Six blocks down, take a left at the corner: Learning to teach English learners outside the school walls

In this article we report on a three‐staged teacher education model, designed to support the development of culturally responsive teaching practice in teacher candidates who are preparing to work with multilingual learners. The creative focus of this model is most pronounced in our effort to enable teacher candidates to “get out of context” of the school setting and to envision curricular possibilities by looking to the community. Our teacher education model assists teacher candidates (TCs) to learn community‐based culturally responsive teaching pedagogies for multilingual learners through (1) supporting culturally responsive teaching practice in the abstract, (2) engaging practice that pushes past the confines of the school walls, and (3) putting it all together in a community‐focused unit of instruction. We advocate for the creative potential of positioning TCs’ learning outside of the school walls and inside the community. For each stage of our model, we provide examples of practice using data from a unit of instruction titled Making a Living—Making a Life that teacher candidates co‐created with the authors and experienced teachers. The unit was designed for a summer program in a U.S. Midwestern community for approximately one hundred fourth‐ to eighth‐grade English learners.