ABSTRACT
Residency is a model with potential to address long-standing tensions—between theory and practice, between competing and often siloed knowledges and practices (school-based, community-based, university-based), between who students are and who aspiring teachers are—through deliberate partnership and by forging conscious reconnections. In this chapter, we describe the broad practice-based turn in teacher education that has guided transformation of curriculum and teacher education pedagogy in the University at Buffalo Teacher Residency (UBTR) and the specific strategy of modularization that is shifting the way university coursework is designed and animated over the course of a residency year—including changes in how novice teachers engage in development and how teacher education coursework relates to school and community contexts. This chapter describes our effort to transform our teacher education program in order to leverage the year-long, immersive clinical placement that residency affords. We focus on the transformation of teacher education program coursework through three dimensions of modularization: the why, the what, and the how; and then conclude by reflecting on our first iteration of implementation to consider how these experiences can inform the what next to imagine a more just and equitable vision of teacher education.
