(Page 1 of 3) - Bridge Builder Academic Mentoring Program: A Model for Preparing and Retaining Culturally Competent Secondary Teachers authored by Eifler, Karen. and Greene, Thomas.

AACTE 2007 Annual Meeting Poster Presentation Proposal

Title—Bridge Builder Academic Mentoring Program: A Model for Preparing and

Retaining Culturally Competent Secondary Teachers

Section I: Content

A. Statement of the problem

The achievement gap between White students and their ethnic minority peers is

well-documented, but perhaps even more dishearteningly, researchers such as Fordham
and Ogbu (1986) demonstrate that cultural pressures within their own ethnic communities
often preclude academically talented Black youth from realizing their fullest potential. If a
primary aim of transforming teacher education is in fact to equip future teachers to serve
diverse learners, then programs that successfully help teacher candidates understand the
complexities of interactions among children of color and their schools, teachers and
communities merit closer looks.

This poster provides just such a closer look at a partnership that has lasted seven

years and continues to thrive. Two groups are involved in the Bridge Builder Academic
Mentoring Program (BAMP): pre-service secondary education majors in a four-year
teacher preparation program at a small comprehensive university in the Pacific Northwest
and Black adolescents from 27 high schools within 25 miles of the university
—“Prospective Gents” in Bridge Builders, a community-based rites of passage program
designed to help Black adolescent males navigate the terrain of high school graduation
and college matriculation. Bridge Builders adhere to four “Barometers of Manhood:”
community-building, entrepreneurship, spirituality and scholarship. The preservice
teachers provide academic mentoring in all disciplines, supporting the scholarship
Barometer of Bridge Builders.

Data collected over five years include surveys, interviews and observations of

White pre-service teachers engaged in weekly mentoring sessions with their Gents in
small intact “homebase groups” of ten Gents (10 groups altogether). In addition, data on
new teachers’ success and longevity in the field have been collected via reports from
administrators who hire graduates of this teacher preparation program and graduates’
self-reports. A focus of this teacher preparation program— comprised almost entirely of
White middle class students, predominately female—has been to increase the “cultural
competency” of its pre-service teachers. Instruments designed to measure these
competencies are administered before, during and after each semester of BAMP. Those
data indicate that while several pedagogical competencies increased throughout the year,
the most powerful changes were in pre-service teachers’ dispositions and orientations
toward diverse students. Communication styles, cultural values and programmatic goals
emerged as crucial considerations contributing to the eventual success or failure of the
mentoring relationships, Gents’ academic success and novice teachers retention in the
field.

B. Literature Review

All levels of the US educational system are facing reform pressures. Much of the

most anguished attention has been focused on PK-12 schools. However, the teacher
preparation programs which produce the teachers who staff those schools are under
intense scrutiny as well, and not simply that of our patrons, but our own accrediting
bodies (e.g. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2003). There is a
clear link between the teaching in P-12 classrooms and how the teachers in those rooms
were themselves taught (Ball, 2000, Lortie, 1975). In particular, multicultural education,
too frequently reduced to a single course or short burst of inservice sessions (Banks &
Banks, 1997), is given short shrift in teacher preparation programs (NCATE, 1998),
while at the same time acknowledged as vital to the formation of teachers equipped to