Peoria and Decatur Schools will benefit from an Illinois State University project to develop teachers for urban settings.
Robert Lee directs the Chicago Teacher Pipeline Project which is receiving a ten million dollar federal grant to expand to Peoria, Decatur, and two more Chicago neighborhoods; Pilsen and Garfield Park.
The project targets people to teach in high need low achievement areas. Lee says sometimes watching movies about inner city teachers creates a misleading idea for teaching candidates.
"What we want to do is find the spirit of where a person comes in and they want to become that change agent, so to speak, but really do it in that deliberate and dedicated sort of way."
"We don't believe that any of our children in of our communities need to be saved. We just think that teachers need to understand the background of the community, where children come from and some of the challenges they face, and ways that they can leverage the resources of the neighborhood."
Lee says the New Urban Center will try to get new teachers to identify with the areas in which they are placed even if their cultural backgrounds are very different...
"You know we work with faculty on campus to redesign their course work so that the content of whatever they are teaching is juxtaposed to the context of the community or the district that we are working with."
He says the grant lets ISU guide student acculturation into the community so they can decide to be an urban teacher, and learn about the assets of those neighborhoods as well as the challenges in them.
Lee says the pipeline project guides teaching candidates to learn about the strengths and challenges of urban neighborhoods and want to stay there. The grant will pay to develop 500 teachers. The project has produced 400 educators in the last eleven years.