, and urban education, to create a clearing for the development of more complex personal and theory-based professional knowledge, and to begin fashioning a philosophy of education that will guide their future practice. We want our teacher candidates to know themselves as scholars who are educated as critical thinkers with the ability to diagnose unique and complicated situations and create original solutions to these problems. Teachers who know themselves as scholars are far more likely to nurture their students to know themselves as scholars. Nurturing this identity and developing the academic skills it requires, necessitates careful attention to the needs of our students, and positive modeling of practices we want our students to engage with their future students. We model forms of critical, constructivist, and culturally responsive pedagogy; and educational practice that foster the all-around growth of all students, what John Dewey referred to as the “moral meaning of democracy.” Our candidates are prepared for the following: to understand the highly politicized reform environments they will work in; to create democratic learning environments; to hold high expectations of learning and achievement for all of their students and build supportive relationships to facilitate the achievement of those expectations; to work collaboratively with school, family, and community partnerships; and to listen with open hearts and minds to what would constitute a meaningful life for each student, all the while basing their decision-making on the strong research base available in the field of urban education.
"Newark Southern Sunset" courtesy of JG Russel May 2002. |
