The Savvy To Translate Rabbits into Pit Bulls
City Smarts: Fabienne Mondesir attended heavily minority schools in Cambridge, MA, where she grew up. Photograph by Richard Howard
When she was a student teacher at the urban Malden High School, in Massachusetts, Fabienne Mondesir drew on her first-hand knowledge to adapt standard lessons so that they would resonate better with urban students.
"There was an example in my book about Jim and Jane breeding rabbits in a pet store," says Mondesir, a first-generation Haitian-American, now 24. "They were looking for dominant genetics, which ones show and which ones don't. So I crossed out the names and picked two names of my students — Gustavo and Amanda — and changed the rabbits to pit bulls, because you see them in all the music videos, and all the kids own one or know someone on their street who owns one. And they know which colors are favorable — the recessive ones, which are all-white pit bulls, with green eyes. So I changed the scenario: You've got a white pit bull and a gray one, and when you breed them the offspring all look gray — and you have to figure out why."
- Information on Urban Teacher Training Collaborative (UTTC)
- Exodus: A Study of Teacher Retention in America, a 2003 study for NRTA: AARP’s Educator Community
Mondesir has become the kind of homegrown teacher that city schools desperately need: people who thrived in city systems and have returned to them as educators. She trained with a special program at Tufts University called the Urban Teacher Training Collaborative, or UTTC. Established in 1999 as a subsidiary program to the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) curriculum, the UTTC is based on two premises: If you offer a specialty in urban teaching, you’ll attract teaching candidates from urban neighborhoods, and if you train them directly in city schools, they’ll be better prepared for those schools' challenges — and therefore more likely to stay.
Taking on Retention Problems. The context for Tufts' initiative is that getting teachers into poor urban communities and then keeping them is a huge challenge. A 1996 study showed almost 50 percent of urban teachers leave the profession after five years. In addition, the number of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians enrolled nationally in teacher education programs dropped during the 1990s.
"When I came to the teaching program [in 1997], it was very much a traditional model, with most of the students placed in suburban schools for their practice teaching," says Linda Beardsley, director of Teacher Education and School Partnerships at Tufts and director of the UTTC. "Only two percent of our students were people of color."
Tufts developed collaborations with schools in and near Boston and began reaching out to traditionally black colleges and organizations such as Recruiting New Teachers to broaden its MAT candidate pool. The result has been dramatic: This year, 34 percent of the Tufts MAT candidates identify themselves as people of color. Students in the UTTC program have the same course load as other Tufts teacher trainees but commit to more classroom time: five days a week starting in the fall, compared with one or two days for student teachers in suburban schools. The theory is that cagey teenagers in urban schools are slow to form connections with new teachers, making the extra time essential.
Nurturing Homegrown Teachers. Garret Virchick, a science teacher at Boston's Fenway High School who has been a UTTC mentor, came to teaching as a second career in 1986 committed to the special challenge of city teaching. "I've been a member of the National Coalition of Education Activists for more than 15 years, and an activist around educational issues as a parent and as a teacher," he says.
"We're dealing with a lot of children who have lived in poverty. Some kids have more responsibility outside of school — maybe they have to take a sibling to school in the morning because their parents are working long hours, or maybe they have a single-parent family. Extra responsibilities may keep them from having time to do all their studies." He says the UTTC program combats what makes teaching so difficult: the isolation new teachers face, the challenge of figuring out how to be a good teacher and not just a cool teacher, and continual questions about how to motivate bright students and manage tough ones.
Training the Next Wave. J Fergus (it's J without the period), now 25, has gone full circle with his Tufts MAT degree: He graduated from the Fenway school, got his masters at Tufts, and went back to teach history at Fenway. He's now at the Greater Egleston Community High School, a pilot school for 16 to 21 year olds that was established in 1996.
"I knew what I was walking into at Fenway because it was the experience that I had had," Fergus says. He urges urban teachers to be more openly encouraging to their students to become involved in education. "I think there is more of a connection when students come from the community and go back to teach in the community. It just makes for an easier learning environment."
Tufts' Linda Beardsley says that already, UTTC graduates have begun to mentor current UTTC students. "That's the true measure of whether they feel good about themselves as professionals — when they’re willing to share that with prospective teachers," she says. It's just the kind of supportive interaction that may help keep teachers in the game.
About the Author
Leslie Brokaw is based in Boston, MA, and often writes for national publications.
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Fall 2005. Portions of this story originally appeared in Tufts Magazine.
