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Medgar Evers College Education Department Mission, Philosophy and Vision
Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York (CUNY) is a unique public higher education institution. MEC was born out of community struggle and out of the racial conflicts that tore New York City apart during the 1960’s. MEC is the only public college in which the community participated equally with the New York City Board of Higher Education in defining the College’s mission, goals, and status implies a redefinition of the relationship between “town and gown”, thereby serving the needs of the community in which it is located.
The philosophy guiding the College is rooted in the belief that education has the power to positively transform the lives of individuals and that education is the right of all individuals in the pursuit of self-actualization. The mission of Medgar Evers College is to develop and maintain high quality, professional, career-oriented undergraduate degree programs in the context of liberal education. The College offers programs at both the associate and the baccalaureate degree levels, giving close attention to the articulation between the two-year and the four-year programs. The College has a commitment to students who desire self-improvement, a sound education, an opportunity to develop a personal value system, and an opportunity to gain maximum benefits from life experience and from their environment. The motto of Medgar Evers College is “creating success, one student at a time.”
The pool of candidates for our teacher education programs consists primarily of students admitted to MEC associate degree programs, as well as educational assistants (paraprofessionals) who participate in MEC’s Worker Education and/or Continuing Education programs through the New York City Board of Education Career Ladder initiatives. MEC has the largest number and percentage of paraprofessionals who become candidates in CUNY.
There are certain characteristics of the MEC student body that make our diverse pool of candidates unique and different from the typical college population from which candidates are drawn. Consistently, candidates are older than typical college students with an average age of about 31-32 years, a median age of about 30, and over 10% above the age of 46. Only about 16% of MEC students are younger than 21. Most live and work in Brooklyn, where MEC is located. Over 90% are persons of African descent and about 30% were born outside the U.S., primarily in Jamaica, Trinidad, and/or Haiti. About 90% of first-time admitted students are placed in remedial courses in mathematics, writing and/or reading, based on their scores on CUNY Basic Skills Tests or the ACT. Approximately one third of our candidates are considered to be in need of English as a Second Language; either candidates’ native language is something other than English or candidates speak and write in Creole or a dialect version of English. Consistently, 75% to 80% of the students at MEC are female and over half receive financial aid in the form of PELL Grants (about 57%) and TAP Grants (about 40%). The majority of our candidates are working mothers.
The Education Department has committed itself to working with students whose literacy abilities may not have been developed sufficiently for them to master academic discourse. These are the same students who will be expected to pass the New York State Teacher Certification Examination and the same students who have had, since the institution of this examination, difficulty passing because of the exam’s reading and writing demands. The Education Department created special workshops designed to assist students to practice their test taking reading and writing skills; the Department has also created a reading and writing intensive section of one of its introductory courses. This latter experience is a pilot experiment that will serve to inform the Department of the feasibility of ensuring reading and writing intensive experiences for all our students in the future.
For over 30 years, Medgar Evers College has remained deeply embedded in the Central Brooklyn community that it serves and is a potent force in the community. It is with this history in mind that the Education Department contextualizes its mission, philosophy and vision, which is actualized in its Education degree programs.
The Department of Education was one of the first departments to be created when the College opened its doors in 1971. Recently, the Department implemented new programs and policies that ensure that its candidates demonstrate the academic and professional skills and competencies addressed in the New York State Teacher Certification Exam (NYSTCE) as well as the intellectual acumen and academic skills and proficiencies needed to meet Departmental standards and related Professional Standards.
Traditionally, the Medgar Evers Department of Education has provided a comprehensive, integrated, urban, multicultural educational experience for all students preparing to be teachers. The Department accepted the special obligation to prepare teachers who worked and lived within the Central Brooklyn community to promote and provide the best education for all children both within and beyond the community.
Mission
Understand
Practice
Demonstrate
Vision
The Education Department envisions successful educators who teach in diverse classrooms and schools in urban communities.
Successful educators will be:
Educators: Practicing professionals whose knowledge ranges from a solid foundation in the liberal arts and sciences to a deep understanding of self. Their practices include, but are not limited to, critical thinking and questioning and whose dispositions speak to their caring and commitment.
Success: Demonstration of the requisite Standards.
Standards: Qualities and abilities candidates acquire and master.
Demonstrate: Express and apply what has been learned.
Knowledge: Candidates’ understand liberal arts and sciences content (the what of various disciplines), concepts (the generalizations about content), and the modes and methods of inquiry (the how of various disciplines). Candidates understand how content and concepts are defined across disciplines; what questions are raised by each discipline and which research processes best characterizes each discipline. Tied to candidates’ knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences is their understanding of pedagogical knowledge: how best to teach what they know about the disciplines. Pedagogical knowledge includes understanding curriculum, practices and strategies for learning, and appropriate assessment devices.
Candidates understand who they are, including the history that preceded them and the culture that surrounds them. Having such knowledge of self allows them to be open to others and to gain understanding of others’ histories and cultures. Candidates know what is expected of them as professionals in the field of teaching, including understanding the role of education in their local communities and in the larger society.
Candidates know which professional organizations represent them, and they know how to use professional development opportunities to enrich their content and pedagogical knowledge.
Practice: Candidates engage in critical thinking and questioning, collaboratively with colleagues, parents, and the larger community, as they involve themselves in a cycle of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction achieved through their immersion in reflection and action research. Candidates use and model effective oracy, literacy and numeracy, exhibiting sophisticated uses of language and an understanding of mathematical concepts. Many of these practices are tied to, reflect, and contribute to candidates’ abilities to engage in standards-focused planning, instruction, formative, and summative evaluations and assessments. The standards to which candidates adhere include New York State Learning Standards for students and New York State standards for teachers. As candidates practice activism in their schools and communities, that is, as they engage in school-wide and community-wide issues, candidates come to know the cultures of their students. This, in turn, contributes to candidates engaging in culturally affirming pedagogy that supplies the crucial links between children’s knowledge and experience and the knowledge that candidates will be responsible to teach.
Diverse: Diverse refers not only to gender, race, ethnicity, exceptionalities, and the like, but diversity also describes the multiple perspectives, believes, and values students possess and bring to learning and growth. Sensitivity to diverseness and consciously acting to embrace diversity goes way beyond holding multicultural celebrations. The latter often pay lip service to being diverse. For the Unit’s candidates and their future students, diverse classrooms and schools means living in places that celebrate and validate differences.
Urban: The MEC Education Department is located in the heart of downtown Brooklyn, specifically in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. This area reflects characteristics commonly associated with the inner city, such as pockets of poverty and insufficient resources to support the community’s needs.
First, candidates will develop a deep understanding of themselves to interact more fully with the array of nationalities and cultures they will encounter daily in their classrooms in order to contribute to transforming the national agenda for the education of children, especially those of African descent, since the unique and significant fact about MEC is that it is a predominately Black college, the majority of whose students are of African descent. The experiences of people of African descent have often been distorted, redefined or destroyed. Through a shared commitment to a process of understanding these experiences, faculty and candidates will deconstruct, reconstruct and construct knowledge and/or generate new knowledge that more appropriately reflects the history and experiences of people of African descent as well as the multiple realities of a world that have marginalized this history and these experiences.
Secondly, in keeping with the basic tenets of John Dewey’s philosophy of democracy in education, educational settings are contexts that reflect equitable and reciprocal interactions among participants. Home, school, and community environments provide the first settings where children share experiences and learn about diversity and democracy. These experiences are utilized to create a participatory democracy where equitable interactions exist among all members who shape society.
Third, in order to create a society where social justice prevails, teachers will become change agents committed to transforming themselves, schools and communities. Critical awareness and critical pedagogy, as defined by Carter G. Woodson and Paulo Freire, serve as the cornerstones of this transformation. To this end, candidates will become knowledgeable about the power relationships in their urban environment and about the ways in which race, gender, ethnicity and class structures affect children, families, schools and the global community. This knowledge will facilitate candidates to engage actively in transforming society and to work for a more just social order.
Fourth, candidates will be “culturally literate.” Culture is a complex set of relationships that expresses a peoples’ ideas, beliefs and knowledge. The representation of these cultural beliefs in art, literature and philosophy is fluid and ever changing as cultures come into interaction with changing historical times and with other cultures. For this reason, candidates will know about the interrelationships and interconnections among cultures. More specifically, candidates will understand the relationships between the histories, literatures and philosophies of Africa, Europe, Asia and The Americas. Candidates will address, critically, the complex questions on art, literature, history and scientific and technological development.
Fifth, the process of gaining knowledge is complex and interactive and includes candidates learning how to learn and how to create productive learning environments. To this end, opportunities for inquiry-based learning and for ways to reflect on the teaching/learning process are numerous. Creating a sense of community in classrooms where rigorous inquiry and supportive structures promote questioning and challenging ideas characterize these classrooms. A climate where students engage with each other’s work through dialogue and critical evaluation is established. Knowledge is distributive. Mutual respect for ideas among candidates and between candidates and faculty precedes and underlies the exploration of new ideas and practices. Communities of learners are created so candidates come to understand learning as a shared effort that can lead to personal and social transformation. Traditional dichotomies between creators of knowledge and practitioners of knowledge are blurred. To that end, candidates create knowledge in all acts of pedagogy, as they reflect on that pedagogy. Candidates become reflective practitioners who question, evaluate and revise curriculum materials, classroom practice and their relationship to the school environment and who are aware that through their reflective practice they can transform the school environment.
Sixth, the Teacher Education unit enacts a teacher/scholar model of professional studies. Traditionally teachers and scholars have had different primary goals. Scholars have been defined as individuals who create new knowledge in the disciplines, while teachers have been defined as individuals who help students acquire new knowledge in the subject areas. Current research on effective teaching suggests that these two goals must be united. Candidates must know and be capable of researching the subject matter and transforming that subject matter into curriculum materials appropriate for children. The teacher/scholar utilizes not only curriculum guides and published materials, but is competent in researching new knowledge and translating this knowledge into learning materials, lesson and unit plans, and projects appropriate for children. Teacher /scholar plays a crucial mediating role between subject matter and learner.
There are three scholarly areas from which the Unit draws knowledge for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing its teacher education programs. The first of these areas focuses on the role of schooling in U.S. culture and society and the movement toward more democratic schooling practices and relationships. Beginning with the works of John Dewey (1916), the Education Department contextualizes its mission and vision in a view of classrooms that is characterized by mutual respect and reciprocity between teaching and learning. Not content to see schools as places to replicate existing social divisions or to produce automatons who do not wish to question the status quo (Aronowitz and Giroux,1985; Bowles and Gintis,1976), the Department seeks to develop candidates’ critical lenses by engaging them in inquiry about the purposes and aims of schooling (Freire,1970; Hooks, 1994; Oakes, 1985; and Woodson, 1933/1990) and the possibilities for alternative purposes and different kinds of relationships, curricula, and materials that promote democratic ways of thinking and being (Giroux,1988; Noddings,1992; Sadler and Sadler, 1994 and Shor and Friere,1987).
A second area of scholarly work that underlies the Unit’s work involves education knowledge having to do with learning. Moving candidates away from seeing students as empty vessels to be filled with facts not necessarily relevant or appropriate to them, the Department seeks to imbue its candidates with a constructivist view of learning. Candidates are prepared to be well versed in the theories of Vygotsky (1962), Piaget (1954), Gardner (1985), Erickson (1963), and Bruner (1966, 1973). At the same time that candidates are acquiring knowledge of how learning is a process of building meaning, they are also looking at how learning has been most often defined as rote memorization and accumulation of facts (Cuban, 1984; Goodlad, 1984, and McNeil, 1986). Contrast in depth between these ways of defining and carrying out teaching and learning fosters candidates’ skills in critiquing and reinventing. Candidates are also introduced to new ways and understandings of how teachers’ learn, particularly the role of reflective practice (Schon,1983; Zeichner & Liston, 1996) and the use of classroom action research to learn, grow, and change (Goswami & Stillman,1987). The third area of knowledge that drives our teacher education program has to do with ideas focused directly on the relationships between schooling and children of African descent. Because MEC is an institution that serves a primarily African descent student population, this last focus is particularly crucial. Our candidates, themselves are persons of African descent who will be teaching children most of whom will be of African descent. Beginning with their own linguistic and schooling autobiographies, candidates learn how to look at their own experiences critically in order to deconstruct them with the intention of reconstructing who they are, where they have come from, and how they can construct powerful identities that will make schooling meaningful for students of African descent (Akbar,1998; Shujaa,1994). This grounding provides the space for candidates to look at children’s language in and out of school as a way of understanding the role of language and dialects in teaching and learning (Delpit,1988; Gilyard,1991, and Smitherman,1986). Gaining knowledge and insight about teaching for a multicultural education serves as another significant goal in this knowledge area (Banks, 1993, 1996; Gay, 2000, King, et. al, 1997) as does examining and critiquing current conditions and beliefs under which children of African descent are being educated (Willis, 1995).
Standard 2: Personal and Global Consciousness Standard 3: Analytical Ability Standard 6: Effective Communication Standard
8: Commitment and Caring
Standard 2: Personal and Global Consciousness
Standard 3: Analytical Ability
Standard 6: Effective Communication
Standard 8: Commitment and Caring
Our conceptual framework extends the scope and depth of our historical charge to prepare teachers who work and live within the Central Brooklyn community to provide the best education for all children within and beyond the community. To this end, our motto “Education from the inside out” captures our mission to prepare Knowledgeable, Personally and Globally Conscious, Analytical, Creative, Professional, Collaborative, Effective Communicators who are Committed and Caring to teach in diverse classrooms and schools in urban communities.
The Department of Education’s mission – “to prepare future educators of children in diverse classrooms and schools in urban communities” – is best represented through our motto:
EDUCATION FROM THE INSIDE OUT
This motto is intended to capture the processes of learning (attaining the Department’s standards) candidates engage in to reach the ultimate goal (the Department’s mission). Candidates in the Department of Education generally come to MEC as members of the local, surrounding community of Central Brooklyn, particularly from Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. When candidates leave us, most return to their communities to take up full time teaching. This is the first interpretation of our motto: Candidates as insiders in their communities returning to teach in community school classrooms from the outside experience of attaining a college degree in teaching from MEC.
Candidates come to the Unit with beliefs, values, habits of mind, knowledge and dispositions that serve as the lenses through which they view the world and through which they respond to and interact with what we offer them in the Unit. This is the second interpretation of our motto: Candidates use their set of lenses to interpret their learning experiences (from course work to field work to internships) and in the process of learning and acquiring mastery, candidates’ lenses are reshaped with the result that candidates see the world of teaching and learning anew and are prepared to enter the world of teaching and learning.
The visual representation of our motto is intended to capture the dynamic nature of this inside-out process of learning and mastery. The circle around symbol for candidates is drawn to indicate the permeability of their lenses to learning new and different ways of viewing the world. Yet, candidates, themselves, are drawn in bold relief to acknowledge their identity and the beliefs, values, habits of mind, knowledge and dispositions they bring with them not only as the beginning point for learning, but as the powerful axis around which and through which new learning is acquired.
As the candidate moves through and around her program of study, as the circle indicates, she experiences different ways of meeting, understanding, and acquiring the Department’s standards. Candidates will come, for example, to our programs with knowledge and schema they have acquired over their years of schooling as well as through their out-of-school experiences. Faculty in the unit and our colleagues in Liberal Arts & Sciences validate and acknowledge this knowledge – what is inside our candidates when they enter our programs – and build upon that foundation with providing new knowledge – what is outside our candidates’ experiences – so that candidates will master and attain the exemplary level of the Unit’s standards’ knowledge dimension.
At the same time that candidates are acquiring the requisite knowledge for attaining this dimension’s highest standard, they may also be learning how to collaborate. While candidates come to us knowing how to get along with others, since most of them have children of their own and extended families with whom and from whom they have learned about cooperation, candidates may not have experienced collaborative learning in school or learned how to use collaboration to test out their ideas and to revise their ideas. Building upon their expertise in cooperation, the Unit’s programs seek to extend candidates’ expertise to include characteristics of collaboration at the exemplary level in our standards.
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