This chapter is situated within the growing literature to decenter, decolonize, and reclaim a more humanizing approach to language and literacy teacher education and research by positioning community members—youth, families, and community organizers—as faculty and architects in designing and supporting the development of community-responsive teachers and researchers. Nurturing critical community literacies is integral to this larger project and greatly facilitated by robust collaborations between community-based researchers/organizers and university-based language and literacy teacher educator scholars. When considering community-engaged teacher education, it is important to interrogate the project of school and its relationship to communities. The shift advocated in this chapter requires consideration of how larger schooling systems need to be radically reimagined and configured and held accountable for the damage they have perpetrated on minoritized communities. Discourses of schooling, teaching, and learning are entangled in the ideology of coloniality. Although social justice and equity are oft-stated goals in their programs, teacher education remains largely a colonial endeavor framed by Eurocentric ways of knowing and being. In this chapter we provide a critique of many mainstream views of community within teacher education programs, using illustrative work from key research to develop new notions of community within teacher education programs.
