Community Experts Who Transform Teacher Education: A Tribute to Philip Borer Nelson

Teacher educators are central gatekeepers to the teaching profession, as nearly all aspects of preservice teacher training at the institutional level are controlled by White Americans, including through admissions criteria, curricular decisions that drive how preservice teachers construct knowledge, and subtle hidden-curricular aspects, such as regulating biased expectations for who is (or who is not) deemed a desirable or effective teacher candidate (Endo & Hernandez, 2007). [...]they often dilute or dismiss the daily realities that indigenous peoples and communities of color experience, including racial trauma and segregation in school-based settings, leading to inaccurate understandings of the experiences, histories, identities, and needs of diverse learners (Cross, 2005). Candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds account for approximately 15% of the students in our initial-licensure programs, but they have few opportunities to learn from people like themselves, who have experienced racialization and have survived in a White-dominated field. [...]TPPs like ours must grapple with a central dilemma: an aspiration to provide inclusive and representative perspectives about racial equality and social justice in an environment that is overwhelmingly White. The reality is that our TPP, like most others in the U.S., adopts what Feagin (2013) aptly described as White racial frames, or "the dominant racial frame that has long legitimated, rationalized, and shaped racial oppression and inequality in our country" (p. x). [...]by primarily learning from White American faculty, Midwestern University's preservice teachers have typically adopted White racial frames to interpret racialized Americans through lenses of deficit and pathology.