The Berkeley Teacher Education Program prepares teachers committed to co-creating powerful and enriching classrooms that embody the values, relationships, and experiences of a more just world.
We believe that:
Teaching Creates Humanizing Spaces
Just, loving, and humanizing spaces of learning are only possible when teachers build on the strengths and assets of students. These spaces require the collective construction of classrooms, schools, and pedagogies in solidarity with students, families, and communities, particularly those marginalized by groups who have created, sustained, and benefited from inequitable systems, policies, and practices. In doing so, we commit to participating in ongoing struggles for public k-12 education rooted in the public good that resists prioritizing market-driven agendas and privatization over the needs of people.
Teaching Critically Examines and Strategically Addresses Systems of Power
Our work as teachers requires a profound recognition of the paradoxical functions schooling and education serve, as avenues for liberation, transformation, and justice as well as oppression, colonization, and dehumanization—an awareness that demands that we intentionally approach each moment of teaching as political, ethical, and moral. In BTEP, we embark on a continuous journey of naming and interrupting systems of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, ableism, sexism, deficit ideology, and heteronormativity. In our classrooms and with our colleagues, we hold ourselves accountable to the lifelong process of interrogating our positionality and deliberately acting with an understanding of how we have internalized or are embedded in systems of oppression. We commit to intentionally using our authority to make our classrooms more equitable and just. Knowing that power shapes what we teach, how we teach, and who we become as teachers and learners, we remind ourselves that learning about sociopolitical issues must have a central place in the classroom. As public school teachers, we commit ourselves to honing our craft to support students in developing their own analysis of societal inequities and injustices by engaging with multiple perspectives through democratic dialogue and systematic inquiry.
Teaching Entails Relationships, Ethics, and Technical Craftwork
Centering principles of justice as teachers requires our close attention to the pedagogies and practices we refine and innovate, the relationships we nurture within and outside of our classrooms, and the systems we create in classrooms and schools. We strive to cultivate joyful classrooms, where students and teachers authentically care for each other, and where teachers foster students’ curiosity and love for learning. We endeavor to create spaces that build on students’ intuitions, creativity, and capacity for joint meaning-making in order to develop their agency as historians, mathematicians, artists, scientists, readers, speakers, creators, writers, and activists. We teach young people who imaginatively navigate diverse social and digital spaces as democratic actors in an increasingly pluralistic society. Knowing that even progressive notions of care and student-centeredness often play instrumental roles in obscuring the abilities, ingenuity, and brilliance of youth from marginalized communities, we examine teaching and learning in relation to culture and power. We commit to developing the technical excellence and craftwork that is required to actualize these goals.
Teaching Fosters Lifelong Processes of Learning and Research
Teaching is a craft that deepens through an intentional stance of inquiry over time. It is also a profoundly creative and intellectual endeavor that requires the coupling of theory and practice, and the fortitude of dialogue and humility, as means to realizing our collective humanity. Transformative teaching means that teachers, their students, and their communities are co-creators of knowledge. By approaching our classrooms, schools, and communities with a stance of learning and inquiry, we use research to inform our practice and we participate in the collective generation of new research.
Teaching Requires Intentional Effort in the Face of Complexities and Contradictions
We teach in deeply flawed institutions that are embedded in a society that has inherent injustices. Teaching will inevitably entail contradictions and involve imperfect choices. The hopes that students, families, and communities have for themselves and for society are manifold. People’s dreams for themselves may be at odds with their immediate needs and goals that they must navigate. We have the responsibility to hold with humility the tensions and contradictions of the world as it is and the worlds that are envisioned. Ideological certainty and judgment that foreclose dialogue are antithetical to teaching and learning. As teachers, we develop intentional and principled practices through our iterative engagement with theory, reflection, and experience.
Teaching Transforms Oneself
Teaching is difficult work. It takes effort and time. It requires us to authentically listen to the feedback of students, families, peers, cooperating teachers, supervisors, and instructors. Discomfort, tension, and conflict are normal and necessary in such growth. As members of the BTEP community, we recognize our collective capacity to transform, to look inward to become more honest, courageous and whole so that we can hold space and support others to do the same. Change takes courage. We strive to understand what we need to change in ourselves; what we can do to catalyze change as a member of a collective; and commit to making those changes. Simultaneously we look outward, knowing that alone we cannot create the conditions in schools and society to fulfill these aspirations for teaching and learning. We consciously work with students, families, communities, allies, unions, and collectives of teachers and educational workers to embody the values and relationships that would characterize the world towards which we strive.
In conclusion, we remind ourselves that at its core, teaching is an endeavor to be more fully human, to embody the fullness of human life in ourselves and our students. Teaching is simultaneously beautiful, joyous, amusing, awe-inspiring, difficult, painful, frightening, nerve wracking, and embarrassing; it entails every emotion that makes us human. Teaching displays our strengths and our shortcomings, which becomes an invitation for us to become better human beings. It is to this wonderfully complex vocation that we purposefully commit ourselves.
(updated 9/13/2024)