This article presents 7 years of qualitative research into the emerging understandings of a population of 456 beginning 7 to 12 urban teachers who supplied 130 participants who were enrolled in a total of 26 MSEd English Language Arts courses over 7 years. These were interviewed while teaching in urban schools focused primarily on testing and…

There is a surprising lack of black and Latino musicians in major orchestras in the United States as well as in other venues for classical music. Similarly, many American high school performing ensembles reflect the same underrepresentation. This article examines the literature on race, socioeconomic factors, and urban teaching and provides…

In this study, I explore the role of the "small schools" context on the development and learning of two first-year urban high school teachers with respect to equity-focused teaching. Analysis points to specific ways in which the small schools context fostered teaching for social justice: strong student-teacher relationships, interdisciplinary…

In her new book, Valerie Kinloch, award-winning author of "Harlem on Our Minds", sheds light on the ways urban youth engage in "meaning-making" experiences as a way to assert critical, creative, and highly sophisticated perspectives on teaching, learning, and survival. Kinloch rejects deficit models that have traditionally…

Existing problems identified in the literature on teacher retention and resilience include (a) a gap in understanding factors influencing urban teacher retention; (b) lack of clarity on multiple factors swaying teachers' decisions to remain despite challenges; (c) overlapping definitions of teacher retention, attrition, and resilience; and (d)…

Democratic political systems and the democratic way of life is aspired by most people around the world. Democracy is considered to be morally superior to other forms of political systems as it aspires to secure civil liberties, human rights, social justice and equality before the law for everyone regardless of their gender, culture, religion and…

In this article, the author describes her use of service-learning as a pedagogical strategy for developing preservice students' dispositions for urban teaching. Twenty-one students were enrolled in a multicultural education course with a service-learning requirement. This was the students' first teacher education course in a two-year,…

Due to the dearth of qualified professional teachers, policymakers and professional development programs need to focus on improving the quality of high school mathematics teaching in order to diffuse this crisis. In the middle of this crisis, the demand for new teachers is predicted to rise significantly in the next ten years. Based on the…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]