Greetings from IRT!
We hope the holidays offered you time to rest, reflect and rejuvenate. Venturing into the new year, we are excited to continue to explore IRT’s future. Given the continuing urgency and crisis of our times, we know we need more diverse teachers, specialists, administrators, and professors now. We know that change does not happen in isolation or departmental vacuums. With the mounting challenges to what we teach, how we teach, where we teach, and who we teach with, the IRT represents a throughline of community, connection, and care.
As we move forward to reimagine IRT into this next phase framed in part by these themes, the following thoughts and critical questions come to mind:
Community
How do we create an engaged learning community framed less by hierarchy and more by a collective will to provide the most cohesive academic support, practice-based instruction, and wellness outreach for our current scholars and alums?
Alums will often comment that IRT pushed them to their growing edges but did so in the spirit of a supportive community. Teaching and learning should be about knowledge co-construction and relationship building. On a recent IRT alumni webinar panel entitled Becoming an Educator, A Conversation with the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers in partnership with Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, Mayra Canizales Cruz, IRT ’07, Founding Partner, The Canizales Group, said, “We are the research. We are the lived reality of theory to the flesh. What is it that I am lived research for?” Followed by Endia Hayes, IRT ’16, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, “So much of oppression is about policing the imagination. Important to me is to think of educators who have pushed my imagination regarding the knowledge that we live versus the knowledge we are supposed to have.”
Connection
What connections do we need to foster across the education PK-12th grades through the higher education sectors such that collaboration and competition coexist even amid contradiction?
Our consortium partners and alums desire more collaboration. Over the summer, we learned how much can happen when our deans and administrators share one space. What could we imagine if more educators connected across sectors?
Care
At a time when stress levels are high and demands on our time are plentiful, how do we care for ourselves as well as offer support to each other in meaningful ways?
Our Scholars are the first to mention the heaviness of our world today. We see our alums struggle to navigate hierarchy and institutions — while continuing to pay it forward with each other and the next generation of aspiring IRT scholars. How do we find beauty and balance in the everyday?
If you have examples or answers to these questions, share them on the blog or with us. We know that our work matters, and we hope to continue to be in community with you.
Warm regards,
LaShawnda Brooks, Executive Director
Catherine Wong, Associate Director and Manager of Programs
Institute for Recruitment of Teachers 