Background/Context In our best efforts to increase preservice teachers’ critical consciousness regarding the historical and contemporary inequities in the P–12 educational system and equip them to embody pedagogies and practices that counter those inequities, teacher educators often provide curricular and field experiences that reinforce the deficit mindsets that students bring to the teacher education classroom. For many social justice-oriented teacher educators, our best intentions to create humanizing experiences for future teachers can have harmful results that negatively impact preservice teachers’ ability to successfully teach culturally diverse students in a multitude of learning contexts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study In this article, we propose a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education that is informed by our experiences as K–12 teachers and teacher educators in a university-based teacher preparation program. We focus on the general questions, How can university-based teacher preparation programs embody and enact a humanizing pedagogy? and What role can curriculum play in advancing a humanizing pedagogy in university-based teacher preparation programs? Research Design In this conceptual article, we theorize a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education and propose a process of becoming asset-, equity-, and social justice-oriented teachers. This humanizing pedagogy represents a strengths-based approach to teaching and learning in the teacher preparation classroom. Conclusions/Recommendations We propose core tenets of a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education that represent an individual and collective effort toward critical consciousness for preservice teachers and also for teacher educators. If university-based teacher education programs are committed to cultivating the development of asset-, equity-, and social justice-oriented preservice teachers, the commitments to critical self-reflection, resisting binaries, and enacting ontological and epistemological plurality need to be foundational to program structure, curricula alignment, and instructional practice.

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With a national push for the adoption of reliable disposition assessment tools in accredited teacher preparation programs, many programs are beginning to assess PSTs' dispositions in more standardized ways. Responding to calls for more adequate preparation of PSTs to be able to teach in racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse classrooms in culturally sustaining ways, many disposition assessment tools aim to measure pre-service teachers' antiracist dispositions. This chapter utilizes counterstorytelling methodologies to examine the tensions of choosing, creating, and using disposition assessment tools, analyzing the ways that such tools may work to further antiracist teaching while simultaneously upholding whiteness ideology.

Focusing on family and community partnerships in schools is an important aspect to culturally responsive education, yet it is often an overlooked area. Educators must consider new models to engage community and family members to become partners in schools. This study presents finding from a mini-ethnographic case study and explores various stakeholders working as a collective to engage in culturally responsive work. In the model, group members interacted to develop curriculum proposals, professional development for teachers and community, as well as proposals for new courses. The opportunities and challenges school districts face when engaging community members in the policy and practice of schools are also discussed in this model.