Teacher Professional Development for Ethnic Studies: A Critical Youth-Centered Approach

In this article, we discuss a partnership with a district-wide Ethnic Studies (ES) program, the Ethnic Studies Professional Development (ESPD) project, through which we designed and led a year-long teacher professional development series for middle and high school ES teachers in one school district. We describe the context of the ESPD project, our vision for a critical youth-centered professional development experience, how this vision aligns with scholarship on ES content and pedagogy, and how we operationalized this vision through key choices we made about the scope and sequence of the year. We conclude with a summary of what was accomplished, the project’s next steps, and implications for teacher-educators.