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Inviting UMN undergrads into educator pathways
DirecTrack to Teaching program celebrates 15 years
Aspiring social studies teacher and DirecTrack to Teaching (DTT) student Ryan Seaver spends his afternoons working for the extended-day programs at Breck School. He works mostly with first- through fourth-graders, managing arguments, hanging out in the gym, and helping with homework when he’s asked. Seaver learned Breck was hiring when DirecTrack to Teaching alum Maddie Haut visited CI 3902: Exploring the Teaching Profession 2, the second course in the DTT sequence, and pitched the job. Seaver laughs, “Now my boss is a DTT alum, and I work with two other DirecTrackers. We’re everywhere.”
Photo by Jairus Davis
As a freshman, Seaver learned about DTT from another UMN alum, now teaching at Edina High School. Seaver recalled by Jehanne Beaton his friend touted that through DirecTrack to Teaching, students “could put their eggs in multiple baskets. I could still explore teaching, pursue political science—my major—and check out careers at the same time.” Seaver adds, “That was appealing.”
Located in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, DTT offers undergraduates a low-stakes opportunity to explore teaching through a two-course sequence that combines seminar and community-engaged learning. DTT students spend more than 60 hours in local schools, working with teachers and students in their subject area of interest. While the two schools where he completed his community-engaged learning were vastly different, Seaver worked with teachers who had a profound impact on his understanding of what it means to teach. At his first school site, he worked with a teacher who “set up the classroom as OUR classroom,” he says. “He had Blackout Marvel superhero decals, was constantly checking on kids about extracurriculars, and served as a caring adult and important human resource for his students.” For his second experience, Seaver worked with a social studies teacher and UMN alum, Bobak Razavi. Seaver had the opportunity to talk with Razavi about their shared identity as Iranian-Americans, and “how it informs his approach to teaching certain concepts in social studies.” Seaver adds, “Bobak is a master teacher. I am so glad I had the chance to learn from him.”
DirecTrack students engage in a discussion. (Photo by Jairus Davis)
Senior Lecturer Karla Stone taught some of the first classes in DirecTrack to Teaching.
Creating a sense of belonging
This year, DirecTrack to Teaching celebrates 15 years of supporting UMN undergraduates as they consider teaching as a profession. Since its inception, nearly 1,400 UMN undergraduates have passed through DTT, with roughly 1,000 students continuing into teacher licensure and education work. Former DTT students regularly find each other as colleagues in schools around the Twin Cities, their teaching professional network seeded in a Peik Hall classroom years before. Shuji Asai serves as the lead officer for teacher licensure in the UMN Office of Teacher Education, but years ago, Asai worked with Bob Utke, Jane Gilles, and Mary Trettin to establish DirecTrack to Teaching. “The community-building component of DTT is hugely important,” Asai says. “DirecTrack helps make the UMN’s giant campus smaller by creating a sense of belonging,” and facilitating connections between undergraduates with “a shared sense of excitement about teaching” from across campus.
Asai credits Utke and Gilles as the “architects of DirecTrack.” Prior to creating DTT, Utke and Gilles ran a pathway program called the Early Admissions Program (EA), which offered a similar two-course sequence but was geared for UMN juniors and seniors. When the UMN shifted away from undergraduate teacher licensure and moved to a post-baccalaureate initial licensure and masters of education program, EA offered some exposure to teaching to UMN undergrads. The EA curriculum was “a bit free-flowing,” Utke says, “students heard from professional voices, representatives from the teachers’ union, discussed educator professional ethics, and we got them into schools.” At the time, the UMN licensure programs were perceived as tough to get into, and then-University President Robert Bruininks pushed to return to undergraduate licensure. Content requirements established by the state of Minnesota made undergraduate licensure a challenge. Students interested in teaching secondary math or social studies, for example, were unable to fit licensure program requirements into demanding schedules that were dominated by course work in their undergraduate majors. Asai notes that while the UMN still offers undergraduate licensure pathways in music, agriculture, and special education, it can be challenging for some students in those programs to complete their undergraduate degree and licensure in four years. Yet, as Utke explains, “we were facing both political pressure and practical pressure that the EA program was not meeting students’ needs.”
According to Utke, DirecTrack to Teaching became “an olive branch”—a program that offered a direct pathway into the UMN licensure programs, while preserving that exploratory element, “key for undergraduates.” DirecTrack continues to offer robust support for aspiring teachers and the ability to recruit teachers from all of the UMN colleges, bringing majors from departments such as chemistry, theater, history, and youth studies together to talk about teaching, schools, and learning. Utke argues, “the low-stakes quality of DirecTrack to Teaching is so critical. Even if a student is just exploring, they earn credits, and they take with them a clear understanding of the complexity and importance of teaching.”
Prepared, confident, ready to go
Senior Lecturer Karla Stone served as the initial instructor and coordinator for DirecTrack to Teaching. Stone recalls DTT started as “current events courses: grounded in what’s happening in the world when it comes to education.” Students discussed different types of schools, unpacked educational policies, and examined the institutional and individual teacher decisions that contributed to—or could interrupt—the school-to-prison pipeline. Right away, Stone noticed how engaged and excited DirecTrack students were. “Students were passionate; they had so much to say!” Now, as the license program lead for the UMN Grow Your Own Teachers Program in Multilingual Education, Stone sees the impact DirecTrack has on the teacher candidates who enter the teacher licensure programs. When they show up for the licensure programs “DirecTrack students are ready to go. They go toe-to-toe with career changers who’ve lived a lot more life,” she says. “When I think about my current teacher candidates who’ve come through DirecTrack, they are prepared, confident, and are not afraid to ask hard questions and engage in healthy discourse. DirecTrack students know what they’re getting into and bring such strong perspectives.”
DTT alum Jason To teaches English as a Second Language at Mississippi Creative Arts in St. Paul Public Schools. He came through DTT as a linguistics major and then earned his ESL license and masters of education in curriculum and instruction in multilingual education through the program Stone now leads. As a third-year teacher, To reflected on how DirecTrack provided him with “so much prior knowledge before coming into the licensure program,” he says. “I knew what the classroom would be like for student teaching because the field placements in DirecTrack allowed me to experience that middle space. It was so much easier to flip into the student teacher role. The program had a big impact in developing my teacher identity. I don’t know if I would have lasted this long if I didn’t feel as comfortable with myself and known myself as a teacher.”
Another DTT alum, Greta Oelberg, is in her fifth year, teaching art at New Millennium Academy in Brooklyn Center. For the past three years, Oelberg has hosted aspiring art teachers in their field experiences during DirecTrack. “We need good teachers! Feeling connected is the antidote to teacher burnout,” she says. “DTT is doing that work: connecting teachers—and aspiring teachers—to each other.” Oelberg argues that by opening her classroom to DirecTrack students, she benefits too. “I get to feel like I have a little bit of a team—someone else to observe and help and witness some of the crazy and the victories,” she says. This year, DTT aspiring art teacher Taliyah Tran helps out weekly in Oelberg’s art classroom. “Taliyah is amazing! The kids get so excited when she’s here. My classes are big, so I love having someone else who’s in the room working with me and caring for students,” she says. Tran lives five minutes from the school, and Oelberg adds, “She knows some of the kids’ siblings and families. She’s connected to the community in so many ways.”
Asai touts the legacy built by DirecTrack. “DirecTrack to Teaching is such a valuable investment. It’s an investment in teaching, in Minnesota, and in kids’ lives,” he says. Seaver is evidence of that investment. Seaver has been accepted into the 5-12 social studies education initial licensure and masters of education program and will attend orientation the day after his graduation from CLA. He says he’s ready. “I’m convinced that teaching is for me. Part of it was being in schools through DirecTrack, being able to reflect on my own education, and being introduced to what good teaching looks like,” he says. Seaver encourages the UMN to continue to invest in aspiring teachers. “The UMN-TC is the educational leader in the state,” he says. “It needs to continue to support teachers and schools, especially aspiring teachers of color and aspiring queer teachers. I love DTT. There are so many different people i n DTT, but at the end of the day—they’re all very like-minded because they want to make an impact on students’ lives.”
DirecTrack to Teaching student Ryan Seaver. (Photo by Jairus Davis)
DirecTrack to Teaching alum Jason To.