The editor’s note: A better start for teachers

Long-standing teacher shortages have only gotten worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Rafael Heller. As more teachers leave the profession, the teacher workforce is getting younger and greener. To stop the churn, school systems need to address the specific needs of their new teachers. Some are also beginning to pursue grow-your-own strategies that encourage current students, paraeducators, and other staff who are already invested in the community to become teachers.

The grow-your-own approach to teacher preparation: A conversation with Amaya Garcia

Amaya Garcia of New America talks with Kappan about grow-your-own programs, in which school districts partner with teacher preparation programs to recruit and prepare community members, often current students or school staff, to teach in local schools. A recent 50-state scan shows that there is a great deal of variety in how these programs are designed and implemented, and data on the effectiveness of these programs to address teacher shortages is still emerging. Garcia discusses some specific programs that appear especially promising.

Trend Analysis of Grow-Your-Own Using Social Network Analysis: Focusing on Hashtags on Instagram

Background and objective: The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on mental health, which has emerged as a major public health issue around the world. This study aimed to analyze trends and network structure of ‘grow-your-own (GYO)’ through Instagram, one of the most influential social media platforms, to encourage and sustain home gardening activities for promotion of emotional support and physical health. Methods: A total of 6,388 posts including keyword hashtags ‘#gyo’ and ‘#growyourown’ on Instagram from June 13, 2020 to April 13, 2021 were collected. Word embedding was performed using Word2Vec library, and 7 clusters were identified with K-means clustering: GYO, garden and gardening, allotment, kitchen garden, sustainability, urban gardening, etc. Moreover, we conducted social network analysis to determine the centrality of related words and visualized the results using Gephi 0.9.2. Results: The analysis showed that various combinations of words, such as #growourrownfood, #growourrownveggies, and #growwhatyoueat revealed preference and interest of users in GYO, and appeared to encourage their activities on Instagram. In particular, #gardeningtips, #greenfingers, #goodlife, #gardeninglife, #gardensofinstagram were found to express positive emotions and pride as a gardener by sharing their daily gardening lives. Users were participating in urban gardening through #allotment, #raisedbeds, #kitchengarden and we could identify trends toward self-sufficiency and sustainable living. Conclusion: Based on these findings, it is expected that the trend data of GYO, which is a form of urban gardening, can be used as the basic data to establish urban gardening plans considering each characteristic, such as the emotions and identity of participants as well as their dispositions.

Increasing doctors working in specific rural regions through selection from and training in the same region: national evidence from Australia

Background ‘Grow your own’ strategies are considered important for developing rural workforce capacity. They involve selecting health students from specific rural regions and training them for extended periods in the same regions, to improve local retention. However, most research about these strategies is limited to single institution studies that lack granularity as to whether the specific regions of origin, training and work are related. This national study aims to explore whether doctors working in specific rural regions also entered medicine from that region and/or trained in the same region, compared with those without these connections to the region. A secondary aim is to explore these associations with duration of rural training. Methods Utilising a cross-sectional survey of Australian doctors in 2017 (n = 6627), rural region of work was defined as the doctor’s main work location geocoded to one of 42 rural regions. This was matched to both (1) Rural region of undergraduate training (< 12 weeks, 3–12 months, > 1 university year) and (2) Rural region of childhood origin (6+ years), to test association with returning to work in communities of the same rural region. Results Multinomial logistic regression, which adjusted for specialty, career stage and gender, showed those with > 1 year (RRR 5.2, 4.0–6.9) and 3–12 month rural training (RRR 1.4, 1.1–1.9) were more likely to work in the same rural region compared with < 12 week rural training. Those selected from a specific region and having > 1-year rural training there related to 17.4 times increased chance of working in the same rural region compared with < 12 week rural training and metropolitan origin. Conclusion This study provides the first national-scale empirical evidence supporting that ‘grow your own’ may be a key workforce capacity building strategy. It supports underserviced rural areas selecting and training more doctors, which may be preferable over policies that select from or train doctors in ‘any’ rural location. Longer training in the same region enhances these outcomes. Reorienting medical training to selecting and training in specific rural regions where doctors are needed is likely to be an efficient means to correcting healthcare access inequalities.

Shifting Dominant Narratives of Teacher Development: New Directions for Expanding Access to the Educator Workforce Through Grow Your Own Programs

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs are designed to recruit high school students, paraeducators, community organizers and parents, and/or career changers from the local community to join the educator workforce. When considering the nontraditional teacher pools that may enter the profession through GYO programs, commonly held assumptions about who teachers are, how they are developed, and what is most important for supporting their growth are challenged. This article reframes conventional narratives in teacher education by exploring the ways in which GYO programs offer counternarratives that reimagine teacher development by valuing (a) intersectional views of ethnoracial diversity, (b) resilience as an important teacher characteristic, (c) multiple modes of assessment as evidence of teacher learning, (d) ethnoracially diverse and community-based teacher educators, (e) culturally responsive pedagogy and place-based learning, and (f) local community school commitment.

Linguistically and Culturally Sustaining Mentoring and Instruction (LCSMI) in Teacher Education: Surveys for Teacher Candidates, Mentors, and University Instructors

These surveys were developed from the Key Competencies in Linguistically and Culturally Sustaining Mentoring and Instruction for Clinically-based Grow-Your-Own Teacher Education Programs (Kibler et al., 2021: https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/defaults/j9602713n). They are designed for use in teacher education programs for purposes of assessing program strengths and needs and improving program quality.

Key Competencies in Linguistically and Culturally Sustaining Mentoring and Instruction for Clinically-based Grow-Your-Own Teacher Education Programs

Grow-Your-Own (GYO) Teacher Education programs that aim to diversify and strengthen the teacher workforce must provide high-quality learning experiences that support the success and retention of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) teacher candidates and bilingual teacher candidates. Such work requires a holistic and systematic approach to conceptualizing instruction and mentoring that is both linguistically and culturally sustaining. To guide this work in the Master of Arts in Teaching in Clinically Based Elementary program at Oregon State University’s College of Education, we conducted a review of relevant literature and frameworks related to linguistically responsive and/or sustaining teaching or mentoring practices. We developed a set of ten mentoring competencies for school-based cooperating/clinical teachers and university supervisors. They are grouped into the domains of: Facilitating Linguistically and Culturally Sustaining Instruction, Engaging with Mentees, Recognizing and Interrupting Inequitable Practices and Policies, and Advocating for Equity. We also developed a set of twelve instructional competencies for teacher candidates as well as the university instructors who teach them. The instructional competencies are grouped into the domains of: Engaging in Self-reflection and Taking Action, Learning About Students and Re-visioning Instruction, Creating Community, and Facilitating Language and Literacy Development in Context. We are currently operationalizing these competencies to develop and conduct surveys and focus groups with various GYO stakeholders for the purposes of ongoing program evaluation and improvement, as well as further refinement of these competencies.