Teaching Grow Your Own (GYO) Programs: A Deeper Discussion of a Teaching GYO with a College Campus Immersion Experience

While the U.S. has seen an increase of students of color in K-12 schools, the teaching profession faces a shortage of teachers of color. A range of issues, including engaging and retaining teachers of color, learning outcomes, and ensuring academic success for students, all contribute to the shortage. Teaching focused Grow Your Own (GYO) programs have gained popularity as a grassroots effort to diversify the teaching profession to reflect current student demographics. This article explored the commonly used strategies in teaching GYO programs aimed at recruitment and retention of diverse teachers. Additionally, it focused on the Future Teacher Academy (FTA) which is a teaching GYO collaboration with a K-12 district and a post-secondary institution. This article is an abbreviated version of the author’s dissertation study. The qualitative and exploratory study reviewed the benefits of the FTA programming during the college campus immersion experience via a one-week college campus residency for students of color. The study had a total of nine participants. This exploratory research focused on how FTA GYO comprehensive student support during the college campus immersion experience encouraged high school students of color to consider the teaching profession and how the campus immersion experience encouraged high school students of color to enroll in postsecondary education. The study findings suggest that the FTA five-day college campus immersion experience did have an impact on the participants’ decision to matriculate into higher education and in their interest in pursuing a career in education. The study found that the FTA camp impacted the participants’ interest in education because of programming, diversity within the field of education, learning more about the teaching career, valuing teachers and the teacher profession, and the decision process in declaring their current major. Regarding the impact the FTA camp had on matriculation into post-secondary, the themes were changes to college perceptions, college exposure and experience, cultural navigators, welcoming and supportive community, confidence and reassurance, and decision to matriculate into current post-secondary institution.