(photo credit: Tony Mastres)
The Immigration Initiative at Harvard is hosting a webinar conducted by Dr. Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School titled “Preparing Teachers to Educate Immigrant-origin Students: An Examination of Teacher Credentialing Standards, Coursework, and Opportunities for Expanded Learning” on Monday, March 6 at 1:30 pm (Eastern). Registration is available online.
For children of immigrant backgrounds, teachers can play a critical role in supporting school engagement, facilitating access to educational opportunities, and promoting high aspirations and academic success. Yet, few teacher preparation programs focus explicitly on preparing school personnel to understand and effectively meet the needs of immigrant-origin students and their families. In this presentation, Professor Sattin-Bajaj will share emerging results from a multi-method study examining how teachers in California are prepared to educate children in immigrant families that includes analysis of state credentialing standards and course syllabi, interviews with course instructors, and surveys and interviews with teacher candidates from three case study teacher preparation programs.
The Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH) advances interdisciplinary scholarship, original research, and intellectual exchange on issues related to immigrant origin children—the fastest growing child and youth population in our country (currently, comprising 27% of children and 33% of all young adults). The Immigration Initiative at Harvard serves as a place of convening for scholars, students, policy makers, community leaders, and practitioners working on topics related to understanding and serving this population.
Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education. Her research focuses on issues of educational access and equity for immigrant-origin youth and other historically underserved student populations. Her work includes exploratory qualitative studies of immigrant families’ school choice behaviors; experimental research to develop and test interventions to reduce educational inequities; and studies of school personnel’s responses to xenophobia in schools and society and their sense of preparedness to address the consequences of immigration enforcement and racism for their school communities. She is the author of Unaccompanied Minors: Immigrant Youth, School Choice, and the Pursuit of Equity.