Developing diverse educator pathways: a descriptive case of a future educator ecosystem

School–university partnerships (SUPs) offer a space where this tension can be productively confronted, a space in which IHEs can prioritize equity and community investment over institutional self-interest. SUPs function as sites of simultaneous renewal (Goodlad, 1994), shared professional learning, curriculum co-development and sustained community investment. When grounded in renewal and reciprocity, SUPs can shift the terms of engagement between IHEs and the communities they serve, moving from transactional relationships toward genuine collaboration that benefits students, teachers and institutions alike (Burns, Jacobs, Baker, & Donahue, 2016). This broader function is particularly significant in the context of teacher diversification, where trust between IHEs and historically underserved communities must be built over time rather than assumed.

SUPs play a promising and multifaceted role in responding to the persistent challenges of teacher recruitment, shortage and diversification (Hicks & Lyons, 2024; Rivers, 2024). One specific form of partnership, pipeline programs, represents a broad approach to recruiting and preparing Black, Indigenous and People of Color for teaching, with grow-your-own (GYO) models – which prepare community members (predominately high school students, paraprofessionals, career changers and military veterans) to teach in their home communities (Sleeter & Milner, 2011; Toshalis, 2021). By increasing teacher diversity, pipeline programs can make small-scale impacts in increasing academic achievement, reducing teacher attrition, developing more culturally responsive teachers and addressing concerns with alternative certification (Toshalis, 2021). Effective pipeline programs provide high levels of outside support, tight-knit cohorts and meaningful faculty advising (Wood & Lewis, 2010).

High school-level involvement in addressing teacher recruitment is increasingly common as they promote dual functions of promoting more equitable, representative teacher workforces and increasing IHE enrollments. Whitney et al. (2026) describe a GYO dual-enrollment course for high school students of color, in which field experiences connected identity and language to the role of the educator. They found that while participants appreciated the work of teaching, they remained uncertain about pursuing it as a career. Margot, Pierczynski, and Lormand (2024) document a summer education camp for rising high school seniors from a diverse, Title I Midwestern district, finding that immersion in culturally responsive pedagogy and project-based learning helped students develop more nuanced understandings of the teaching profession, even as they identified financial barriers and low salaries as significant deterrents. Similarly, Kier, Johnson, Parker, Mauney, and Fountain (2025) examine a summer STEM enrichment program in which marginalized undergraduate mentors served as both near-peer role models and research collaborators, arguing that centering the counterstories of those who have experienced systemic exclusion from STEM is essential to designing summer enrichment curriculum that is inclusive and culturally affirming for historically underrepresented high school students. Both Margot et al. (2024) and Kier et al. (2025) demonstrate how mentoring programs and cohort grouping in pipeline programs provide opportunities for students of color to support each other to develop and utilize navigational capital (Yosso, 2005) to “affirm their [teachers of color] humanity and enable them to persist” (p. 21) despite oppressive structures in IHEs (Gist et al., 2019).

Pipeline programs are not without critique, however. They are notably prone to short life expectancies with issues of sustainability and ongoing support (Gist et al., 2019). Further, the metaphor itself has been called into question for the way it positions those going through the “pipeline” in a commodified, dehumanizing way (Bigelow, 2022; Stern, Vela, & Nakae, 2023) in order to meet neoliberal ends. Stern et al. (2023) argue that the pipeline metaphor “implies that there is only 1 entry point and 1 exit, and frames career development as a passive process in which individuals are commodified as a resource to be delivered as a final result” (p. 1). While the scholars writing about teacher recruitment through the pipeline metaphor may not consider the students entering the pipeline as coming out the other end without a change or consciousness, the metaphor still serves to legitimize “a violent, extractive, colonial worldview” (Bigelow, 2022).

This article presents a case-in-point of a future educator program situated across multiple school district-university partnerships in the Southeastern U.S. that was focused on increasing the number of junior and senior high school students from underrepresented and marginalized groups interested in careers in education. In recognizing and confronting tensions created by neoliberal ideologies – such as the commodification of student recruitment, the prioritization of enrollment metrics over student agency and the reduction of diversity efforts to institutional image-making – the authors worked with school and university partners and students to reimagine their IHE's future educator program. We document how the future educator program underwent a transformation from a pipeline model of teacher recruitment to an ecosystem model to create more organic and customized opportunities for increased student agency, community and belonging; shift the motive from administrative to purposeful; and strengthen the multiple school district-university partnerships that support the future educator program.

The future educator program is anchored at one doctoral-granting, R2 regional university, a predominately white institution in a large multicultural, urban city in the Southeastern U.S. that graduates approximately 120 undergraduate students from teacher licensure programs each year. The university's College of Education (COE) has a long history of partnering with several neighboring school districts for teacher education to provide clinical field experiences for initial teacher certification at the bachelor's and master's level as well as to provide teacher professional development for practicing teachers, teacher leaders and school and district leaders.

Jade was responsible for much of the future educator program through her role as Manager of Outreach, Recruitment and Retention. Jade's primary responsibilities were supporting students in their transition to the university through admission events, on-campus field trips and ongoing outreach. Jade monitored and tracked student progress through the Virtual Teaching Academy (VTA) and taught a VTA course each semester. Megan was a postdoctoral associate focused on clinically based teacher education and SUPs, who came to this work through her role as Co-PI on the Teacher Quality Partnership grant and prior involvement in the college's Urban Education Scholarship Program, a “pipeline” initiative to recruit, retain and employ teachers from historically underrepresented groups in urban schools. Megan's role centered on co-leading future educator programming with university and school-based partners to build sustainable recruitment structures within the COE, teaching VTA courses and co-facilitating future educator workshops at partner high schools. Together, Megan and Jade collaborated closely across all future educator initiatives, bringing complementary expertise in administration and outreach, practitioner inquiry and SUP to the work.

At the time of this work, the COE worked closely with 16 high schools in five school districts that served approximately 250,000 PK-12 students. Students across future educator program initiatives represented diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic status. See Table 1 for details on districts and their program involvement.

In 2019, the COE leadership launched a “High School Virtual Teaching Academy” to offer up to 12 free credits of asynchronous, lower-division undergraduate coursework delivered through dual enrollment in response to these specific needs expressed by rural partners. Later, in 2022, the COE was awarded a U.S. Department of Education Teacher Quality Partnership grant to expand the academy as part of a broader effort to collaboratively build an aligned system for recruiting, preparing, and retaining highly qualified teachers and teacher leaders in a large suburban partnership school district (District C) (Burns et al., 2023). The five-year grant (terminated early via Executive Order, February 2025) funded efforts to reimagine recruitment, preparation, and retention with a large suburban district partner, while also scaling, institutionalizing, and sustaining changes to the academy for other partnerships stemming from the university. Through grant funding and other aligned COE and partnering district initiatives, the Future Educator Program encompasses a variety of entry points for high school students interested in the education profession. The five key entry points discussed in this manuscript include: the Virtual Teaching Academy dual enrollment program (VTA), Future Educator Workshops, Florida FEA high school chapters (FFEA), a regional FEA conference hosted at the university, and the grant-funded Summer Bridge.

We (the authors) began working together on more intentionally understanding, supporting and reimagining the future educator program in Fall 2022. At that time, the program modeled a traditional pipeline approach: recruit students into the pipeline and once they graduated from the university, they would return to their home district and teach (see Figure 1).

Yet, we realized that there was no straightforward pipeline or one-size-fits-all approach for students. For example, some students joined their high school's Future Educator Club after learning about it from classmates in the VTA, while others started in their Future Educator Club and joined the VTA after learning about it during a club announcement. We also recognized that students needed a variety of options based on their time commitments and responsibilities in/out of school, the associated costs, participation format, and varied interests. Conceptually, Megan and Jade began to see the pipeline to teaching through the lens of an ecosystem that had multiple, overlapping partners, varying entry/exit points, and multiple ways to stay connected. Figure 2 represents our shift in thinking and captures many of the initiatives made available to students while orienting to an overall purpose of building excitement and advocacy for public education. In the sections that follow, we describe the entry points and their evolution.

VTA was launched with goals to develop a sense of democratic responsibility and citizenship in future educators, cultivating education advocates empowered to become champions for public education in their communities. More specifically, the VTA was designed to: change the narrative of teacher education by promoting the idea of education as a public good; create an affinity for the university; encourage graduates to return to their home districts to teach; and make higher education more affordable and accessible.

Students could take up to four, online asynchronous 3-credit courses in educational foundations in the COE for free through the state's dual enrollment policy. Two courses were offered each semester, designed so that juniors could complete one course per semester over two years, or seniors could take two per semester and finish within one year.

Megan and Jade hosted a series of partnership meetings with school partners and revisited courses based on their feedback and suggestions. Due to statewide policies, Introduction to Diversity for Educators was removed from the course catalog and no longer offered. Based on partners' feedback, Introduction to the Teaching Profession was subsequently offered every fall and spring as it was a required course for all education majors and offering it twice a year allowed students more flexibility and choice in selecting VTA courses. Other courses offered included: Educational Psychology, Introduction to Educational Technology, Introduction to Leadership, and Introduction to Disabilities. A Schools on Screen course has been developed for future iterations.

Through grant support, the VTA hired Distance Learning Coaches to co-teach during the 2024–2025 academic year. Distance Learning Coaches, who were in-service teachers and coaches from high schools in District C, brought secondary education pedagogy, contextualized learning for students, and offered additional opportunities to cultivate relationships through the VTA's asynchronous format.

The VTA has demonstrated significant growth in student participation, course enrollment and university matriculation since its inception. A total of 226 students have enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, filling 559 seats across 18 courses. In 2019–2020, 23 students were enrolled; 2020–2021: 14; 2021–2022: 43, 2022–0223: 90, 2023–2024: 146, 2024–2025: 153. In 2025–2026, even without grant-funded support, enrollment grew from 153 to 170. Participation has expanded steadily from primarily in two high-need high schools in District A into Districts B and C.

Matriculation outcomes have similarly improved. The percentage of students admitted to the university increased from 44% in Spring 2024 to 66% in Spring 2026. Commitments reached their highest level in Spring 2026.

Future Educator Workshops were held at fourteen high schools across four partner districts (B, C, D, and E), with other university partners we visited each school twice annually. These workshops were deliberately situated within existing early childhood and teaching academy programs, reaching students already oriented toward careers in education and were organized by teaching academy advisors and/or school counselors. Attendance at sessions ranged from 20 to 100 students per visit.

Over the course of the initiative, the workshops underwent significant reconceptualization. Workshops began as traditional, “sit-and-get” recruitment presentations with largely passive audiences. Over time, we co-designed the presentations as interactive workshops which they co-facilitated and tailored to each school and student attendees. The shift in format reflects a broader reorientation of goals. Rather than positioned primarily as recruitment events, the reimagined workshops engaged prospective educators in critically examining the philosophy and purposes of public schooling, invited early advocacy for the teaching profession, and created space for students to articulate and examine their own beliefs about teaching. Looking forward, we aim to shift toward a co-teaching model with teaching academy teachers and distance learning coaches.

During the summers of 2023 and 2024, the COE hosted high school students from District C for a week-long, residential stay on campus for a Summer Bridge program. Summer Bridge was developed to both positively impact college-readiness and educational attainment, recruit students from underrepresented and underserved communities into the COE, “demystify” the college experience, and develop future educators and education advocates from diverse backgrounds. A2 directed the Summer Bridge both years, with Jade supporting planning and facilitation, and a team of staff, which included current COE teacher candidates, program graduates, and a District C elementary school teacher.

The Summer Bridge curriculum was organized around five key learning objectives:

1. Enhanced civic and democratic engagement, recognizing one's civic responsibility, and developing a richer sense of what it means to be in community;

2. Enhanced capacity for difference/change-making, envisioning the future and identifying the resources to create that future;

3. Enhanced learning through disciplined reflection;

4. Greater comfort and skills in working with diverse groups and environments;

5. Enhanced sense of belonging to the COE's teacher preparation community.

During the weeklong experience, students truly got a “college experience.” They lived on campus in a residence hall, ate in the dining hall, and participated in activities, service, and reflections in classrooms, the libraries, and other campus spaces. See Table 2 for more details about the day-to-day events.

Monday through Thursday each ended with group reflections and open time for activities/games. In both iterations, Megan and Jade co-designed a service-learning experience with school partners at one of District C's professional development schools. The week culminated in each student creating a college and career action plan, which COE staff utilized for intentional follow-up throughout the academic year to maintain communication with students, provide support and accountability, and reinforce that this was more than a one-time experience.

The COE has worked with 16 Florida Future Educators of America (FFEA) school chapters across Districts A, B, C, D and E over the past five years. Jade sits on the advisory board for several districts' career and technical education programs and was recently honored with an outstanding post-secondary partner award.

Florida holds an annual statewide FEA conference where schools can represent their chapter through display boards, participate in competitions and attend education-related sessions. The COE, A2 and school-based partners have been involved in this conference for several years. In 2024, a school-based partner in District C suggested to Jade that the COE host a regional conference.

Thus, in Fall 2024 and 2025, the COE has hosted a regional conference for local FFEA school chapters organized by A2. In its inaugural year, approximately 113 students and 18 teachers and school representatives attended from 11 schools from Districts A, B and C. In its second year, approximately 127 students and 16 teachers and school representatives from nine schools across Districts A, B, C and D attended.

New in 2025, community members were invited to the sponsored Robinson Education Symposium, a panel presentation featuring each district's superintendent or a district representative. The COE also announced increased scholarships and award opportunities at the regional conference. Winners of individual competitions at the state conference who attended the regional conference became eligible for a COE award of $1,000 per semester for up to four years if they enrolled in a teacher licensure program in the COE.

The COE Education Club is a registered FFEA chapter, so high school students could transition to a student organization and structure that they were familiar with. Many students who were a part of the Education Club come from high schools with an FFEA chapter. The Education Club was also very involved in the planning and execution of our FFEA regional state conference. The Education Club hosts monthly events, goes to the state capital for literacy week and provides opportunities to support students in their college and career readiness via guest speakers, teacher certification test prep sessions, study sessions, etc.

We have identified three key “ripple effects” as we transitioned our future educator program from a pipeline model to an ecosystem. We identified these ripples based on systematic feedback gathered from high school and undergraduate students who participated in future educator programming, our (Megan & Jade) own reflections documented in Megan's researcher journal and memos, and systematic feedback from school and university-based partners collected during district meetings and documented via meeting minutes. We also collected and monitored program completer and university enrollment and attrition data, raw data that we were able to analyze using descriptive statistics to identify general enrollment trends. Beginning in 2023, all future educator programming incorporated exit surveys and feedback forms, which included a combination of Likert-scale items and open-ended response items distributed via Qualtrics within 24 hours of attendance. On average, we received a 50–80% response rate on surveys and feedback forms. Collectively, these data were reviewed in Megan and Jade's bi-weekly program meetings for insights into continuous improvement. One year after the grant termination, we engaged in reflection on our program meetings and in re-reading meeting minutes. During this reflection, we recognized that an ecosystem design for the future educator program was reflective of students' positive sense of belonging and community, increased accessibility to higher education, and increased attention and action taken to strengthen partnerships.

Perhaps the most consistent theme across feedback from students and school partners is their claim of a sense of belonging, both to the university and the teaching profession itself. Students who participated in multiple ecosystem initiatives reported feeling known and supported across time and that Jade was only a phone call or email away. Summer Bridge participants, in particular, described the experience of living on campus together, sharing meals, and working together as a cohort with shared aspirations as transformative in their sense of self. One Summer Bridge student shared via open-ended survey item that her group's leader was “awesome! She gave each of us equal attention and paid attention to our individual personalities and questions to make us feel welcome and loved.” She added at the end, “I'll miss her!” Another Summer Bridge student, who enrolled at the university afterward, noted that the Summer Bridge was the first time she felt like she could actually belong at a university.

The FFEA regional conference, VTA, and COE Education Club similarly functioned as belonging-affirming spaces across districts, particularly for students from smaller or more rural districts or schools in which they may not otherwise encounter peers who share their interest in teaching.

Enrollment in future educator program initiatives has grown steadily over the years. The program has demonstrably increased access to affordable higher education coursework for students across five districts, many of whom would not otherwise have had exposure to college-level learning during high school. We increased the number of visits and touchpoints for students as well as increased opportunities, especially free opportunities to participate. For example, one student shared in an exit survey that “no other colleges had reached out to us about opportunities like this [...] especially not something that's so particular to the education field for those that are really interested in [teaching].” We drove over 90-min each way once a semester to visit the particular school this student attended, and it made a difference. Moreover, the university demonstrated clear investment in students. The regional conference led to the creation of new scholarships for incoming students. And even though dual enrollment courses do not generate tuition dollars for the college, additional courses were offered in the VTA each semester taught by faculty in the COE.

Additionally, both the VTA and Summer Bridge were much more representative of U.S. demographics and the K-12 teaching population. Of the 46 students who participated in Summer Bridge, 47.83% of the students self-identified as White, 36.96% as Black or African American, 8.70% as Hispanic, 2.17% as Two or More Races, and 2.17% as Other. In the VTA, of the 226 students enrolled, 54.02% self-identified as Black or African American, 26.44% self-identified as White, 11.80% as Hispanic, 4.50% as Two or More Races, and 3.24% as Other ^[1]. One outcome of the shift has directly resulted in increased representation of students from racially and ethnically minoritized groups. One limitation of this data is that we did not have access to students' reported sexuality and sexual expression, religious affiliation, nationality, dis/abilities or other identities that could identify representation from marginalized groups.

The ecosystem model oriented us away from success measured in enrollment increases toward a different outcome: how do we create conditions in which young people can authentically explore whether teaching is for them, and what do they need to pursue that path? This shift required us to hold a tension that the pipeline metaphor obscures: some students who engage deeply with the ecosystem and develop rich understanding of what teaching entails will decide, thoughtfully, that it is not the path for them. A student who takes Introduction to the Teaching Profession, attends a Future Educator Workshop, and concludes that they want to pursue social work instead has been meaningfully served by the program. The ecosystem model makes room for this outcome to be viewed as a success in ways the pipeline does not.

The ecosystem approach changed the quality of our relationships with school and district partners. Over time, Megan and Jade found ways to collaborate with school partners in a more reciprocal way. In a fall grant leadership meeting, district principals and administrators reported that the service-learning experience in the second year of the Summer Bridge was a significant improvement in terms of local impact as it represented more input from school-based partners about what work was needed and how students could meaningfully contribute to the school community.

The ecosystem model required us to ask different questions of our partners. What do your students need in order to see themselves in education? What does your teaching academy look like, and what would be most useful to bring in? Who in your building is excited about this work and should be centered rather than simply consulted? These questions produced richer and more durable relationships. The suggestion from a school-based partner to host a regional FFEA conference was a product of this collaborative inquiry. The integration of District C teachers as Distance Learning Coaches emerged similarly from an ongoing conversation with school partners about what dual enrollment needed to work for students.

The termination of the grant in February 2025 tested the sustainability of these relationships under conditions of institutional adversity. That the VTA continued to grow in enrollment in 2025–2026, without grant support, is in part a testament to the investment school partners made in the program.

This descriptive case of a future educator program situated within and across multiple school district-university partnerships offers a practical and conceptual contribution to ongoing conversations about how to diversify and strengthen the educator workforce in ways that do not dehumanize students by pushing them through a pipeline. At the practical level, we have described five initiatives: the VTA, Future Educator Workshops, FFEA high school chapters, the regional FFEA conference, and Summer Bridge, and their evolution. We provided evidence of the increased diversity and representation in future educator programs, which is particularly important as our university is a predominantly White institution.

At the research level, this case raises generative questions for future inquiry: How do students who participate in multiple ecosystem initiatives over time narrate their development of professional identity? What structures within SUPs best support the transition from high school engagement to sustained commitment to the profession? And how might the ecosystem framework be taken up and adapted across different institutional and community contexts?

At the conceptual level, we have argued for a shift from the pipeline metaphor to an ecosystem metaphor as a more productive and humanizing framework for this work. The ecosystem metaphor matters because metaphors shape practice, such as how workshops are designed, how partners are engaged, and what counts as success. When we view students as moving through a pipeline, the focus is on optimization for conversion and students themselves are treated as the resource to be delivered, rather than the people the program is designed to serve. However, when we see students as participants in an ecosystem, we allow for belonging, for authentic exploration, and for the development of a professional identity.

We also wish to acknowledge the structural conditions that make this work difficult and precarious. The premature termination of the Teacher Quality Partnership grant is not a peripheral footnote nor an ending to our story; however, it is central to understanding the challenges facing university-based teacher recruitment programs in the current political moment. Federal investment in educator diversity initiatives has always been insufficient relative to the scale of the need; its sudden withdrawal is an additional harm layered onto an already fragile system. Sustained, systemic change in the diversity of the teaching force will require not only innovative programming at the local level, but also policy commitments at the state and federal level.