Towards Youth Participatory Teacher Education

Despite its significant impact on their lives, youth remain mostly absent from teacher education. Scholars have begun to explore the potential of bringing youth into teacher education spaces to support teacher learning. Youth Participatory Teacher Education (YPTE), as I term this emerging body of research, repositions youth as knowers about teaching and stakeholders in teacher education through their participation in the joint enterprise of how teachers learn to teach. This dissertation explores a novel form of YPTE: youth participation in rehearsals of discussion facilitation. Data collection occurred across three unique studies that involved youth participation in discussion rehearsals: two five-day summer institutes and one social studies methods course. In all, 119 youth, 30 novice teachers, and 8 teacher educators participated in the three studies. The dissertation is guided by the following research questions: 1) What feedback did youth give to novice teachers about their enactment in discussion rehearsals? 2) How did youth, novice teachers and teacher educators pause rehearsals to shape novice teachers learning to teach and what dilemmas did this prompt for teacher educators? 3) What do youth want when novice teachers rehearse social studies discussions? Findings reveal that youth gave actionable feedback on discrete social justice teaching practices, shared important insights into their experiences as learners, and opened critical commentaries on race, society, teaching, and history. Youth participation in rehearsals also expanded conceptions of discussion practice and rehearsal facilitation; flattened hierarchies of expertise; and opened new dilemmas for co-investigation. For teacher educators, facilitating discussion rehearsals prompted novel pedagogical dilemmas related to working on discussion facilitation practices with novice teachers and following youth’s lead by centering their expertise. This dissertation has the potential not only to reshape urban teacher education around youth participation, but also to introduce the practice of eliciting student feedback as an important pedagogical practice for improving classroom instruction. Further, the dissertation’s theoretical framework may serve as foundation for YPTE, linking the diverse teacher education pedagogies of YPTE to a shared theory of teacher learning with youth.