About a week before Mother’s Day, the fifth-grade students
of Lindi Williams’ classroom are painting pastels of pink,
blue and yellow onto egg cartons. The project will soon be planted
with soil and flower seeds to be given to their mothers. Williams
watches and observes her students closely, some splattering paint
over each other, others focused on painting their pots. Inside the
classroom, her students are innocent children. Outside the
classroom, she said, her students have witnessed problems to which
they shouldn’t have been exposed. They have seen drugs in
their neighborhoods, violence in their community, sex among their
peers and the struggles of their parents trying to keep their
family afloat and alive. Williams is a second-year graduate student
in UCLA’s Teacher Education Program, in which students
simultaneously receive a master’s degree in education and a
teaching credential, then teach in a classroom for a year as part
of a pathway to becoming a career teacher. Williams has found a
comfortable outlet for her passion for teaching in the program but
still sees a few flaws because it is fairly new. But in an
environment where these issues have affected her students both
inside and outside the academic sphere, Williams, along with other
TEP students, have found hope through experiences with their
students for the progression of urban education.
A different teaching process TEP is a program
within Center X, a division of UCLA’s Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies that was created in response to a
1993 report by the University of California that described the poor
quality of education within urban areas. It shares some qualities
with Teach For America ““ an independent national organization
that also places college graduates into classrooms ““ which
has a training period of several months before the recruits are put
directly into a classroom. In contrast, TEP’s
professional-development program requires a year of training and
graduate classes to receive a teaching certificate, during which
students teach only on a weekly basis at local schools under
teacher supervision. Students then spend their second year as
full-time teachers in poor, low-income areas of Los Angeles.
Williams is already credentialed and teaches at Angeles Mesa
Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles. Her students ask
her about sex. They talk to her about growing up. They address her
about politics. With all the questions, she said no academic
preparation could prepare her for the type of responses she should
give and the relationships she has developed with her students
“They know they can come to me; they know they can trust me,
and they’ve said that to their parents,” Williams said.
“I’m real with them because they’re living very
real lives. You can’t learn how to do that.” Though she
said it has been difficult at times to talk to her children about
these subjects, what has helped her is her experience working and
teaching children, especially within the TEP program as an intern
for the credential program the previous year. The program, which
has about 320 students, promotes social justice and a combination
of research-based theories along with practice within the classroom
environment, said TEP director Eloise Lopez Metcalfe. Metcalfe said
she believes it doesn’t take just one year to become a
teacher. TEP administrators and faculty still stay in contact with
graduates to continue guidance and check up on their teaching. The
program attempts to attract students who reflect the demographics
in which they will be teaching. Currently, a third of the graduate
students are white, one third Asian and another third Hispanic or
black. The program also has field supervisors who visit the student
teachers every one or two weeks to reinforce theories and issues
they learned their first year.
A challenging environment The bell rings and it
is recess. Williams walks out of her classroom and onto the black
top of tetherball and four-square courts where her students play.
Most of the students are Latino and black, none is white or Asian.
According to Los Angeles Unified School District statistics, for
the 2005-2006 year, none of the students at Williams’ school
is white and 1.5 percent are Asian. Most of her children are
bilingual, with parents who emigrated from Latin America,
specifically El Salvador, where a civil war plagued the country
within the past decade. When it comes to state standardized
testing, Williams said her children sometimes have a disadvantage,
growing up in a mainly Spanish-speaking household without much
exposure to English but not qualifying for an English as a Second
Language exam. The elementary school where Williams teaches is
under a probationary period, receiving additional after-school
study programs to help improve their scores as it did not reach its
designated target score for state testing last year. Her students,
she said, have been under immense pressure to raise test scores but
should instead be challenged to think critically and be instructed
on topics they would be interested in learning. “You need
those scores to raise so your school can get the materials you
need. It’s very much a penalty system, not a rewarding
system,” Williams said. Williams plans to graduate with a
master’s in education this spring. As an undergraduate at UC
Berkeley, she sometimes received skepticism as to why she would
want to attend prestigious schools if she would only be pursuing a
career in teaching. “I thought this was incredible because I
was thinking, “˜Why wouldn’t we want our children to
have the best people in charge of them?'” Williams
said. “These children deserve for their teachers to have
these credentials and these degrees.” Finding a place
to make change Another TEP student found from her own life
the inspiration to take on education problems. Sarah Worley, a
second-year graduate student, grew up in a poor, rural area in
Washington, where a majority of her classmates did not pass their
classes or make it to high school. When she made it to college, she
found her passion for teaching. “I decided education would be
the best place I could try to make change,” Worley said. As a
credentialed sixth-grade teacher at the Foschey Learning Center
near USC, she wanted to go into urban education because it was
where she thought the school system needed the greatest
improvement. Worley said she notices lines drawn between racial
groups in the elementary school’s track system ““ a
designated schedule for various students to attend class during
different times of the year to ease overcrowding. She said that
though administrators might deny that they try to keep different
ethnic populations on separate schedules to alleviate possible
conflict and consequences, she sees otherwise. But at the same
time, conflict happens as groups of students come to see each other
as different, which then creates more racial tension and
boundaries, she said. Despite the negatives she sees in certain
aspects of urban education, Worley likes being able to see the
positive influences she has on her kids. She recalls one of her
students who came from an abusive household ““ the typical
class bully who would boast to protect and prove his toughness. He
would curse at her. He would throw tantrums. He would fail his
classes. She tried to offer him positive support regarding his
classwork and personal issues, carefully building a respectful
relationship. She said that he progressively began to do better in
class through her encouragement and is now passing his classes.
“He’ll be proud of his work now,” Worley
said.
Room for improvement Though the program
provides students with hands-on experience, some participants said
improvements could be made to its training courses. First-year
graduate student Erica Carducci said she has experienced
disorganization and lack of communication within her classes in the
decade-old TEP program. Though she said it is beneficial that the
program is re-evaluated every year to improve upon its flaws, it
sometimes feels as though the program is on a trial run. One of
these flaws, Worley said, is that TEP provides theoretical classes
on what one would see in the school environment, such as children
misbehaving, but does not offer classes that teach practical ways
to deal with these issues. “I wish they had a lot more
classes to help build practical skills you would use as teachers
““ building lesson plans, everyday things that you can’t
learn from theories and what scholars have to say about
education,” Worley said. Williams added that the program
preaches to keep the students’ experiences in teaching at the
forefront but doesn’t provide classes that allow them to do
that. “They’re always teaching us to teach curriculum
that’s relevant to our students, and then at the same time
they’re not necessarily doing that for the classes on our
end,” Carducci said. Metcalfe said TEP distributes annual
surveys that allow their students to provide criticism and suggest
changes the programs can make to better accommodate them. The
program also offers focus groups so students can express what
courses are or are not benefiting them in the classroom. “We
carefully look at how students assess the program and that informs
our decisions about what should be changed,” Metcalfe said.
She added that many graduate-program alumni conclude in later years
that those theories eventually helped them better teach their
students and understand classroom behavior, even if they
weren’t helpful immediately.
Education as a mission As Carducci looks around
Dorsey High School where she teaches ninth-grade English, she
notices the mess and overflowing trash on her campus. She said the
bathrooms are not clean and that there is a lack of computers for
her students to use. Because the facilities are poorly maintained,
Carducci said it’s not very motivating for students to come
to school since it makes some feel like they’re not being
taken care of by the state as much as other students. “You
get the most funding when you have the best attendance. We have a
hard time keeping kids in school here because there’s so many
issues outside of school that they have to deal with,”
Carducci said. Some students at Dorsey High School have probation
officers; others deal with gang problems. This sort of neighborhood
and surroundings, Carducci said, creates an environment where
students go home thinking about how they are going to make it
through the next day, not about the homework they have due.
Carducci said one of the biggest problems facing urban education is
the lack of qualified teachers in the field, with some students
currently working in education more as a method of income rather
than having a passion for teaching. “But I work in education
as a mission. It’s my mission that these children are our
future, and if we can better influence our youth here, our society
will eventually be much better in the future,” Carducci said.
Hoping to provide her students with a window into their futures,
Carducci’s exercise for one recent day is a poetry activity
where students write about what they want to do after they graduate
from college. They describe what their futures smell, taste and
feel like. For another project, students compile pictures and
memorabilia of the college they want to go to. They write letters
to the university and request application information as well as
memorabilia from the college for their project. One student says he
wants to go to Duke University. One wants to go to USC. Another
wants to go to UCLA.