While new teachers are often ill-equipped to address and discuss issues of race and culture, especially with students of color (Milner & Laughter, 2014), teacher preparation programs can provide candidates with safe spaces to explore these concepts. This study presents findings from student enrollees in redesigned teacher education courses at…

This qualitative study investigated the visions and metaphors for teaching held by teacher candidates enrolled in an urban-based alternative certification program. While late-entry teacher recruits are considered to have high motivations for urban school teaching, few studies explore the nature of these motivations. Findings from this study…

Awardees of the National Science Foundation's Noyce Scholars funds are required to teach science in high-need urban or rural school districts upon graduation. The purpose of this research was to analyze the reflective considerations that distinguish preservice Noyce Scholar science education majors committed to teaching in high-need New York City…

Preparing teachers to work in urban settings poses unique challenges, as urban communities are complex and require systemic understanding of students and their families, culture, and community. Pre-service teachers often harbor misconceptions about what it means to work in urban settings and many bring to their teacher education program minimal…

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…

This article discusses urban educators' views of their teaching experiences. The article is based upon survey research conducted with teachers in two poor, urban districts during the 2005-2006 academic year. The teachers reported a variety of positive and negative views regarding their classrooms, their students, and the students' social worlds.…

This book provides an illuminating account of teachers' own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male role models in elementary schools to address important issues…

In this dissertation, I examine the mediating role of emotion during lived interactions between students and teachers at an urban charter high school. While the importance of student-teacher connectivity for positive school engagement has been well documented, research that attempts to describe the mechanism of that link is scarce. This…

Identifying (and assessing) the mechanisms responsible for promoting social justice awareness represent a process that could be illuminated via theory building. To illustrate, integrated theories of moral reasoning and prosocial development stipulate that ultimate altruistic/benevolent intentions and behaviors are preceded by cognitive and…

Urban teachers are fleeing urban schools in large numbers for positions that offer safety, support, security, autonomy, respect, higher pay, and freedom from managing disruptive student behaviors and attitudes that are products of the community's social problems. Efforts to retain experienced teachers in urban districts are crucial to the success…

Alternative certification programs are changing the face of the teaching profession. Not only have these programs attracted individuals from different disciplines and educational backgrounds, they have also changed the ethnic and gender makeup of the classroom teaching population. This suggests an increase in point-of-view diversity in the…

Project-based science (PBS) curricula have project- and inquiry-based aspects that leverage the strengths of urban students from ethnic and racial groups underrepresented in science careers, potentially impacting positively these students' science achievement and attitudes and thus their college and career plans. We aimed to determine the extent…

School climate is created through the combined culture of the adults and students within a school--both the culture they share as an organization and the diverse cultures they bring from home. This study compared the school climate of two elementary schools, one urban and one suburban, by measuring 179 fourth and fifth grade students' and 65…

Teaching students in the inner city has been likened to hugging a porcupine--teachers nudge them toward success while getting pricked along the way. Many urban students perform below proficiency level and are difficult to manage. Their apathy toward completing class assignments, let alone homework, compounds the problem. As a whole, educators do…

The purpose of this study was to examine preservice teacher learning in an integrated course and field experience in an urban school-university partnership. Study participants included two cohorts of preservice teachers at a large, northeastern research university who were completing a semester-long experience of site-based coursework and…