Embedded Files
The MnEDS Dispositions Strands
1. Assets - Leverages the funds of knowledge from students, families, colleagues, and communities to inform teaching and learning, build relationships, and honor various forms of knowledge and experience.
2. Role of Self - Develops an on-going critical awareness of one’s self and establishes a critically aware teaching presence in the classroom to teach for equity.
3. Collaboration and Communication - Meaningfully communicates and collaborates with students, families, and colleagues through a variety of interpersonal modes that support equity based teaching.
4. Critical Care - Actively nurtures and contextualizes complex relationships to responsibly work in solidarity with and for all students, their families, and communities.
5. Intentional Professional Choices - Engages in ongoing professional learning and decision-making that is ethical, based on multiple forms of evidence and feedback, and extends opportunities for professional growth and leadership.
6. Navigation: Flexibility and Adaptability - Reads and interprets multiple contexts in which teaching can be situated (e.g., classroom, grade level, department, school, community) in ways that are responsive to local situations and needs.
7. Imagination and Innovation - Creates enriching and engaging learning environments to support all students—and the identities and perspectives they represent—by imagining and innovating practices beyond the status quo.
8. Advocacy - Effects systemic change for students, families, and communities in ways that are responsive to multiple and intersecting inequities.
MnEDS and Equity
The MnEDS disposition framework grounds equity as a core element in successful teaching, recognizing its heightened importance in schools whose teacher population does not mirror the racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of their students. Equity means school systems must be fair--personal attributes of an individual (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual identity, language) should not limit one’s opportunity for success. Equity demands that we create access to opportunities within systems that have historically been denied to some students. Ladson-Billings (2006) argued that we have accumulated an “education debt” in the United States through historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral factors and decisions regarding public school systems. Through systematic denial of access to resources, opportunity, quality instruction, and curriculum that feels personal and empowering students of color, English learners, and newly immigrated students are at a larger disadvantage today than their white, English-speaking counterparts. Our schooling system today requires differentiated access and support in order to provide equitable education for all students. Educators must work to bring about a more socially just set of schooling practices in order for all students, and especially historically marginalized students, to experience school with full access and fairness.
Working inside classrooms and schools requires that we pay close attention to the everyday-ness of interactions between and among students, teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators. We are convinced that a conceptual frame of cultural relevance is needed for teacher leadership enactment. Ladson-Billings (1995) identified three fundamental characteristics of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP): 1) students experience academic success; 2) students experience instruction with cultural integrity that allows them to maintain their cultural identity while engaging in high level work; and 3) students are challenged to develop a critical socio-political consciousness and to analyze macro-social norms. These three tenets help us define the development of teaching dispositions that affirm multiple definitions of success in school, welcome and embrace cultural differences within classrooms, playgrounds, and hallways, and bolster pedagogical courage to lead and facilitate classrooms where students develop critical consciousness and question the status quo.
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