UCLA CTC Accredited Professional Educator Programs (UCAP)

Common Mission/Goals

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is an institution that is firmly committed to the betterment and benefit of the Los Angeles community. The UCAP Unit at UCLA believes in its common mission of promoting social justice, building an ethic of caring, fostering individual responsibility, and committing to underserved communities.

• We believe that building on the strength of our diverse populations is critical to a successful society.
• We seek to foster a community of professionals who will work together to improve the lives of students and community members in the most underserved areas of Los Angeles.
• We seek to educate professionals who will serve their communities with integrity and an ethic of caring.
• We believe that professionals can help to create a learning environment that helps to empower the people they serve.
• We seek to create a dialogue that emphasizes research, inquiry and problem-solving.
• We believe that social justice and advocacy undergird our programs.

Conceptual Framework

The principles of social justice, the ethic of caring and a commitment to the communities served all undergird the Unit’s vision, mission, and values.  These concepts reside in the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of Jean Anyon, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux, Martin Haberman, bell hooks, Tyrone Howard, Luis Moll, Sonia Nieto, Jeannie Oakes, Nel Noddings, and John Goodlad.

Social Justice

The programs in the UCLA UCAP Unit are firmly committed to issues of social justice and school reform. We emphasize the importance of having a “fundamental commitment to a just and caring society: ‘Human life is experienced in the way we live our everyday lives, our relationships to ourselves and others, our sense of personal belonging in society and the cosmos. We believe this demands a human condition characterized by freedom, justice, equality, and love’ (Macdonald & Macdonald, 1988, p. 480, as cited in Oakes, 1996, p. 9).  Our candidates and faculty are well aware of issues about cultural and social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1973) and the fallacies in the concept of “merit”-based success. Bourdieu (1973) states that schools often function as an instrument of social reproduction. When schools do “away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give” (p. 58). Following Henry Giroux’s notion of a “transformative intellectual,” we want all of our candidates to have “the courage to take risks, to look into the future, and to imagine a world that could be as opposed to simply what is” (Giroux, 1988, p. 215).

Ethic of Caring

When developing our curriculum for our coursework, as a part of our following the state standards, we also adhere to Nel Noddings’ (1984; 1992) concept of care. This concept emphasizes the necessity of developing empathy in both our candidates and their students. This is not a “one-way” relationship, but instead adheres to Noddings’ ideas about the necessity for a reciprocal relationship to develop if “caring” can succeed as a concept. “We wanted to foster an ethic in which care would be expressed as high expectations, confidence in students’ capacity, and support for persistence and high achievement” (Oakes, 1996, p. 10).

Commitment to the Communities Served

Our candidates and faculty engage in discussions and professional development based on articles about the commonly researched differences in schooling between children in working class neighborhoods and children in professional and affluent neighborhoods (Anyon, 1981), and the pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 1991). However, we do not hold a “deficit” view of the high-need neighborhoods in which we work. To the contrary, we look to the strengths of the community and the knowledge-base of the students and families whom our graduates will serve (Moll, 1990). Our candidates take a critical stance when analyzing curriculum and teaching and counseling strategies, always looking for the most effective, research-based methods of teaching and counseling the high-needs children and families they will serve (Cummins, 1989; Moll, 1988). “We decided that Center X novice teachers must engage with the communities they serve, not so much to ‘educate’ parents in the conventional meaning of the term, but rather to connect what children do in school to their experiences in the community. By engaging children and their families in finding and solving real problems that matter to them outside of school, we thought that they could help make schoolwork less abstract and detached (and thereby more likely to be learned) and that they could enhance the power and well-being of the larger educational ecology for children” (Oakes, 1996, p. 12). “Together, we work to transform public schooling to create a more just, equitable, and humane society. We believe that this work is an enduring feature of our democracy and that it occurs within and across multiple communities—of teachers, students, parents, community members, elected officials, researchers and others engaged in democratic life. Together, these communities transform public schooling by asking questions and solving problems, fueled by passionate resolve and persistent effort”  (Quartz & Priselac, 1995, p. 1).

These research-based principles all support and are responsive to California’s adopted standards and curriculum frameworks which all focus on serving diverse students equally and ethically. As such, all programs, courses, teaching, candidate performance and experiences, scholarship, service, collaboration, and UCAP Unit accountability are designed, directed, and based on these three principles, which undergird the overall mission and vision of the UCAP credential programs.

UCAP UNIT LEADERS

Christina Christie
Wasserman Dean, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies
Professor of Education

Annamarie Francois
Associate Dean for Public Engagement, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies