Becoming An Urban Physics And Math Teacher

This book explores what happens as beginning urban teachers transition through their first few years in the classroom. It captures one teacher's journey through the first three years of teaching science and mathematics in a large urban district in the US. Combining narrative with critical analysis, the authors focus on Ian's agency as a beginning teacher and explore his success in working with diverse students.

Bridging a gap in the literature by offering a comprehensive look at how STEM teacher education programs evolve over time, this book explores teachHOUSTON, a designer teacher education program that was created to respond to the lack of adequately prepared STEM teachers in Houston and the emerging urban school districts that surround it.

This book weaves together voices of faculty, residents, mentors, administrators, community organizers, and students who have lived together in a third space urban teacher residency program in Newark as they reinvent math and science teaching and teacher education through the lens of inquiry. Each chapter includes narratives from multiple perspectives as well as tools we have used within the program to support and build change, providing readers with both real cases of how an urban teacher residency can impact school systems, and concrete tools and examples to help the reader understand and replicate aspects of the process. Capturing both the successes but also the tensions and challenges, we offer a kaleidoscopic view of the rich, complex, and multi-layered ways in which multiple stakeholders work together to make enduring educational change in urban schools. Our third space NMUTR has been a fragile utopian enterprise, one that has relied on a shared commitment of all involved, and a deep sense of hope that working collaboratively has the potential, even if not perfect, to make a difference.