Date of Award

2015

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

School of Education

Abstract

This qualitative case study explored a community-university partnership for teacher preparation with an urban Indigenous community organization in Chicago, Illinois. In the examined partnership, Indigenous participants collaborated with university faculty to prepare graduate-level students in an initial preparation program. I examined the impact of the partnership on the participating Indigenous community members, emphasizing how their interactions with university faculty and teacher candidates impacted the Indigenous organization and participants. Indigenous participants considered what teachers must understand to serve urban Indigenous children and the community's role in teacher preparation.

I collected data through focus groups with Indigenous participants before and after engagement with the partnership; direct observations of partnership activities where Indigenous participants interacted with teacher candidates and university faculty, and offered individual interviews for all participants. The collected data was audio recorded and transcribed, then analyzed using conventional content analysis. With Indigenous Postcolonial Theory (IPT) guiding the study, I examined the perspectives of urban Indigenous community members interacting with a non-Indigenous university teacher preparation program preparing teacher candidates to serve the needs of diverse children and their families. This study held implications for continued development of Indigenous community-university partnerships, policy and practice in urban Indigenous education, and potential for partnerships to advance self-determination and postcolonialism through self-education.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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