Community-Engaged Teacher Education: Deep Listening with Communities to Shift Teacher Knowledge

Abstract: For teacher education, the challenge of engaging more deeply with community is about righting imbalances and giving community members a voice in how those teaching their/our children will be prepared and informed. It involves a systemic shift in governance and power. This shift requires an institutionally embedded strategy to allow Indigenous, refugee and other historically vulnerable communities an audible voice at the decision-making table, in central rather than tokenistic ways. In this paper, we report on the early stages of a teacher education intervention based on the research question, ‘How can teacher education be done differently to represent the desires of families and communities most seldom heard?’