Centering joy as an act of resistance, presenters share multimodal strategies — literature circles and restorative practices — designed to help teacher candidates cultivate identity, criticality, and belonging. Grounded in Muhammad's Culturally and Historically Responsive Model (2020, 2023), these approaches model humanizing pedagogies to sustain both educators and students in challenging times.
Institutions of higher education have a responsibility to prepare future educators not only to teach effectively, but to navigate the complex realities of today’s school environments. Increasing concerns about campus and school-based violence have heightened the need for intentional, research-informed preparation for preservice teachers, particularly in relation to active shooter scenarios and broader safety challenges. Together, we can move from fear and uncertainty toward preparedness, responsibility, and collective action, ensuring that future educators enter the profession equipped to teach, lead, and protect themselves and their students.
This proposal examines how multimodal assessment and data visualization can strengthen educator preparation by expanding the ways candidates, faculty, and program leaders engage with evidence. Building on scholarship in multimodality and multiliteracies, the session argues that contemporary learning is increasingly mediated through visual, textual, oral, and digital modes, requiring teacher education programs to design assessment systems that reflect this complexity.At Touro University Graduate School of Education, assessment data had been fragmented across multiple Excel files, limiting timely analysis and obscuring patterns across programs. To address this challenge, we integrated Watermark Student Learning & Licensure with Microsoft Power BI to consolidate candidate submissions, key assessments, and placement data into interactive dashboards. This shift enabled real-time analysis of program-level and cross-program performance, including comparisons across traditional and alternative certification pathways. Research on multimodal digital classroom assessment suggests that combining multimodal perspectives with performance assessment theory can broaden the kinds of evidence available for instructional decision-making while also raising important questions about validity, literacy demands, and the interpretation of evidence. Similarly, scholarship on multimodal teacher education emphasizes that such work requires strong assessment support and reconceptualization of how learning is represented and evaluated.The session positions dashboards not merely as reporting tools, but as pedagogical and organizational instruments that support data literacy, shared inquiry, and continuous improvement. By enabling faculty and stakeholders to interpret assessment evidence through multiple modes, the approach aligns with research showing that multimodal learning can deepen understanding and engagement, particularly when preservice teachers encounter content through varied media and representational forms. Participants will learn how integrated assessment systems can support transparency, accreditation readiness, and evidence-based program improvement in educator preparation contexts.
Following the 2014 “transgender tipping point,” trans visibility increased dramatically in public life while remaining understudied in teacher education. This systematic review examines scholarship published between 2014 and 2024 at the intersection of transness and teacher education, exploring how trans people, experiences, and issues are represented and what this literature reveals about the field's assumptions, gaps, and possibilities.
