Beth attends a New York City K-8, dual-language (Spanish/English) public school where 96% of the students qualify as low-income, based on participation in the federally funded lunch program. Early in Beth's 1st-grade year, she was classified as a struggling reader, based on district-wide assessments that identified academic deficits in such skill…

Colleges and universities are presented with the problem of preparing teachers for diverse classrooms on a daily basis. The lack of preparation for teaching in urban settings is one problem. This article presents the Urban Semester Program. This is an immersion program for junior level students. In this immersion experience, participants take a…

Fostering preservice teachers' multicultural development is critically germane to teacher education programs. Preparing preservice teachers to teach in urban areas means preparing them to teach a culturally and economically diverse population of students. In this article, the authors feature the Urban Semester Program, a pre-student teaching urban…