Teacher Education Partnering with Mt. Diablo Unified on California Teacher Residency Capacity Grant
In collaboration with the Mt. Diablo Unified School District (MDUSD), the Kalmanovitz School of Education’s Teacher Education Department has been awarded a Teacher Residency Capacity Grant from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Saint Mary’s College of California will partner with the MDUSD to develop a Bilingual Residency for Inclusive Critically Conscious Educators (BRICCE). This project is led by Teacher Education faculty Drs. Laura Alvarez and Joy Broughton, and Dr. Wendi Aghily who serves as Chief of Pupil Services and Special Education in MDUSD.
The BRICCE program will address three priority areas of teacher shortage: 1) Special Education with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish, 2) Multiple Subject with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish, and 3) Dual Credential (Special Education and Multiple Subject) with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish. BRICCE will cultivate bilingual teachers who have critical consciousness of the intersections of disability, language, and culture to create inclusive learning environments for multilingual learners.
The BRICCE program will address three priority areas of teacher shortage: 1) Special Education with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish, 2) Multiple Subject with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish, and 3) Dual Credential (Special Education and Multiple Subject) with Bilingual Authorization in Spanish. BRICCE will design a teacher residency partnership grounded in Dr. Broughton’s award-winning dissertation research and original coaching model, Cultivating Critical Consciousness in Educators (CCCE). The CCCE model supports teachers to adopt into their teaching practice critical consciousness of the intersections of disability, language, and culture to create inclusive learning environments for multilingual learners. The CCCE coaching model will be adopted by university field supervisors, faculty, and mentor teachers not only to prepare future teachers, but also foster this practice of social justice teaching within the MDUSD partner schools.
This collaborative partnership began in 2021, when the Teacher Education Department was awarded a Thompson Policy Institute’s California Educator Preparation Innovation Collaborative (CalEPIC) Grant to build capacity for designing inclusive, equity centered teacher pathways. During the 2021–2022 school year, TED faculty and MDUSD administrators have met weekly to explore the district’s needs and the resources that could be leveraged to collaboratively support the development of a teacher residency program. In addition, SMC began placing bilingual Multiple Subject and Education Specialist candidates in dual-language MDUSD sites. Currently, Drs. Broughton and Alvarez are collaborating with bilingual mentor teachers and field supervisors to operationalize the CCCE rubric for coaching pre-service teachers in their instructional practices. We are thrilled for what is to come from this Residency Program Capacity project.