How Do We Know What We Know About Teaching Students from Low-Income and Other Minoritized Cultural Communities?

Abstract

Researchers have explored the theory-practice gap in education for decades, noting that teachers are often unequipped to reconcile the gaps between the knowledge, skills, and abilities they realize are required for the job while in-service and those they are taught through formal preservice training. We know much less about the gap between what teachers think they know about how to work effectively with students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities in theory, and how these subjective assessments shape their strategies for delivering culturally responsive care through their teaching and classroom management styles in practice. This dissertation features three papers rooted in a set of fundamentally epistemic inquiries: Which sources of knowledge do teachers working with students from low-income and other minoritized ethnoracial communities rely on to assess and respond to the challenges their students face both in and outside the classroom? How do these sources of knowledge influence the ways in which teachers assess their students’ challenges and make decisions in response to them?

Paper One is a narrative literature review that surveys what we currently know about teacher thinking in schools serving this student demographic. I repurpose a conceptual framework from the organizations literature to identify and examine root causes of some persistent challenges to double-loop learning for teachers working with students from low-income and minoritized ethnoracial communities. Papers Two and Three are empirical studies based on interviews with 62 part- and full-time faculty on one campus of the largest urban university in the country. I asked faculty to describe in detail how they would respond to challenging circumstances and situations that commonly affect their students. In Paper Two, I found that late career faculty were less likely to use culturally responsive classroom management strategies than their early career peers, and draw from developmental research to explore suggestive evidence that many of these differences correspond to various psychological experiences teachers have across their career lifespans. In Paper Three, I find that all faculty employ a mixture of espoused values associated with both single- and double-loop learning in developing their on-the-job responses, and that mixture varies by situation.