Teaching Pre-Service Teachers About Belonging
1 Colorado Mesa University
Abstract
This article describes how a Teacher Educator teaches her university students (pre-service teachers) about belonging; how it feels to belong to a group, why they need to spend their time and energy during the school day working to make K-12 students feel that they belong, what belonging looks like, and how to make it happen in the pre-service teachers' future classrooms with their future K-12 students. The Teacher Educator attempts to accomplish this preparation through daily community-building and inclusive activities in the university classroom, written reflections about belonging, and taking university students out into the local K-12 schools to see what belonging actually looks like. Included in this article are direct quotes from pre-service teachers that illustrate their learning, value of, and future planning for belonging.
Keywords
- belonging
- community-building
- teacher education
- pre-service teachers
- relationships
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