The Institute for Urban Education (IUE) is an urban teacher preparation and scholarship program at UMKC that helps students serve Kansas City’s historically underserved public schools.
Through an effective cohort model, field experience and post-graduate mentorship, IUE students graduate from the program equipped to address the unique needs and challenges of richly diverse urban schools in Kansas City.
“Teaching is a noble profession, and great public school teachers are needed now more than ever. Everyone I’ve met through the IUE shares my passion and commitment for shaping young minds and leaving the world a little better than we found it,” said Joel Walsh, an IUE graduate who now teaches American government at Northeast High School.
Walsh was committed to teaching in an urban school whether or not he participated in the program, but the IUE allowed him to graduate from UMKC free of student loan debt.
Dr. Brad Poos, associate director and coordinator of IUE Curriculum and Pipeline Programming, thinks that commitment to teaching in urban communities and Kansas City is exactly why IUE students go on to make exemplary teachers.
“They believe in restorative principles and guiding a classroom. They believe in cultural, ethnic and racial diversity as a strength,” said Poos. “There is no real comparative program nationally to what the Institute for Urban Education does.”
Students who receive the IUE scholarship sign a contract where they agree to teach for four years in a local urban school after they graduate.
Ninety percent of IUE graduates are still teaching at or beyond the 5-year mark and 85% of all IUE graduates still work in education today.
Half of the students within the IUE identify as students of color and more than half are first generation college students, said Poos.
The program emphasizes the importance of making students aware of the diverse landscape of urban schools through culturally responsive teaching.
Walsh said that method of teaching helped prepare him to teach at a school like Northeast, where over 50 languages are spoken in the home and many different racial and ethnic backgrounds are represented.
One unique aspect of the IUE is its ability to support prospective teachers from high school to post-graduation with the Grow Your Own program, a pathway teaching program that acts as a pipeline for high school students interested in teaching.
“We offer dual credit opportunities for students in high schools, predominantly local urban schools, so we can reach out into those communities to try to cultivate interest in education even before they get to college,” said Poos.
After students graduate from the IUE program, they receive coaching and mentoring from alumni in their first and second years of teaching.
“I don’t think I would have been as ready as I was to take on a classroom of my own if it hadn’t been for the direct feedback and guidance I received from several great evaluators and instructional coaches who work with the IUE,” said Walsh.
