Maestros Para el Pueblo

About Maestros para el Pueblo

The Maestros Para el Pueblo [Maestros] is a dedicated, community centered program committed to recruiting and preparing culturally diverse, multilingual educators who reflect and represent the students and families of the Skagit Valley community. By offering mentorship, leadership opportunities, and culturally contextualized coursework, Maestros supports underrepresented/Latine students in pursuing education careers. The program aims to address racial disproportionality in academic achievement and improve outcomes by increasing access to educators who share students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Maestros also works to dismantle systemic barriers to teacher preparation for Latine and other historically marginalized communities. At its core, Maestros is committed to equity, representation, and developing responsive educators who honor culture, language, and community.

The program aims to address racial disproportionality in academic achievement and improve outcomes by increasing access to educators who share students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Maestros also works to dismantle systemic barriers to teacher preparation for Latine and other historically marginalized communities. At its core, Maestros is committed to equity, representation, and developing responsive educators who honor culture, language, and community.

Courses

DRR360 – Maestros Apprenticeship Seminar (MAS): The Community Teacher: Rethinking Educational Systems & Relational Teaching Practices

The Maestros Apprenticeship Seminar (MAS) is a variable credit (1-4), repeatable course that provide students opportunities to consider place-based systems thinking, intergenerational learning, and community-based approaches early in their development as future P-12 educators. The course is aligned to INTASC and Washington state multicultural and SEL standards.

This seminar seeks to develop critically conscious educators in the Skagit Valley who understand the importance of building institutional and community partnerships as future educators for fostering the academic potential and well-being of all children and youth. This approach to teacher preparation aims to integrate aspects of both the classroom teacher and the community organizer to accomplish the following:

• Prepare a diverse group of future teachers to transform schools into justice-producing institutions, using a systems-focus and transdisciplinary emphasis that places children/youth, families, and communities at the heart of educational practice.
• Collaborate with schools, communities, families, and youth to create the conditions for university students and faculty to see teacher education as a place to understand and apply issues related to transforming schools in real time and not just as a future-oriented goal, and
• Use processes that cultivate educational success through relational networks focused on engaging with children/youth, communities, families, and school professionals.

Most teacher education programs localize curriculum within individual departments or content areas and emphasize specialized methods courses in traditional classrooms. Although this structure may lead to content knowledge and expertise, preparing teachers to work with children and youth within the context of their lives is a social justice imperative requiring cross-department and interprofessional collaborations. Additionally, preparing future teachers who will challenge school system inequities may be optimized by initially engaging future teachers with families and communities in less-formalized education settings than a traditional classroom. 

Facilitating a teacher’s development to work in the community requires taking the time in pre-service education for building a network of relationships and to experience how power operates among the people, schools, and community-based organizations. Toward this end, this seminar will prioritize the rethinking of educational systems and relational teaching practices that consider the ecology of the school context, particularly within Skagit Valley communities.