Preservice Teachers Social Class And Race In Urban Schools

This book provides an autobiographical and research-based exploration of the perceptions of Black middle and upper class preservice teachers about teaching and learning in high poverty urban schools. While there is an extensive body of knowledge on White preservice teachers, limited studies examine Black middle and upper class preservice teachers who may also lack experience with students in high poverty urban schools. Through this narrative, the author explores her own professional journey and a research study of former students who experienced the same boundary crossing. Their voices add to the body of current knowledge of how race and class affect the perceptions of preservice teachers.

Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students takes on the continuing challenges of White teachers in increasingly de facto re-segregated schools of the present. Drawing on the author’s eighteen years of experience as a classroom teacher and his research on White teachers of inner-city students, Becoming Teachers provides key discussions on professional identity for preservice teachers, professional educators, and researchers interested in diversity education or urban education. Driving at complex recognitions of race, class, culture, language, and gender as a basis for teaching and learning with diverse urban students, the author’s and other White teachers’ life and teaching stories move beyond prescriptive models of professional identity for preservice and professional teachers to “follow.” Instead, life and teaching stories in Becoming Teachers demonstrate again and again that in teaching the personal is political, professional knowledges are forged in practice, and – overall – that becoming a professional teacher is a process that draws on one’s experiences and inner-most convictions. Becoming Teachers, updating Vivian Paley’s White Teacher and reworking Christine Sleeter’s multicultural research on White teachers’ race-evasive identities, moves discussions on White teacher identity toward a second wave of race-visible professional identity for White teachers in the present. James Jupp’s book is an instruction on how to keep the democratic educational experiment on the workbench... – Roger Slee, Professor and Director of the Victoria Institute for Education, Diversity, and Life Long Learning at Victoria University, Melbourne James Jupp thoughtfully explicates the complexity of the social justice literature in education related to race, class, culture, language, gender and other differences in classrooms. Jupp is one of the leading scholars in education who challenges static notions of difference and opens up new curriculum spaces for a second wave of critical race work. Challenging the field to consider more nuanced possibilities that will advance social justice in the present, Jupp provides generous readings for new intercultural alliances. Jupp’s Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students offers a fresh understanding for those who are looking for new ways to understand teachers’ lives and professional identities. – Patrick Slattery, Professor of Curriculum, Texas A&M University Jupp does the hard work, here, of understanding where we have been in conceptualizing the racial identities of White teachers. And then he does something harder. With abundant intelligence, courage, and generosity, Jupp opens up new pathways for our thinking and feeling and action. Read this book. – Timothy Lensmire, Associate Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Minnesota

This volume illuminates the most pressing challenges faced by urban schools, teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher training programs and offers a range of insights and possibilities for urban teacher education and teaching. Covering issues spanning the broadly theoretical to the urgently practical, it goes beyond the traditional discourses in teacher education to focus on diversity, social justice, democratic schooling, and community building. What emerges is an emphatic message of hope for those committed to the ongoing project of improving urban teacher education and working in urban settings. Contributors from Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean bring rich and divergent knowledges, perspectives, and cultural experiences to their discussion of the three central themes around which the book is organized: • the conceptual framing of key issues in urban schooling; • pre-service teacher preparation for urban transformation; and • culturally relevant pedagogy and advocacy in urban settings. This book is intended for all students, practitioners, and researchers involved in urban education. It is appropriate as a text for student teaching and field experience seminars, and for courses dealing with social issues, educational policy, curriculum development, and multicultural teacher education.

Intersectionality of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Teaching and Teacher Education brings together scholarship that employs an intersectionality methodology to actual conditions that affect school-age children, teachers and teacher educators in relation to institutional systems of power and privilege.

In this incisive and practical book, H. Richard Milner IV provides educators with a crucial understanding of how to teach students of color who live in poverty. Milner looks carefully at the circumstances of these students’ lives and describes how those circumstances profoundly affect their experiences within schools and classrooms. In a series of detailed chapters, Milner proposes effective practices—at district and school levels, and in individual classrooms—for school leaders and teachers who are committed to creating the best educational opportunities for these students. Building on established literature, new research, and a number of revelatory case studies, Milner casts essential light on the experiences of students and their families living in poverty, while pointing to educational strategies that are shaped with these students' unique circumstances in mind. Milner’s astute and nuanced account will fundamentally change how school leaders and teachers think about race and poverty—and how they can best serve these students in their schools and classrooms.

More students today are financing college through debt, but the burdens of debt are not equally shared. The least privileged students are those most encumbered and the least able to repay. All of this has implications for those who work in academia, especially those who are themselves from less advantaged backgrounds. Warnock argues that it is difficult to reconcile the goals of facilitating upward mobility for students from similar backgrounds while being aware that the goals of many colleges and universities stand in contrast to the recruitment and support of these students. This, combined with the fact that campuses are increasingly reliant on adjunct labor, makes it difficult for the contemporary tenure-track or tenured working-class academic to reconcile his or her position in the academy.

In traditional educational research, race is treated as merely a variable. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate, IV argued that race is under-theorized in education and called for educational researchers to pay closer attention to the relationship between race and educational inequity (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). In particular, they argued, drawing on legal scholar, Derrick Bell’s notion of Racial Realism (Bell, 1995), that racialized inequities are not accidental or aberrant; rather, racialized educational inequities are the result of particular and specific policies and practices that are designed to maintain particular forms of dominance and marginalization. More specifically, Bell and later Ladson-Billings and Tate, argue that racial inequity persists despite liberal policies and legislation that were ostensibly designed to eradicate it. The Racial Realist perspective takes into the consideration the longevity and history of racism, racial inequity and White supremacy in the U.S. and serves as a mirror to reflect back the limitations of proposed policies and legislation that fail to address those issues. In this way, Critical Race Theory and the scholars who draw on CRT, view our work as an important “check and balance” in the effort toward racial equality.