training tomorrow's urban educators

The College of New Jersey’s Urban Teacher Academy (UTA) is a unique experience. Forty-eight students from high schools near the Ewing, NJ area were recruited to spend two weeks at TCNJ to learn about teaching, and be enlightened about the benefits – and hardships – of working in urban schools.

Hard-to-staff schools are a problem in the New Jersey and the nation. The nation will need more than two million teachers within the next 10 years, with only one million prospective teachers as of now. With programs like UTA, which recruit and attract current high school juniors for urban teaching, the issue of understaffed schools with unqualified teachers has a chance of being resolved.

Laurence R. Fieber, UTA Coordinator, and Lucy Pascius, UTA Program Assistant, were the organizers of thisenriching and beneficial experience. Fieber developed the program as part of the New Jersey Teacher Quality Recruitment Grant Project.

Fieber said he was excited to work with motivated students. “These are kids who really want to do this,” he said.

From the beginning, students were immersed in the experience. They attended many lessons designed to instruct them about crafting a lesson plan and how to teach elementary school students. They had homework assignments with reaction papers to books about experiences in urban teaching they had to read. They delivered speeches about why they want to teach. They listened to many teachers talk about their own experiences with urban teaching. They went to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and the local Boys and Girls Club for community service and interaction with urban students.

They even had the opportunity to put their research, reactions, and knowledge to use as young teachers.

One day's activity brought a group of area fourth graders to campus. In the morning, UTA participants taught a science lesson in Armstrong Hall. After lunch and a concert in the Music Building, lessons recommenced with mathematics. When math was over, the teachers and students went to Packer Hall for a gym class.

“I didn’t know the kids would understand,” explained Snigdha Machandra, an UTA participant and student as Robbinsville High School. “I actually felt they learned something. The lesson plan was so systematic and organized and the kids thought it was systematic and organized, too.”

The path to becoming and staying an urban teacher is difficult, for its hardships of seeing inequality and unfairness every day can take a toll on a person’s spirit. The hope is that the UTA program, now in its second year at TCNJ, will inspire its participants to overcome those hardships and recognize the importance of their role in educating these children, as well as the personal rewards and satisfaction the participants themselves will feel as a result of that.