Teacher Education with an Attitude

Preparing Teachers to Educate Working-Class Students in Their Collective Self-Interest

Publication Year: 2007

Using a social justice approach to teacher education, the contributing teacher educators address the need to prepare teachers to understand the way social class, race, and culture impact their efforts to educate working-class students. By helping prepare teachers to strengthen democracy through education, the contributors offer ways to help them develop “critical consciousness”—the will to address society’s injustices and inequities. Teachers who collaborate actively with their students, their families, and others, such as community and labor organizers, to challenge the economic and educational policies that keep the hierarchical structure in place, develop their own educational and political power alongside their students. These educators see schools as sites of struggle for democracy, and their students learn to direct their attitude toward outcomes that are in their collective self-interest.

Published by: State University of New York Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

TEACHER EDUCATION WITH AN ATTITUDE

pdf icon Download PDF (34.7 KB)

pdf icon Download PDF (36.6 KB)
pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

pdf icon Download PDF (31.9 KB)
pp. ix-x

Chapter 2, “Labor Deserves Credit: The Popular Education Foundations of the National Labor College” by Susan J. Schurman is a revised version of Chapter 8, Article 4, “Labor Deserves Credit: The Popular Education Roots of the National Labor College,” in Teaching for Change: Popular Education and the Labor Movement, L. Delp, M. Outman-Kramer, S. J. Schurman, and K. Wong (eds.),...

Introduction

pdf icon Download PDF (68.0 KB)
pp. 1-12

TEACHER EDUCATORS USUALLY ESCAPE THE intense public scrutiny and criticism to which classroom teachers, principals, school board members, parents, and students are subjected when high-stakes test results are announced. Free-market ideologues, however, continue their maneuvers to reduce the power and influence of traditional routes to teacher certification through teacher education...

Part I: Addressing Issues of Class, Race, and Culture

1. Teacher Education With an Attitude: Completing the Revolution

pdf icon Download PDF (85.7 KB)
pp. 15-32

PATRICK J. FINN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR EMERITUS, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, presents T. H. Marshall’s proposition that in the unfolding of democracy, citizens have been granted civil rights by the courts, political rights by the legislature, and social rights by public schools. Finn argues the process is not complete because of the inferior education offered in the schools...

2. Labor Deserves Credit: The Popular Education Foundations of the National Labor College

pdf icon Download PDF (73.7 KB)
pp. 33-46

SUSAN J. SCHURMAN, PRESIDENT, National Labor College, argues that popular education, based in Freirean pedagogy, offers workers an opportunity to ac-quire the type of analytic skills necessary to act in their own interest that members of elite groups obtain through formal education. This version of worker education is surprisingly close to Finn’s (chapter 1) call for social...

3. Coalition for Educational Justice: Antiracist Organizing and Teacher Education

pdf icon Download PDF (71.8 KB)
pp. 47-60

ALEX CAPUTO-PEARL, TEACHER, Kahllid A. Al-Alim, Parent, and Frances A. Martin, Student, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, argue for a pedagogy rooted in school- and community-based antiracist organizing and campaign development as the most effective transformative pedagogy for teachers, parents, and students. It is a pedagogy where teachers are organically...

Part II: Social Justice Teacher Education in Undergraduate Courses

4.Developing Critically Reflective Practitioners: Integrating a Practice-Reflection-Theory Cycle of Learning in an Undergraduate Literacy Course

pdf icon Download PDF (77.4 KB)
pp. 63-78

GILLIAN S. RICHARDSON, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR and Director of the Literacy Center, and Rosemary K. Murray, Associate Professor of Graduate Education and Leadership, Canisius College, describe an action research project designed to assess the impact of integrating critical pedagogical theory, critical reflection,and practice experience into prospective teachers’ learning. Surveys, debriefing...

5. Teacher Education and Community Organizing

pdf icon Download PDF (83.0 KB)
pp. 79-94

DENNIS SHIRLEY, PROFESSOR OF TEACHER EDUCATION, Special Education, and Curriculum and Instruction at Boston College, addresses contemporary issues of organizing parents and communities around engagement for educational justice. The organizing challenges presented by race and class differences are compounded by high-stakes accountability and standards-based reforms. Yet...

6. Learning to Act: Interactive Performance and Preservice Teacher Education

pdf icon Download PDF (73.8 KB)
pp. 95-108

ROSALIE M. ROMANO, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Educational Studies, Ohio University, explores the process of building a bridge between poor and working-class students and preservice teachers from middle- and upper-class families through Interactive Performance, an offshoot of August Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.” The Interactive Performance her students engaged in uncovered...

Part III: Social Justice Teacher Education in Graduate School

7. New Literacies With an Attitude: Transformative Teacher Education through Digital Video Learning Tools

pdf icon Download PDF (82.7 KB)
pp. 111-126

SUZANNE M. MILLER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Learning and Instruction, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and Suzanne Borowicz, Di-rector of the Western New York Writing Project, Canisius College, investigate ways infusing digital video (DV) technologies into teacher education classes transforms teachers’ attitudes towards literacy teaching and learning. Their...

8. The Journey to Justice: Inquiry as a Framework for Teaching Powerful Literacy

pdf icon Download PDF (79.4 KB)
pp. 127-140

DIANE ZIGO, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LITERACY Education at LeMoyne College, traces the development of the English education courses that she taught through a framework of inquiry. The inquiry framework is designed to move students through three stages of growth in becoming teachers for justice: increasing awareness of justice issues that are related to teaching contexts,...

9. Accessing Praxis: Practicing Theory, Theorizing Practice in Social Justice Teachers’ First Year of Teaching

pdf icon Download PDF (80.7 KB)
pp. 141-157

PETER HOFFMAN-KIPP, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of Education at Sonoma StateUniversity, and Brad Olsen, Assistant Professor of Education, University of California, Santa Cruz, describe the UCLA Center X teacher education pro-gram, where students have a Novice year of study and student teaching fol-lowed by a second Resident year as employed, full-time teachers in urban...

10. Russian Children in American Schools:Towards Intercultural Dialogue in Diverse Classrooms and Teacher Preparation Programs

pdf icon Download PDF (78.8 KB)
pp. 157-170

VLADIMIR AGEYEV, CLINICAL PROFESSOR of Educational Studies, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, addresses the problem of communication across cultures between teachers and students using a cross-cultural and sociocultural theoretical framework to describe the situation of American teachers and Russian-speaking immigrant students. He argues that intercultural education...

Part IV: Social Justice Teacher Education through Professional Development

11. Urban Teacher Development That Changes Classrooms, Curriculum, and Achievement

pdf icon Download PDF (90.1 KB)
pp. 173-190

JEFFREY M. R. DUNCAN-ANDRADE, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of Education and Codirector of the Cesar Chavez Institute, San Francisco State University,examines the potential of critical teacher inquiry groups to promote urban teacher retention, professional support, and development. Drawing on analysis of data gathered from a group of South Central Los Angeles elementary...

12. Literacy with an Attitude and Understanding the Water We Swim In

pdf icon Download PDF (74.2 KB)
pp. 191-204

JOHN OTTERNESS, FACULTY, UCLA School Management Program, observes that many teachers teach the way they were taught, and for teachers of poor and working-class students that almost always means domesticating education. He describes his experiences in helping administrators and teachers, in schools in the Los Angeles area, change their attitudes using a “walk-through” of three...

13. Popular Education in Los Angeles High School Classrooms: The Collective Bargaining Education Project

pdf icon Download PDF (62.9 KB)
pp. 205-216

LINDA TUBACH, TEACHER AND DIRECTOR, Collective Bargaining Education Project, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), explains how Freirean popular education is used to teach about social justice and the labor movement through a six-part curriculum that engages students, their teachers, and volunteer professionals from both labor and management in simulations of labor-management...

14. “We Cannot Avoid Taking Sides”: Teacher Unions, Urban Communities, and Social Justice in Historical Perspective

pdf icon Download PDF (73.4 KB)
pp. 217-230

LAURI JOHNSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR in Educational Leadership and Policy,University at Buffalo, State University of New York, tells the story of the Teachers Union of New York City whose members worked from the 1930s through the 1950s to make the communities where they taught a better place for their students and their families to live. This historical case provides a vivid...

15. For Further Thought

pdf icon Download PDF (80.5 KB)
pp. 231-246

MARY E. FINN, RETIRED DIRECTOR OF THE Urban Education Institute, Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, examines some of the assumptions that underlie teacher education with an attitude, assumptions about democracy,equality, individual opportunity, collectivity, and solidarity. It extends the argument for social justice teacher educators to collaborate with progressive worker...

Contributors

pdf icon Download PDF (36.3 KB)
pp. 247-250

Index

pdf icon Download PDF (82.1 KB)
pp. 251-256

E-ISBN-13: 9780791480397
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791470350
Print-ISBN-10: 0791470350

Page Count: 266
Illustrations: 2 tables, 7 figures
Publication Year: 2007