Center Members Recieve Spencer Grant: Interrogating Recruitment Practices of Black Candidates into Teacher Preparation

The teaching profession has had long-standing challenges recruiting Black teachers (Albert Shanker Institute, 2015). Though some research has surfaced promising strategies for recruiting Black candidates (e.g., Carver-Thomas, 2018), few center on unveiling existing practices of recruitment in university-based teacher preparation programs, particularly as experienced from the lens of both teacher educators and candidates. This study seeks to unveil existing recruitment practices of two university-based teacher preparation programs as well as identify promising practices for improving the recruitment of Black candidates. University of California, Irvine and California State University, San Bernardino have both articulated a commitment to increasing their numbers of Black teacher candidates. We situate this project as the first step in initiating an improvement network focused on improving the recruitment of Black teacher candidates across universities in California. We aim to examine existing recruitment practices by: interviewing teacher educators at both universities to make visible and compare recruitment processes; interviewing prospective and current Black candidates and alums of the programs; and conducting a review of the literature on teacher preparation to identify promising strategies for improving recruitment. These research activities will help us to establish an improvement network by developing a shared problem analysis.