1. Provide internship opportunities for UW-System students to teach in urban school settings to fulfill their student teaching requirements.
2. Facilitate community connections between teaching candidates, community members around and within the school districts, and UW-System stakeholders.
3. Increase and support effective professional development opportunities for Wisconsin teachers who are working in urban settings or want to work in urban settings.
4. Increase and improve the collaborative teaching and research efforts of UW System Schools and Programs of Education.

The IUE’s charge is to advance the field of urban education and to recruit, promote and retain high quality educators for urban districts. To achieve this goal, the IUE will:

• Establish and maintain productive relationships with appropriate public and private organizations at the local, regional, state, national, and international levels;
• Promote public service and research efforts directed toward meeting the social, economic and cultural needs of the state of Wisconsin and its metropolitan areas;
• Encourage others from institutions in the University of Wisconsin System and from other educational institutions and agencies to seek benefit from the University’s research and educational resources such as libraries, special collections, archives, museums, research facilities, and academic programs; and
• Provide educational leadership in meeting future social, cultural, and technological challenges.

Clinical Experience
The IUE’s clinical experience is a year-long, residency model internship preparation program for Elementary Education teacher candidates across UW System institutions who desire to teach in an urban setting.

IUE will partner with Racine Unified School District and Kenosha Unified School District for the 2020-2021 school year. In subsequent years, we will be adding 7 more districts incrementally for clinical placements in urban districts. For information on all 9 districts, please see the Wisconsin Teacher Equity Plan from DPI.

During the clinical experience, teacher candidates will student teach 50% of the time and intern teach 50% of the time (based on specific school/district needs) and earn a stipend from the school district for the semester they student teach/intern.

Teacher candidates that start in fall can graduate from their home institutions in December. A unique feature of the IUE is that teacher candidates will earn a second teaching license in Special Education (if not already graduating with dual licensure in Elementary Education/Special Education) in partnership with UW System Schools.

Upon a successful interview and job offer from the district, teacher candidates could be hired on full time in the second semester while continuing to work on their Special Education certification.

Professional Development
The IUE will provide ongoing professional development opportunities for teacher candidates and cooperating teachers in urban classrooms to implement research based culturally relevant pedagogy. Teacher candidates will begin their experience in the summer before student teaching in the fall. This summer experience will be a service-learning project in the community of their chosen school district, supported by community mentors.

The summer experience will end with a 1-week Professional Development Academy which will be required for teacher candidates and their cooperating teachers to learn about and experience Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT) pedagogy.

There will be follow up seminars during the school year which will offer time and support for teacher candidates to reflect on how they are incorporating CRT into their placement. The IUE is committed to supporting the growth and success of all teacher candidates.

Scholarly Research
The IUE collaborates with scholars from UW System institutions to support research in urban education. IUE will focus their research on culturally relevant pedagogy and the impact on educator effectiveness, retention, and student outcomes.