Our Kellogg Foundation-funded curriculum handbook is a major NLERAPP project that intends to develop effective teacher education in the context of higher education within our partnering universities. Developed by NLERAPP’s nationally recognized scholars, the curriculum handbook provides guidance on the kind of instruction that aligned with the needs and concerns of the partnering CBO and the larger community writ large to college professors located in colleges of education. This higher education curriculum not only promotes and develops teacher candidates’ sensitivity to minority cultures, it also offers an innovative participatory action research (PAR) approach that informs their capacity to engage in critical pedagogy.

Along with the signature courses that will apply to the certification completion process across our pipeline sites, and our PAR approach, NLERAPP’s curricular handbook offers teacher candidates an opportunity to acquire the expert knowledge and capacity that they need to not only be effective classroom teachers, but to also inculcate in them and the future teachers in their classrooms a high regard for the community that has nurtured our grow-your-own candidates. It is impossible to imagine this kind of outcome absent of the infrastructure and curriculum that NLERAPP has built and established, respectively, and that will continue to develop as the different strands of our initiative get interwoven at all of our sites.