Jamming on the Jamboard


 Jamming on the Jamboard:

Using Jamboard as a Tool for Recognizing Differences in Teacher Education

 

Every semester I involved my elementary education preservice teacher in discussion on topics concerning demographics in education. Usually, I ask my students to chart their elementary teacher demographics, and we usually do this mentally. Of course, we discover that we have far more female than male teachers and white than other races as elementary school teachers. Then we read public data that confirms our lived experience with elementary school teachers. However, this year I did something different. We used a visual tool to chart our teaching demographics. I utilized Google’s Jamboard to create a visual representation of our elementary school teacher demographics. The picture at the bottom of this blog post is a display of our data. We disaggregated our elementary teachers by gender and race.

From the visual representation, PST were able to quickly determine that our elementary teachers were mostly female and white. Of course, this is findings are only generalized to the PST in this classroom. Or is it?

 For the next class meeting, I will present data regarding the topic at hand by using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The NCES provides demographic data about schools in the United States. We will examine national statistics and compare our class data to the nation. I, however, wanted to examine the data prior to providing it to my PST for the purpose of this blog post.  Therefore, the following data is based on 2017-18 data obtained from the NCES website.

  According to NCES, in cases where the student population is the majority of students of color, the teaching population was often found represented. This holds true for schools where students are majority white with 90% of the teachers were white; schools with majority-black students with 36% of the teachers were black, and schools with majority Hispanic students with 33% of the teachers were Hispanic. This trend in teaching population, moreover, is the same for Native American/ Alaskan (29%), Hawaiian (19%), and Asian American (29%).

Why knowing the demographic data is important to PST especially in an HBCU setting? Having the knowledge of the teaching demographics is essential to understanding the historic and present inequities and system inequitable policies that effect today’s schools especially in math education. The call for access and equity has been strongly emphasized by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics(2000, p. 12). Equity requires teachers to provide all students what they need to become proficient in mathematics and to have access to high-quality instruction regardless of their students’ background characteristics. Support for access and inequity requires teachers to have high expectations, a high-quality mathematics curriculum and instruction, and adequate time for student learning (Guiterrez, 2002).

 

Sharing our teacher demographic data will help PST with the challenges of not seeing people like them in the classroom. These feelings may be the same feelings PST experiences as children. Having teachers of color is beneficial to all students which will hopefully encourage my PST to keep progressing through the process of being an educator.

 










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