and the COVID Urban Classroom
PROFESSOR TOMÁS GALGUERA is the bridge between the School of Education (SOE) faculty from before and after the turn of the millennium. Early childhood education used to underpin most SOE programming, he said, but once his older colleagues retired around the mid-2000s, there was a shift in
The Mills School of Education had already adjusted its program to better prepare teachers for the challenges of urban schools. What happens when that intersects with a pandemic? By Rebecca Bodenheimer
the school’s priorities to focus more on teachers. Galguera, who is now the chair of the SOE’s Teacher Education Department, said the faculty realized that the program “assumed a certain level of privilege, because it asked people to suspend everything they were doing for a year so they could become a teacher.” In that sense, it had a tendency to favor prospective educators who could afford to take that kind of break. More recent faculty members have committed to making the program accessible to teachers who reflect the makeup of Oakland public school students. “We have a pretty unstable workforce in our schools, teaching primarily students of color [and] families that are grappling with financial, food, and housing insecurities. It’s such a wide conflation of challenges,” said Wendi Williams, dean of the SOE, who came to Mills in 2019. “We need schools to be places of stability, which means that we need a workforce that’s going to be there, and that can afford to be there.”
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M I L L S Q U A R T E R LY
