Culturally Relevant Teacher Residencies: It’s Just Good Teaching

By Jacquelyn Ollison, Ed.D. and Jeanna Perry

Teacher residency programs are culturally relevant. They are a vital part of teacher preparation. They provide a culturally relevant space for residents to learn about teaching, build relationships, and gain an understanding of their students. From a programmatic perspective, residency programs are spaces where residents in California, the majority of whom are people of color, experience teacher preparation designed to help them succeed with diverse populations of students. Let us tell you why.

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, a keynote speaker at the CA Teacher Residency Lab End-of-Year Symposium (April 27–28, 2023), discusses what effective preparation of teachers of diverse students should include in her book Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Asking a Different Question (Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Series).

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “must-haves” for teacher education are present in many aspects of an effective teacher residency program. We will attempt to make the connection between Dr. Ladson-Billings must-haves and what residency programs entail as outlined in the Lab Updated — Characteristics and Evidence of an Effective California Teacher Residency. Read on to learn more.

According to Dr. Ladson Billings, an effective preparation program should include the following:

Culturally relevant pedagogy that is based on a student’s academic success, cultural competence development, and the ability to critique cultural norms and values that lead to inequalities. (p.47)

• Teacher Residency Characteristic Link (#1): Residency programs work to define and advance equity and justice at all levels of the residency. This includes working to ensure that California’s powerfully prepared, diverse, and thriving teacher workforce advances educational equity and justice, providing the learning support that ensures every student reaches their full potential academically, socially, and emotionally. In addition, it includes formal, consistent, and institutionalized spaces to discuss equity and justice work, as well as articulating clear goals to diversify the workforce and tackle opportunities of practice related to local issues of inequity.

Restructured field experiences should embed the educator-to-be in the community so that they better understand the daily lives of the students they will teach and thus become more adept at “Learning to see students with strengths as opposed to seeing them solely as having needs.” (p. 112)

• Teacher Residency Characteristic Link (#9): Residents are grouped at schools with the school district as they engage in their year-long residency. Clustering helps residents understand the school district and community while learning to teach. They are then prioritized in hiring at the school district.

Reexamination of coursework to center more diverse voices in the literature will help novice teachers see the students of color that they will eventually serve as scholars while making the work more meaningful overall. (p.115)

• Teacher Residency Characteristic Link (#7): In residency programs, coursework, and professional learning opportunities are tightly integrated with clinical practice. Partnerships, residents, and mentors work together to understand and examine ways in which racism shows up in grading systems, perpetuates and masks inequities, and discredits improvements made by students over time.

Drawing on the expertise of teachers. That is, “the place to find out about classroom practices is the naturalistic setting of the classroom and from the lived experiences of teachers…Their unique perspectives and personal investment in good practice must not be overlooked.” (p. 53)

• Teacher Residency Characteristic Link (#6 & #8): Residents engage in a full year of clinical practice teaching alongside an accomplished mentor teacher. All residents are mentored by accomplished mentor teachers who reflect the school district and the community’s unique diversity. They use their knowledge and expertise to ensure residents can address issues of equity, bias, and access to standards-based curriculum, in collaborative problem-solving and reflection, self-assess and co-assess practice based on evidence, set professional goals, monitor progress, and ground the critical analysis of teaching practice in student experience and learning.

Culturally relevant pedagogy has helped shape teacher residency programs by creating a focus on culturally responsive teaching. Teacher residency programs prepare teachers to use their unique understanding of their students’ cultures and backgrounds to help them learn. By emphasizing the importance of culturally relevant instruction, these programs are better able to help teachers create learning environments that are inclusive and equitable.

Dr. Ladson-Billings’s body of work articulates many more ways to engage in good teaching. Her contributions to education have helped thousands of teachers understand how best to work with African American students, Latinx students, Indigenous students, and other students of color.

Culturally relevant teaching helps all teachers recognize and honor the sanctity of each child’s culture while simultaneously using it “to empower students, intellectually, socially, emotionally and politically.” (Ladson-Billings, 2009).

Thank you for sharing your wisdom with all of us. And thank you for speaking at our symposium.

If you are a teacher residency practitioner (school district or university), advocate, or partner, join us at our end-of-year symposium, where Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is a keynote speaker.

Works Cited

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Asking a Different Question (Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Series) Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. John Wiley & Sons.

Jacquelyn Ollison, Ed.D. and Jeanna Perry are Co-directors of the California Teacher Residency Lab.