By Judith Schwartzstein, Vice President for Publicity, Sarah Lawrence College 

Dec. 21, 2016:  The best way to train teachers to understand the challenges faced by inner-city children-at-risk is to have teachers who come from those communities.

That's the thinking behind Sarah Lawrence College's Art of Teaching graduate program, which has just received a five-year grant from New York State's Teacher Opportunity Corps to help expand its work in Yonkers public schools. The grant was recently announced by the New York State Education Department.

"This Teacher Opportunity Corps initiative is a natural extension of the relationship Sarah Lawrence College already has with the community of Yonkers," said Kathleen Ruen, acting director of the Art of Teaching program. "The grant offers us vital support and helps us to expand the work we are doing to prepare our students to teach in disadvantaged communities, as well as to recruit students from minority backgrounds and help them become teachers."

Under the grant, which comes from the state's department of education, the Art of Teaching program will receive $103,334 in 2017 and up to $659,000 over five years. The money will be used to fund the tuition and transportation costs of the program's pre-service teachers, support the teaching of an additional course addressing the needs of children placed at risk, and help develop certificate programs in special education and bilingual education.

In addition, the grant will create a teacher-mentoring program in partnership with Yonkers's Cedar Place Elementary School, a pre-K through eighth-grade magnet school whose student body is 96 percent minority, with 76 percent coming from families whose incomes are at or near the poverty line. 

The Art of Teaching is a child-centered (birth through sixth grade), culturally sensitive interdisciplinary teacher education program centered on observation of children. The program gives students a solid philosophical background in current thinking about educational theory and practice. Students work with children at every point in the program.

Sarah Lawrence's program was one of 56 across the state that received a total of $10 million as part of two New York State My Brother's Keeper Initiatives: the Teacher Opportunity Corps II (TOC) and the MBK Challenge Grant Program.

Pictured here:  A Sarah Lawrence student participating in the interdisciplinary teacher education program.

Photo courtesy Judith Schwartzstein, Vice President for Publicity, Sarah Lawrence College