Chapter 16: Learning Beyond the Scripts: Professional Development Through a Racialized Perspective

The work of being a teacher educator is complex. We straddle the spaces of teacher education as former classroom teachers in the K–12 school system while also having a foot in the space of academia where research, theories, policies, and standards inform how we approach our work with prospective teachers. In the past decade, the academization and standardization of teacher education enforced through external evaluations on teacher performance such as the EdTPA, have shifted the priorities of teacher preparation and assessment of teacher competency based on standards and benchmarks rather than on understanding of students and their communities (Dover & Schultz, 2016).