Adapting To Cultural Pluralism In Urban Classrooms

This book helps teachers explore the origins of differing value structures in safe forums. It uses guided cross-cultural exchanges to help break down prejudices and foster an appreciation of other cultures and the essence of a common humanity. Acknowledging the inextricable link between cultural and structural factors in the plight of vulnerable student populations, this work focuses on how to help counter prevailing disparities in perceptions and expectations within school settings. Designed primarily for teacher candidates, this book offers educators a forum for recognizing the impact of primary backgrounds in teaching and learning. Adapting to Cultural Pluralism in Urban Classrooms focuses on four elements in the teaching/learning process: school climate; the views and expectations of teachers in solidarity with principals and policy makers; teacher interactions with students and parents; and the centrality of reflection to improve practice. It offers tools to support cultural adaptations that enhance the academic success of inner-city students served by predominantly white and more privileged teachers.

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.

Focusing on the causes for the continuing marginalization of minority children, this book examines inner-city education, its teaching practices, curricular rationales, perspectives of teachers and students, and the institutions themselves.

Cover -- Half Title Page -- Title Page -- Copright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- Editor's Introduction -- Education for Diversity -- Policy Responses in Education -- Curriculum and Assessment -- Intercultural Relations in the Classroom -- Language Issues in School -- Bilingualism and Mother Tongue Teaching in England -- Minority Pupil Progress -- Home, School and Community -- Ideologies and Multicultural Education -- Select Bibliography -- Index

Borrowing from the ideas of John Dewey, schools and classrooms are a reflection of the world; therefore, in order to make sense of the urban classroom, we need to make sense of the world. In this book, the editors have compiled a collection of nine critical essays, or chapters, each examining a particular contemporary national and/or international event. The essays each undertake an explicit approach to naming oppression and addressing it in the context of urban schooling. Each essay has a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to help readers see the world unveiled, through a more critical lens, and to problematize long held beliefs about urban classrooms, with regard to race, gender, social class, equity, and access. Second, as each author draws parallels between an event and urban classrooms, a better understanding of the microstructures that exist in urban classrooms emerges. “At a time of serious political, economic, and social uncertainty, we need a book like this, one that showcases how the world can be seen as a critical site of curriculum and pedagogy. A powerful intersectional analysis of the world, word, and urban sociopolitical context, authors in this book push the boundaries of what educators know and do in urban schools and classrooms. Grounded in frameworks of critical race theory and culturally relevant pedagogy, authors center essential societal moments that must be viewed as the real curriculum. These moments can equip students with tools to examine ‘the what of the world’ as well as how to examine, critique, challenge, and disrupt individual, systemic, and structural realities and practices that perpetuate and maintain a racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic status quo. This is an important, forward-thinking, innovative book – a welcome addition to the field of urban education.” – H. Richard Milner IV, Helen Faison Chair of Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh

The universality of the problematics with urban education, together with the importance of understanding the context of improvement interventions, brings into sharp focus the importance of an undertaking like the International Handbook of Urban Education. An important focus of this book is the interrogation of both the social and political factors that lead to different problem posing and subsequent solutions within each region.

Textbook

This work is designed to assist new teachers in their first years in urban classrooms. The author provides insider recommendations for coping with school realities ranging from overcrowded classes and a lack of appropriate materials, to cultural diversity, bureaucracy and school violence.

This book introduces multiculturalism and its relationship to education and schooling, while also highlighting current approaches to multicultural education and placing them in a broad comparative and international context. Through a comparative view that is both domestic and international, the book explores ethnicity, race, class, and education (kindergarten through higher education) as they interact to integrate populations, while also serving vested interests and enhancing group identity and status. The authors position multiculturalism as a political and social phenomena that affects and interacts with education and its institutions. To do this, they draw upon international cases as well as the history of segmentation and integration in the United States.