Module Critic

Preface

Joe L. Kincheloe, kecia hayes, Karel Rose, and Philip M. Anderson

One of the most compelling concerns of decades, educational researchers have our era is the question of what to do about been collecting data confirming the defi­ the neglect of our urban schools. Thirty- cits of urban youth while sensationalized one percent of U.S. elementary and sec- media produce images of urban youth ondary students go to school in 226 large running wild and out of control. In this urban districts. There are nearly 16,000 context, many urban school leaders school districts in the United States and attempt to hide the problems undermin­ almost one-third of all students attend 1.5 ing education at their particular schools percent of them (Fuhrman, 2002). In the (NWREL, 1999; Ciani, 2002; Kozleski, urban context one finds "the emergent 2002). The problems-the crises-besiege U.S. culture." The ways in which urban many of us who work in urban systems. educators shape urban pedagogy in. the , We have come to realize that without sig-! coming years is central to the way people I nificant structural changes, even increased in this country reinvent the nation (Ander- l funding will merely prop up pathological son and Summerfield, 2004). With this in systems and provide little help for stu­ mind the United States faces an uncertain , dents and teachers. future, because in the schools in these 226 In the eye of the perpetual crisis, teachers urban districts, observers encounter a keep on teaching and many students keep wide diversity of problems and successes. on learning. Indeed, there are urban teachers

Urban education is always in crisis- who perform good work in a context in yesterday, today, and certainly in the near which impediments are many and resources future. Teacher shortages force many are few. Even if resources were provided urban school administrators to scramble and equal funding of urban school systems madly during the first weeks of school to were mandated, there would still be inade- . fill classroom vacancies. Inadequate funds quate monies. Poor urban schools are so in cause cutbacks in essential services in the · need of financial help that equal funding middle of the school year. In con tempo- 1 ~ )would have to be supplemented by addi-

1 rary U.S. society the use of the term

1 . tional infusions of resources just to get to

I "urban" has become in many quarters a where they might be able to visualize the I signifier for poverty, nonwhite violence, . equality of resources on the distant horizon. , narcotics, bad neighborhoods, an absence 1 Reform efforts proliferate in this context.

of family values, crumbling housing, and Overwhelmed by these disparities and the failing schools. Over the past several crisis atmosphere surrounding them, urban

xii Preface

policy makers have sought to replace huge, bureaucratic systems overseen by boards of education with new smaller, locally oper­ ated organizations.

There is nothing simple about urban edu­ cation. Urban Education: A Comprehensive Guide for Educators, Parents, and Teachers highlights the interaction between the chal­ lenges and opportunities found within the diverse educational spaces of our urban contexts. Throughout the handbook this dialectic will assert itself in every topic addressed. Indeed, the central watchword of this work is complexity. Just when we think that we've made a definitive state­ ment about the uniqueness of the category, up pops a contradiction that subverts our confident pronouncement. What passes as urban education involves a wide range of circumstances (Willard-Holt, 2000). Keep­ ing in mind the complexity and contradic­ tions of urban education, the handbook asks whether there are unique features of urban education. After careful study of the question we believe that the following char­ acteristics apply:

• Schools operate in areas with high population density.

• Schools are bigger and school districts serve more students.

• Schools function in areas marked by profound economic disparity.

111 Urban areas and urban schools have a higher rate of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity.

s Urban schools experience factionalized infighting on school boards over issues concerning resources and influence.

(;'I ~rban ~chool .systems are undermined by meffechve busmess operations.

0 Poor urban students are more likely to experience health problems.

0 Urban schools experience higher student, teacher, and administrator mobility.~

0 Urban schools serve higher immigrant populations.

@ Urban schools are characterized by linguistic diversity.

6 Urban schools experience unique transpor- tation problems. · .

0 Teachers working in poor urban schools are less likely to live in the communities neighboring the schools than are teachers in suburban and rural systems.

With these rationales in mind, the edi­ tors and authors of Urban Education have created a diverse body of work that speaks directly to the needs of urban educators and the teacher-educators who teach them. Although attempting to develop a vision of what urban educa­ tion can become, we are profoundly con­ cerned with providing material that urban educators can use in their profes­ sional lives. We have organized this book into thematic sections. In the section on Context, we highlight the need for a rigorous, inter-/multidisciplinary under­ standing of urban education that draws on several disciplines and transdisci­ plines, including history, cognitive studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural stud­ ies, philosophy, political science, eco­ nomics, and geography to help teachers and educators understand the complex space in which urban education takes place. In this way teachers and educa­ tors gain unique and powerful insights into research on educational policy, ped­ agogy, and the lives of children living in densely populated urban settings. Understanding the effects of such forces, however, must not lapse into a deter­ ministic view of how such contextual forces inexorably shape the schooling pro­ cess and student performance. Understand­ ing the imr,act of political and economic factors and the cultural mismatches between home and school culture does not mean stu­ dents, teachers, and parents cannot over­ come these contextual impediments.

The sections on Race and Ethnicity, Power, and Language address the many ways m which the different social construc­ tions of culture, and the demonstrations of those social constructions, reflect hierarchi­ cal power distinctions and privileges that­ shape an individual's position within the

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Preface xiii

society. "In an ideal world, every child born world from the late fifteenth century until would have the same opportunity to realize the twentieth century, when it mutated his or her potential. In the real world, this is into a neocolonialism grounded on eco­ not the case. Socially constructed differ- nomic and cultural dynamics led prima­ ences in race, class, and gender tum out to rily by the United States. The knowledges be very costly for some and very profitable of teacher education coming from both for others .... They impact directly on the colleges of education and colleges of lib­ life chances of everyone, 'and they reflect era! arts and sciences are too often based and perpetuate the cycle of racism, sexism, on an acceptance of the status quo in and class inequality that constitutes both urban education. When teacher education their cause and their effect" (Rothenberg in and schools fall into this monological trap, Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, p. they are telling urban students from 188). As the primary social institution diverse backgrounds that their knowl­ responsible for the socialization of youth edges, values, and ways of living are not into the society, schools rest at the dynamic important. Schools are here to provide intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and them with the correct ways of being-the gender. Essentially, schools become the proper ways of seeing that come from the sites where, on one end of the spectrum, we / dominant· white upper-middle-class cul­ /reproduce the hegemonic tendencies inher- ture. Such insights force us to rethink

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other end of the spectrum, we engage in [ : practice. In this context we begin to seej

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, cts of criticality to challenge and recon-)f · urban education not as a means of socially ! struct these conceptualizations to create[, controlling the poor and nonwhite but as a i

. new relations of power within the web of! means of liberating and cultivating the I I reality. In these sections, we are especially intellect while providing t~r .1

interested in the impact of the current . socioeconom_ ic mobility. <a~ritical urb~ po':er blocs on children and adults and · p~~lldi:s t~_e cont~n their efforts to enter mto the processes of for the .P_':'_i:j,W,;1;c'yL ~i\1-ianc'!lg __ 1i1:1_i:i:i.'m teaching and learning. Contributors also ag~ncy:=llleEa1'~~i,tYcJ9cA<=tin_tI"_a~~~o_rma­ study the means by which the intersections tive ways-not to rntnimize it. . of race, ethnicity, class, and gender within The · focus· of the section on Tfachl_ng school systems (i.e., public schools, inde- .and Pedagogy is on the many different pendent schools, and alternative schools ways i:n..;,hidrteaci1~rs_·:;,xpeffence the including charter schools) can be cha!- urban classroom. Too often these teachers lenged and altered to provide a more egal- leave the profession without ever learning itarianexperienceofeducationforchildren diver~e ways of working with and moti­ and adults. vating urban students. As we know, many

In the se5'tiC>11 <>~nstice>, we cha!- . times these young urban teachers come. lenge teachers and educational leaders to from socioeconomic locales very different · confront their relationship with some 'than those of their lower socioeconomic long-term historical trends rarely dis- 1 class students. These are the teachers who cussed in the contemporary public conver- · are sometimes the most vulnerable to the! sation and in urban teacher education. social representations of urban poverty i Indeed, everyone in the contemporary and poor urban students. Living lives so/ United States is shaped by this knowledge culturally distant from their students,\ in some way, whether they are conscious these teachers and teacher-education stu­ of it or not. We cannot erase the fact that dents need to understand both the com­ European colonialism dominated the munities in which poor urban students

xiv Preface

live and the nature of their daily lives. They need to have field experiences dur­ ing their teacher education in urban schools so they won't experience culture shock when they assume teaching posi­ tions. These are also teachers and teacher­ education students who-moving to the other end of the spectrum-sometimes develop an unhealthy desire to "save" or "rescue" poor Latino/-a or African-Amer­ i¢n students. In this mode such teachers tee the cultural capital of white middle- ✓c1ass lifestyles as the antidote to "urban­

ness." These rescuers are missionaries who bring salvatiop---thrpugh "proper ways of being." . . ',

In the section on Re~earc\'.(, our goal is to highlight the scholarly Work that grants insight into working in the everyday world of urban schools and other educa­ tional locales. Producing literature and research on urban education in the con­ temporary sociopolitical climate is diffi­ cult in that it must address the dominant representations of the urban poor and poor urban students as "the undeserving poor" rather than the "underserved poor." In the contemporary climate of the No Child Left Behind act, the methodological influence on educational research has been one of socially decontextualized cause­ effect and. of a hypothetical-deductive sys­ tem of reasoning. Our goal is to push the margins of this constrictive mode of research conceptualization such that we can begin to understand all of the nuances of a child's experiences in the urban class­ room. This means that we must embrace notions of the teacher-researcher and the student-researcher in order to generate research that is representative and truly informative.

Authors who contributed to the section on Afsthetics understand that the urban envi­ ro~eilt provides a remarkable opportu­ nity for the educator to explore philosophic, pedagogic, and aesthetic principles. Our cit­ ies are characterized by people of increasing diversity, and educators as social architects

can help make it possible for urban areas to become rich, caring, beautiful places to work and live. We recognize that young peo­ ple within these urban centers have been significantly affected by such forces and

. often find no sanctioned spaces in which to voice reactions to the ways they experience urban life. Consequently, urban youth have constructed aesthetic forms within youth culture that facilitate expression of their lived experiences. However, there is a dis­ connection between the expression con­ structed by youth and the expression valued and legitimated by schools. In the Aesthetics section, we explore how students and teach­ ers can feel greater empowerment in the urban environment through an appreciation of its rich aesthetic opportunities for learn­ ing. The aesthetic experience, whether it happens on the streets, in the schools, or in the cultural institutions of the city, can help learners of all ages recognize that cities have long been the centers of world culture.

In the section on Policy, we acknowl­ edge that the current framework of our educational system reinforces the idea that because of asymmetrical representation, urban educational policy rarely reflects the interests and needs of its clients. Politi­ cians are becoming more unilaterally responsible for schooling that changes the nature, rather than the reality, of the politi­ cization of schools. With such unilateral­ ism, those who are routinely engaged with the experiences of schooling do not have any control over their experiences. Educa­ tional bureaucracies have historically operated to diminish tfie self-direction of participants in the system. Authors writ­ ing in this domain assess the extent to which the constituent groups of students, parents, and educators gain and lose power within new, but not necessarily dif­ ferent, political dynamics. We also explore the extent to which urban educators can cre­ ate a politically restructured system in which all clients, especially new social actors seeking access to the discourse, can partici­ pate. Such actions position participants in

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ways that release them from the control of the bureaucracies that shape the policy frameworks of schooling and the dis-_ courses of reform according to their own limited understandings and interests.

Susan Fuhrman (2002) argues that in the contemporary era there are endless attempts at urban sthool reform with little improvement to show for the efforts. She is correct, and one of the most important reasons for these failures at reform involves the lack of a sense of educational purpose. Without this key ingredient most

Preface xv

educational reforms amount to little more than taking an aspirin to ease the pain of a kidney stone. The urban education pro­ moted herein demands a fundamental rethinking, a deep reconceptualizatiori,of what human beings are capable of achieving-the role of the social, cultural, and political in shaping human identity, the relationship between community and schooling, and ways that power operates to create purposes for schooling that are not necessarily in the best interests of the children who attend them.

Introduction: The Power of Hope in the Trenches

Joe L. Kincheloe, kecia hayes, Karel Rose, and Philip M. Anderson

Karel Rose writes: The first day of school in September is the

best time to be driving through Brooklyn. Fathers, mothers and grandparents clutch the hands of their young treasures as they walk them to what each child hopes will be the best day of his or her life. All parents send to school the best they have and most share their children's great expectations. In an urban area, children of all races and eth­ nicities proudly stride toward the school­ house: their braided pigtails with colorful ribbons, their shiny backpacks, and their bright socks, a testimony to their optimism. Sometimes, their dreams are realized; too often, urban schools fail these children and their teachers.

The New Yorker March 7, 2005, cover: A naked and frightened Adam and Eve are running across the Brooklyn Bridge fleeing New York Gty. We see the pointed finger of God throwing them out of New York City, the unaffordable Eden. Where will they go? Many of our cities have become increas­ ingly unaffordable-hospitable only to those with power and means. As a result, any urban schools bedeviled by bureaucratic demands too often replicate this dismissal of poor populations. Despite high-sounding rhetoric and claims of higher test scores, the

disregard for public schooling in many urban areas is apparent. Although there is real reason for gloom, the contributors to this handbook speak eloquently and hold out enormous hope that community work­ ers, parents, artists, and educators are find­ ing new ways to change the ethos of urban schooling. Our writers' suggestions and experiences are multifaceted and their opti­ mism is not grounded in a facile naivete that raises expecta lions disconnected from reality. All are practitioners and they write about the reality of their experiences. Imelda Castaneda-Emenaker and Lionel Brown address the complexities of city liv­ ing by suggesting six different types of alternative education. Hollyce C. Giles directs her attention to approaches to com­ munity organizing as a means for reform­ ing the schools. The richness of community cultures is echoed by Karina M. Jocson as not only a source of knowledge but also as a teaching resource. Gene Diaz describes teachers as urban gypsies who travel among us leaving their creative work as a gift to fractured and fragile communities. In their distinctive styles, each author high­ lights liberatory educational practices that foster the personal and social powers of students and teachers in urban areas. The

xviii Introduction

arts are the vehicle of choice for many of our writers.

Each semester, I begin my philosophy of education class by asking the students to provide adjectives that describe their notions of "a good education." Here are some of the words that I get: inspiring, joy­ ful, bottomless, challenging, messy, hopeful, Jun, concerned, multifaceted, complex, compel­ ling, caring passionate, liberating. I know that because these students in my class are future teachers, this is the kind of educa­ tion they want to provide for their stu­ dents. We continue the exercise and I ask them about their notions of "a good city." The words they offer are grand, sophisti­ ca·ted, nurturing, protective, multiethnic, noisy, challenging, center of civilization, tem-. pestuous, changing, exciting, multifaceted, available, alive, communal.

/ I am continually struck by the parallels ' between a good education and a good city. 'My students' voices and the voices in this book continually suggest that cities can contribute in very positive ways to the lives of teachers as well as students. For

. those of us who are teacher-educators, the responsibility is to assist our students to ask their own questions about the_relation­ ship between urban education and urban life. City teachers face the same dilemmas as their students. Neither geography nor personal and professional lives remain discrete entities.

THE IMAGINATION TO BUILD A MULTICULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Many urban teachers live in the city where they teach and their everyday life pulsates with urban rhythms. The chap­ ters in this handbook suggest in many ways that teachers need not only to under­ stand but also to transform for their stu­ dents those responsibilities and strategies Iha.I are specific to the urban scene. The assumptions of many of our writers reflect August Heckscher's concept that democ­ racy is the pursuit of public happiness as

well as. John Dewey's perspective that the classroom is the microcosm of the world and schools are where students learn the meaning of democracy.

What follows are some of our writers' assumptions for teachers and students about urban life and urban education:

0 Every voice is worthwhile. • Each voice needs to be supported by other

· voices in order to be heard. Q Schools and cities should serve concepts of

equality and build a multicultural democ­ racy.

e Schools and cities are in a constant state of flux and have renaissances because of the people who inhabit them.

0 Private and public responsibility is set in motion by citizens trained and committed to taking ownership of their schools and cities.

• Long-range planning is essential for the health of schools and cities.

• Muses are all over the city, but not all of them are at black tie affairs.

G Muses are all over the schools and many of them are the students.

e Teachers are invaluable community resources and support systems.

e1 Communities and neighborhoods are criti­ cal to the success of urban schools.

TOWARD THE EMPOWERMENT Of IMAGINATION

We begin with an epistemology that honors the imagination. Immanuel Kant tells us that imagination is the catalyst for the intellect. Imagine a city and school that are nurturing, safe, economically viable, respectful of di1)ersity, and are providers of appropriate social services. There is pleasing architecture all around, open spaces, appropriate places for silence and conversation, and many opportunities for cultural events. There are celebrations, fes­ tivals, and pageants honoring different cultures. Beauty abounds in the eyes of the beholder and there is an ethic that digni­ fies individual imagination. Therefore, the teachers, students, and civic leaders dare

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to imagine a . better world and are pre-· pared to transform and bring new forms, new_ ideas, and new ways of being into existence. Artful teachers are high func­ tioning transformers. With the perspective that a school, a community, and a city are all laboratories, living museums, and gen­ erative studios, teachers can link their efforts and provide directio,n as to how one transforms.

URBAN EDUCATION AND THE ARTS

I chose to solicit and edit chapters to Urban Education: A Comprehensive Guide for Educators, Parents, and Teachers on the arts. This domain represents to me the hope in the trenches that all of the editors wished to convey in this undertaking. The teaching behaviors of those who wrote chapters about the arts in urban education are grounded in the larger concepts that they want their readers to take seriously. They may share similar beliefs but develop them quite differently. What follows are some of the very exciting pedagogical perspectives embedded in the authors' chapters:

Introduction xix

religious perspectives, we begin to acknowl­ edge the new reality of our flat world and the importance of a holistic view. Holistic education, Ron Miller (1997) tells us, is not merely a romantic, New Age fantasy but a coherent and significant, theoretical per­ spective. At a time of crisis in our cities and schools, Jane Jacobs (2004)-not a romantic by any definition but a highly respected and influential gadfly who tackles the plight of U.S. cities with imagination and thoughtfulness-looks to higher education and self-policing by the learned professions as the great hope against racism and the growing gap between rich and poor. As edu­ cators, we are charged with the responsibil­ ity of finding the pedagogy and theoriestha t will lift the gloom. Despite what this writer or those of us involved with this project see as enlightened views on urban issues, the most salient perspective is to recognize that education is all about the self-exploration of endless possibilities girded by hope, cele­ bration, .and the belief that educators and schooling make a difference.

I am probably older than most of the contributors to this handbook, but I cher­ ish and try to sustain that part of me that

• Make sense of the visual languages in the is continually surprised, open, and ready culture (the architecture, the imaginative to change. Authentic engagement with appeals, the power thrusts, the diversity, the consumerism). students and colleagues and frequent

• Sift through the cacophony of information encounters with the imaginations of 0th- and try to understand its intentionality. ers facilitates my efforts. Philosophically,

• Theorize from all the messages and evolve urban education presents an enormous some workable concepts. challenge to our imaginations and sug-

• Make the familiar strange by finding simi- gests that we have a moral responsibility larities in differences. not only to transform but also to be hope-

• Cautiously embrace, but do embrace, the ful about the possibility for transforma- new. tion. Hope becomes an ethic and a guide

111 Extend ~-ou~daries ~L!~~ring do~n {;,nc.~~\· .. fnr J:,ehavior. and ttnpa~Slll(~ I\ \1(1.(,e::n,_rJ;;.u_ .

• Recognize that teaching and learning, like/) r,p,h\z,p M. Anderson writes: life and art, are improvisational.

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When we honor urban schools, urban society, people of all colors and back­ grounds, art in museums and on apartment house walls, immigrants and citizens, ~hil­ dren and adults, differing political and

The city is the teacher of the man. (Simonides c. 556-468 BC)

Urban education is about possibilities. The city is complex, vibrant-full of peo­ ple and events. In the city lie the treasures of the civilization. The city is an archeolog­ ical record of the past and the place where

xx Introduction

the future is being shaped. If a person is to be educated, he or she needs to make a trip to town.

The myth of the people of the United States has always been centered on the small town and people of the frontier. The last generation of citizens who began the movement back into the center of cities were called "urban pioneers." Those myths were dealt with handily by Sinclair Lewis in his novels Main Street and Babbitt in the 1920s, but the rural myth returns regularly as an "alternative" to the city. The rural is natural, the city is artificial ( or even artifice), goes the story. But, cities, of course, are just as "natural" as rural living, since both are human constructions. And, there is also nature in the middle of the city, whether contained in arboretums, laid out in parks, or maintained as a leg­ acy by all manner of wild creatures.

James Bryant Conant tried to unravel the rural myth when he consolidated high schools in the 1960s; the rural model was not up to the demands of post-World War II life, he argued quite persuasively. Today we are trying to deconsolidate the high schools and · make them into "small schools," which are really like the old-time rural schools. It all

· 1 Beems like nostalgia fora time that, even if it , ever existed, is now gone.

It might be worth a moment to dispel the rural myth further. The United States was essentially urban by the 1870s, and by 1905 the superintendent of the Winnebago County schools in northern Illinois was publish­ ing a book on the need to focus on the edu­ cational needs of the remaining rural populations. Most of the proposals in the book are about consolidation of the exist­ ing schools and more emphasis on the practical and scientific that will be possi­ ble in the larger, expanded mission schools. The consolidation was about modernization, not just efficiency. The older local schools were basic education mills, whereas the new schools would serve the new scientific needs of the citi­ zen. Conant had to have read this book.

Returning to the Simonides quotation from the ancient word, the city has always been the center of human culture. And we are more urban as a culture than we have ever been. If education in the postmodern sense is to be about identity construction, then education needs to draw on the resources of the urban way of living. The urban way of living requires negotiation, tolerance, communication, and a host of other skills not needed by hermits. None of these virtues are antithetical to the goals of a humanistic education in any of the great state universities situated in their rural settings. (Although it must be noted that the No. 1 major in those rural settings is business administration.)

Increasingly, the urban landscape is populated with artists and culturai work­ ers who are interested in educational mat­ ters. The great museums themselves have invested in education divisions and hired specialists in curriculum and pedagogy. Although the museums were originally constructed with an educational mission, that is, they were sources of knowledge and experience otherwise unavailable in time or place, the new museum sees that work as a more formal part of its mission. The museum lecture is still a mainstay of these institutions' work, but now there are programs for children and outreach to the schools themselves. Even teacher prepara­ tion is now part of the mission of these cultural institutions.

Some critics complain that the richness of the artistic and cultural resources in some urban areas is used as an excuse to limit art education, for example, in the public schools. It seems that the schools are richer for the contact with the muse­ ums and arts organizations. But, clearly, the museums cannot serve all the children in large urban areas and the schools must work in concert with the resources in the community. It is this connection between the schools and the other cultural institu­ tions in the city that provides some of the richest opportunity.

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Cultural institutions and organizations in the city are not limited to museums, of course. There are theaters, groups of writ­ ers, musicians, and a wide and fascinating array of performers and performances within the city's cultural walls. Children and adolescents (as well as the adults they become) are inundated with possibilities for cultural experience af\P. educational opportunities. The life outside of school (and the life outside of school sanctioned by the school) is a complex and rich envi­ ronment that refines the idea of formal schooling itself.

However, seeing the potential in the urban educational landscape is to invite complexity. The standardization and mechanization moment that has dogged urban schooling for the past century or so still has adherents. The current chancellor of the largest urban school district in the United States appears to have as his goal the reduction of the curriculum, the stan­ dardization of student performance, and supervision of every move of the teas_J:i!'r in the classroom. The city outside the"'\

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model of school preparing these students ( or "life" in the city? The vision here is ! om Terry Gilliam's film Brazil-those

who wish to control the city end up con- trolling the city dwe)iers. The city is a liv­ ing organism (a natural image, to be sure) and cannot grow by constant pruning.

Diversity is also the mark of the city. The city is a rich bazaar that needs to be explored and sampled. There are many true stories of students on Long Island who have never been to Manhattan; there are also true stories of kids from Brooklyn who have never been to Manhattan. How could responsible school authorities let that happen? Shouldn't the cultural insti-j tutions of the great cities be "required" as I much as mathematics and school lunch? f

In the diversity of the city one finds all the possibilities that one's local commu­ nity denies. As anyone who has grown up in a homogeneous community knows,

Introduction xxi

experience outside of the community tends to promote tolerance as well as reflection. Growing up in a heterogeneous community requires tolerance and reflec­ tion. The urban school is a social experi­ ment necessary to the global community in which we now find ourselves. The urban way of life is the way to interna­ tional communication and community.

The most common complaint about urban education, and urbanism in general, is that it is "too big." But the scale of urban life is part of its magic: the scale of build­ ings, the diversity of the population, the richness of opportunity, all made possible by the size of the city. There is literally something for everyone.

And yet, the myth of the little red schoolhouse is still invoked. "Could we just make schools smaller" to solve the "crisis" of urban education? The cities get bigger, the buildings grow larger, budgets and taxes increase, but the "solution" to urban schooling's problems is "small­ ness." The smallness of schools is just another way of recreating localness, an attempt to resist the diversifying demands of urban life. One sometimes thinks of the hilltop towns in Italy whose citizens built the defensive towers for family homes­ the skyscrapers in the city can serve the same purpose.

The "crisis" in urban education that everyone appears to be trying to solve is its heterogeneity-the situation looks more and more like a simple resistance to tolerance and diversity. Big schools mean that the population of the school will be more diverse. A complex curriculum

\/means that diversity and complexity will 'l, be encouraged, a situation that works '[against tight control (of both money and ~deology). The richness of the city is only for the rich when the schools offer only the most meager of curricula.

If the city is the teacher, then we really need to look to the city for answers to our educational questions. The urban curricu­ lum needs to be urban in direction and

xxii Introduction

shaped by the tenets of urbanism. Dream­ ing about olive gardens and teaching about the "natural" virtues isn't going to cut it. The city is big-our ideas about education ought to be big. The world will not get smaller in this century-the prob­ lems of human life will not get any sim­ pler. The success of the city is the success of human life. The schools are necessary to that urban life and must construct them­ selves as part of that urban life.

foe L. Kincheloe writes: As my coeditors Karel Rose and Philip

M. Anderson make crystal clear in their pieces in this Introduction, the city is com­

' plex and full of possibilities. And in that complexity and possibility resides great

' hope. Hope in the trenches is the central ' theme of Urban Education. And as I will

argue in the remainder of this In trod uc- tion, the hope articulated by Karel and Phil is nC>t a blind hope but a11 Lnformed, mature hol'e grouncied-cirt_a_&tark under­ standingoLfu,iyjci~tis~ffg!:it,allead. In the following pages I want to lay out a vision of urban education replete with all of the obstacles that operate to subvert, even mock, such a socioeducational dream. Despite the images that circulate through our collective consciousness in the twenty­ first century, the dream is alive. It is nur­ tured and sustained on a daily basis by an amazing corps of urban teachers who fight-despite the lack of respect and material reward-to make the vision a reality.

DOWN AND DIRTY: MAKING SURE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE GETTING INTO

A quick picture of urban education from far above helps us understand what we're up against. We see an urban school district in need of thousands of faculty members encircled by suburbs and villages in which every teaching position draws hundreds of applications. Martin Haberman (2002) maintains that based on his research,

about three of every twenty new teachers are willing to apply to urban districts. Of this group, about only one in ten, he con­ cludes, has the disposition to stay in urban education long enough to become good city teachers. Obviously, most people interested in a career in education are not drawn to the conditions we are addressing in this book. There are many reasons, of course, for such choices. One explanation involves the difficulty many find in work­ ing with individuals who are culturally different from them. Because of the diver­ sity of urban education, teachers who · come from white middle- and upper-mid­ dle class backgrounds often find them~

· selves culturally displaced by contact with. . very poor, nonwhite people who speak English as a second or third language. Given the representations of such people in the media and other knowledge sources over the last few decades, some teachers may experience fear in such circum­ stances.

A critical ur.ban pedagogy encourages teachers to analyze such fear and the ways that such representations of "otherness" may have shaped their vision of them­ selves and the world. The perpetuation of such fear plays a powerful role in oppress­ ing poor and nonwhite urban dwellers while ensuring that little is done to help improve their circumstances. In addition to this socially constructed fear of differ­ ence, many teachers are unwilling to put up with the divergent ways teachers are treated in more up.scale suburban as opposed to poor urban schools. In many­ but certainly not all-well-to-do schools teachers are treated more like profession­ als with qualifications and perspectives on

. the accomplishment of the task at hand. In many poor urban schools--certainly not all-teachers are treated as temporary bureaucratic functionaries as they enter the building for the first time. After a few hours of fingerprinting and other forms of systemic processing, a first-year teacher hardly possesses the heady confidence

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that she is off to a happy start on her life's professional journey.

This depersonalizing and deprofession­ alizing dimension of urban education cat­ alyzed the teacher union movements. To insulate urban teachers from a barrage of indignities, teacher unions organized to regulate the workplace. Union organizers recognized that the only way that urban ,teachers were treated as professionals is that they were paid for their laoor. Unlike, doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists,:

. a11d other professionals, teachers did not devise the goals and objectives of theitj

,practice, the subject matter of their·profes-l ·sion, the number of clients (students) with\ 1tvhom they would work, the nature and \ /organization of the schools in which they \

/ :would operate, or the terms of their own I

, and their students' evaluation. The advent of teacher unions has not solved these issues, however. Indeed, with legis­ lation such as No Child Left Behind, the twenty-first century is rechallenging teacher professionalism.

" In the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, teachers in all locales-urban teachers, especially-are losing many professional prerogatives. In the contemporary era, one is hard-pressed towalk into an urban school without see­ ing specific curriculum packages and methods forced upon teachers. Chillingly, one routinely watches teachers teach from scripted lessons. No pretense of teacher professionalism is offered in these circum­ stances. If professionalism has to do with the possession of special expertise, an abil­ ity to conduct research and produce rele­ vant knowledge about professional practice, and control the terms of one's labor, then urban teachers too often work in a deprofessionalized educational cos­ mos. Our pedagogy challenges this scourge of deprofessionalization and, in the process, promotes and respects teach­ ers who cart critically analyze the multiple contexts in which they operate, work for democratic action, and challenge the

Introduction xxiii

unjust realities that face urban students and urban communities (Kincheloe, 1995; Weiner, 1999; Carvan, Nolen, & Yinger, 2002; Haberman, 2002).

FUNDAMENTAL PREMISES OF A CRITICAL URBAN PEDAGOGY

Our concept of urban teaching finds its philosophical foundation in the notions of empowered, professionalized teachers working to cultivate the intellect and enhance the socioeconomic mobility of marginalized urban students. Teachers in a critical urban pedagogy conduct research into social and educational prob­ lems. They design curricula around multi­ ple macro-knowledges of education and the contexts in which they operate and the micro-situations in the communities and · schools in which their students find them- · selves. Such teachers build coalitions of scholars in urban education and other related areas, teachers, parents, students, community members, and sociopolitical organizations. In this context teachers who enact a transformative urban pedagogy are serious students of education who apply their insights to promote new edu­ cational psychologies and learning theo­ ries, new cultural studies of urban communities and the young people who live in them, and subjugated knowledges derived from organic intellectuals who live and operate in urban neighborhoods. Such teachers are motivated by the power of ideas to reshape the world in which they operate, the notion that human beings can become far more than they presently are, and the belief that ulti­ mately the fate of humanity is related to these ideas.

DEVELOPING A SENSE OF PURPOSE

Advocates of a critical urban pedagogy maintain that they must use these funda­ mental premises to build a clear, prag­ matic, and transformative sense of

xxiv Introduction

purpose. W)iat should we be a!tempting to accompJish in urban education? As the cities deteriorated in the middle of the twentieth century, urban schools lost their sense of direction. With few shared values and little discussion of larger goals, urban educators retreated to their private hells. In the midst of such fragmentation, delib­ eration about the intellectual, social, and political goals of urban education never took place. School reforms came and went w_ithout ever answering the questions:

• What are the intellectual goals of urban education-what does it mean to be an edu­ cated person?

o What are the social goals of urban educa­ tion-what social changes in the domains of race, class, language, and power need to take place so that urban education can be improved?

• What are the political goals of urban educa­ tion-how do urban educators and their allies build coalitions that are strong enough to circumvent the obstacles to systematic reform in city schools?

Advocates of this contextualized, multi­ dimensional urban pedagogy must develop ways of answering these questions that help school leaders, community mem­ bers, teachers, parents, and students artic­ ulate a powerful multilogical (informed by numerous perspectives and concerns) con­ ception of urban school purpose (Bamburg, 1994; Peterson, 1994; Hill & Celio, 1998; MDRC, 2002). In the spirit of valuing the power of different perspectives, therefore, critical teachers not only seek new knowl­ edges but also search for ways of seeing that provide new vantage points on a par­ ticular phenomenon. As opposed to the work of many mainstream urban educa­ tors, a critical urban pedagogy values the voices of the subjugated and marginalized that are too often banished from the conver­ sation about the goals of urban education. Thus, the idea of subjugated knowledge is central to our teaching. With this idea in mind, critical urban educators do not

assume that experts in the disciplines pos­ sess the final word on a domain of study.

Sometimes what such experts report needs to be reanalyzed in light of the insights of those operating outside the framework of dominant power. As a scholar of education I have often observed how some of the most compelling insights concerning pedagogy come from those individuals living and oper­ ating outside the boundaries of educational scholarship. Sometimes such individuals are not formal scholars at all but individuals who have suffered at the hands of educational institutions: Such experiences provided them a vantage point and set of experiences pro­ foundly different from those of more privi­ leged scholars. Titis phenomenon is not unique to the study of urban education but canoe viewed in a variety of domains (O'Sul­ livan, 1999; Pickering, 1999; Thayer-Bacon, 2000, 2003; Malewski, 2001).

Because of the absurd! y high turnover rate in urban school leadership, this criti­ cal pedagogical effort to use diverse stake­ holder insights to help build visionary, 7 long-term coalitions takes on profound importance. As the parade of urban school leaders passes through designed office spaces, the plans that Chancellor Levy promoted were discarded when Chancel­ lor Klein took the reins of the city's schools. When Chancellor Klein leaves the post the erasure of everything past will begin again. In such situations little is learned, few strides are made to improve urban schools, and learning communities have the longevity of a mayfly. A distrib­ uted community of learners and policy makers drawing upon and producing a wide variety of perspectives is the only alternative to these periodic purges of the reigning urban education politburo. Criti­ cal communities of diverse stakeholders understand that there are no shortcuts to the reform of urban education. Permanent but flexible reform strategies must be devised, which are supported by a wide range of groups and individuals. Efforts to reform urban education cannot go back to

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Armed with their literacy of power­ with its understanding of the insidious ways dominant power blocs operate to promote the interests of the privileged, their commitment to democratic and socially just goals, and the worth of invest­ ing social resources to cultivate the intel­ lect of urban students-prl'lponents o.f a critical pedagogy push ahead. They have good times-they have bad times. They get depressed-they get over it. Such educa-\\

, tors know they have to work hard every~

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day with the understanding that all I improvements in urban education require long-term efforts. Not only do they require ! continuing labor but such reforms also '\

/ necessitate a form of restructuring that gets ri beyond merely rearranging the furniture I of urban education. '-· · Too many of the reforms of the last decade have done little more than create new regulations that serve to weaken schools. Overwhe)med by trivial rules, school administrators and teachers lose their sense of control over what happens to students at school. This orgy of microman­ agement has disempowered educators as it fragments the curriculum and strips it of meaning. One dimension of education becomes so isolated from others that indi­ viduals operating in different domains of education find it difficult to talk to one another. Curriculum development, fiscal policy, building maintenance, teacher edu­ cation, community relations, and personnel policies exist in separate universes. Without a larger sense of intellectual, social, and political purpose urban education becomes a latter-day Tower of Babel where no one understands anyone else (Bamburg, 1994; Hill & Celie, 1998; Fuhrman, 2002).

CONSTRUCTING A VISION: SELF AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

To begin, a critical urban pedagogy works to make sure that schools in the

Introduction xxv

poorest and most marginalized urban communities operate simply to not retard the intellectual growth of their students. It may seem silly to make such an assertion, but I believe that a detailed, experiential knowledge of many urban schools in poor communities-despite the efforts of brave, talented, and committed educators-often works to impede students' personal and cognitive development. This pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 2004) or insidious deficitism is supported by the structures we have previously analyzed. A poverty­ stricken pedagogy has a familiar look and smell no matter where we encounter it. As a student who attended poor schools in rural southern Appalachia, I watched a hillbilly version of it operate throughout my early life. In the poverty curriculum, teaching is routinely separated from con­ nection to the lived world.

Ritual acts are established that emphasize form and compliance over substance. Here information is distributed for later recita­ tion, the ability to follow directions (orders) takes precedence over making meaning, and convergent, one-right-answer ques­ tions on tests take on an exaggerated impor­ tance. Students in such a pedagogy become unbearably bored, as they see little connec­ tion between the pedagogy of poverty and their immediate daily concerns-not to mention the improvement of their lives. They want to scream and flail their arms in the air just to break the deadening monot­ ony of it all. Such students are insulted by the dumbed-down content they are expected to know and spit back on tests. Such proce­ duresposition them as dolts who are biolog­ ically incapable of engaging with mature information and the cognitive sophistica­ tion it demands (Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Cresson, 1996).

Our understanding of the urban peda- gogy of poverty confronts us head-on wi_th

§ e larger philosophical question: What are hools in contemporary society attempt­ g to d0-'-train "compliant workers" or

ducate discerning, empowered citizens?

xxvi Introduction

In my observations of far too many high­ poverty urban schools, I conclude the answer to this question has little to do with graduating smart citizens for a democratic society. In this context our conception of urban teaching and learn­ ing is very clear about its intentions. A democratic society demands empowered citizens who can work to make sure it

· does not continue to subvert egalitarian and democratic principles. In an era unfriendly to both political and eco­ nomic notions of democracy, the future of our political institutions depends on the success of this venture. In addition it is necessary for individual students to develop through their schooling the power, confidence, creativity, and deportment to forge their own way in the cosmos. This is why our urban peda­ gogy is based on a commitment to social and personal transformation.

Such a commitment means that a critical form of urban education embraces a new vision of what it means to be an educated person. In a context where marginaliza­ tion by race, class, gender, or religion is the norm, an educated person under­ stands that things must change, that he or she must comprehend and work to over­ come the impediments to personal and · social progress. Like their teachers, mar­ ginalized students must join with larger groups that can help make these dreams realities. Social and personal transforma­ tion are inseparable (USSR, 1998; Cuello, 1999; Hurley, 2003; Rose, 2005). Thus, our mban curriculum begins this transforma­ ,hve process by ensuring that school is /never separate from the lived world, from,'

, ithe personal experience of students. " Although this is important in the larger

quest to make education meaningful and useful-more than an empty ritual 'of compliance-it is also important for other reasons. When academic activity is con­ nected to the world and the lived experi­ ence of students, it is, simply put, more damned interesting.

Indeed, it is very important for students (and teachers) to find pleasure in academic work. No matter how long right-wing com­ mentators proclaim that students must be disciplined to learn boring lessons, I will argue that all great teachers must find ways to make becoming a scholar interesting. In my own life as a scholar I had to search for a way to make rigorous scholarship inter­ esting. I had to frame it as a pleasurable activity. I had watched too many would-be scholars fail to become the researchers they wanted to be because they could not make the process interesting for themselves. The same is even more germane for elementary and secondary students from high-poverty and racially marginalized backgrounds. We operate in a media-driven, hyper-real world that has successfully represented academic work as intrinsically boring and irrelevant. A critical urban pedagogy refuses to accept such constructions and works to make intellectual labor a source of personal satisfaction. Social and personal transformation is not possible without this important step.

In this affective context, it is not inappro­ priate for advocates of a transformative urban pedagogy to devote much time and energy to developing education for enjoy­ ment and personal satisfaction (Cuello, 1999). Neither is it out of place to engage urban students in conversations about what it might mean to be a scholar in their own sociohistorical context. The urban pedagogy supported here promotes a redefinition of the role of the intellectual for marginalized

. urban students. Indeed, I talk unabashedly with students ab@ut a demilitarized, gen­ der-inclusive notion of a warrior intellec­ tual. Such a concept situates the quest for personal and social transformation in the mean streets of our cities. Warrior intellectu­ als are tough young men and women who:

• Develop the ability to think critically and analytically.

° Cultivate their intellects. a Understand the world as it is in relation to

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• Interpret and make sense of the world around them by understanding the invisible forces at work in shaping particular situations.

• Employ their creative ability to get beyond ritualized but failed practices in school and society.

• Use their imagination to transcend the trap of traditional gender, racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and the harm they can cause in individual lives and the larger society.

e Reconceptualize the role Of "good citizen" in a way that speaks and acts in relation to dominant power and how it oppresses those around them.

• Develop the ability to teach themselves what they need to know to take on a partic­ ular task.

• Cultivate a humility that allows them to be both good leaders and good members of diverse learning communities.

• Devote themselves to never-ending, lifelong growth as citizens, parents, workers, teach­ ers, scholars, researchers, and lovers.

THE POWER OF CONTEXTUAL UNDERSTANDINGS IN URBAN EDUCATION

Teaching and learning, as well as the study of teaching and learning, have to do with exploring the context in which they take place. And this context, advocates of a critical urban pedagogy maintain, is

always complex and multidimensional. Insight into the context allows researchers and educators a clearer view into the com­ plicated processes that operate to shape urban education. Take, for example, histor­ ical processes. In an emancipatory educa­ tion, it is believed that teachers are ill­ equipped to teach in urban schools without a profound understanding of the history of urban education, the history of urbaniza­ tion and the evolution of urban areas, the history of social policies in relation to urban life, the history of racism and class bias in various societies, the history of urban youth culture, and so on.

These historical dynamics constantly shape what goes on in schools and in the

Introduction xxvii

lives of urban students. In the grotesquely unequal socioeconomic conditions that exist in most urban areas, poor students confront realities that undermine their readiness for learning (USSR, 1998). If urban educators are not aware of how these processes work, they are unprepared to deal with the lived realities they produce. When educators fail to understand thes1/ processes, they often resort to easy attribu tions of individual blame. Juan and Jasmine don't do well in school, such teachers tell their colleagues, because they are so lazy. Such an explanation is oblivious to the social forces shaping these students' fatigue in the teacher's class. Juan and Jas­ mine may be up all night taking care of younger brothers and sisters while their single mother works the graveyard shift at the local factory. I have seen ways that urban students spend their nights that are even more exhausting than babysitting. For many students, a full night of babysitting may look like a good option.

Understanding Juan and Jasmine's nighttime activities may make a dramatic difference in how a particular teacher views these students as human beings or interprets their academic performance. Advocates of critical teaching understand the larger concept at work in such a context:

~ow ledge of anything in the world is con- \ , tingent on the context in which we view it \ i. (Harding, 1998}. Knowing takes place iM particular microsituations, cultural con­ texts, and moments in history. Change the situation, context, or moment, and the knowledge produced and the meaning ascribed it will be forever modified. Such an understanding is a key element of higher orders of cognition-a critical urban pedagogy in this context perpetually seeks to move practitioner thinking to more rig­ orous and complex domains.

,. Thus, those of us attempting to imple-, 1 i!ment a transformative curriculum always ./ I '·.

l lwork to understand urban classrooms as / I part of a larger system. We cannot think of · · our purpose as urban educators outside of

xxviii Introduction

this set of connections. Thus, in the most generic pedagogical sense, critical urban educators never teach anything without considering the context in which they and their students are operating. Teaching aca­ demic skills in the context of developing higher-order thinking abilities in relation to problems important to the everyday lives of urban students is quite different from learning fragments of information by rote (Weil, 2001). The former reflects the spirit of our contextualized pedagogy; the latter replicates the logic of rational irra­ tionality found in such so-called educa­ tional reforms as Success for All and No Child Left Behind.

Implementing a critical urban education is a complex cognitive activity that well­ educated, experienced teachers are quite capable of enacting in their professional lives. Armed with historical, social, cul­ tural, economic, political, philosophical, and pedagogical insight, critical urban teachers observe, reflect on their experi­ ences, connect these observations and reflections to their contextual and subject matter knowledges, and act accordingly. These are high expectations for profes­ sionals so demeaned by politicians, acade­ micians, and many others-but they are not unrealistic. The public has yet to com­ prehend the complexity and multidimen­ sionality of urban education reform. Thus, an important dimension of our urban ped­ agogy involves engaging the public in the complexity of the urban educational con­ text. This means helping lay people understand the great strengths that urban teachers bring to their teaching, and what is needed to improve urban education.

A TRANSFORMAT!VE URBAN PEDAGOGY, POSTFORMALISM, AND CONTEXTUALIZATION

In work published elsewhere, I have injected this power of contextualizing into a larger cognitive theory called postfor­ malism (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993;

Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Hinchey, 1999; Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Villaverde, 1999). Postformal contextualization is a key dimension of a critical articulation of urban education. Contextualization in the postformal sense involves understanding that knowledge can never stand alone or be complete in and of itself. In the act of abstraction-as in the abstract individual of Cartesianism-an analyst takes some­ thing out of its context. Of course, this can­ not be avoided in everyday life because of the bombardment of information humans have to deal with in the process of living. In this context if an object of thinking can­ not be abstracted, it will be lost in a larger · pattern. While the postformal thinker must be adept at such abstraction, it must take place without a concurrent loss of sight of the larger conceptual field-the context that provides separate entities with meaning. This is a tricky act that complex critical thinkers must learn to perform adeptly. Postformalists place great importance on the notion of context and the act of contextualization in every aspect of their lives. When urban teachers who are postformal thinkers encounter problems in their work lives, they connect the difficulty to a wider frame of reference with a wide array of possible causes.

When pedagogical problems fail to meet the criteria of an archetype, postformalists explore unused sources and employ the information acquired to develop a larger understanding of the interaction of the various contexts surrounding an issue. When teachers, for example, fail to per­ form such an act of contextualization, stu­ dents get"hurt. When educational leaders are unequipped to contextualize, they tend to isolate various dimensions of a larger socioeducational circumstance and call each a separate problem. Thus, they tinker with components of the problems but never approach the macrocontext of which such complications are mere parts. In this context postformal advocates of criticality understand that data derive

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their meanings only in the context created by other data. Context, thus, may be more important than content. These insights change the way researchers, urban educa­ tional professionals, policy analysts, and practitioners of all varieties conduct their work.

As Ray Horn (2000) cqp.tends, postfor­ malism is profoundly concerned with cre­ ating dialogues about power and context. Thus, postformalist urban teachers exam­ ine curriculum and instruction in light of the urban community and the forces that affect it. Here urban teachers employing the power of contextualization study media representations of urban education, urban youth culture, and the socioeco­ nomic forces that help shape these dynam­ ics. In a postformal context, therefore, learning cannot be separated from an indi­ vidual's identity, her personal history in her lived material environments (Hanra­ han, 1998). All teaching in this postformal formulation is an act of connecting the act of learning to the learner and her con­ text(s). When urban educators apply these ideas to curriculum development, educa­ tional policy, and classroom teaching, the world of urban education changes forever.

RIGHT-WING EDUCATION RESISTS OUR CRITICAL URBAN PEDAGOGY'S EFFORTS TO CONTEXTUALIZE

In the numerous educational reforms promoted by right-wing politicos, the importance of context is quashed. Such reforms create an urban education in which connections to city neighborhoods and the urban political economy are irrele­ vant. The desire of many urban high school students to make these contextual _connections part of the curriculum falls on regressive deaf ears in the right-wing cos­ n1os. Such a stance often induces urban students to assert that such educational and political leaders don't give a damn about them (Miron, 2004). Viewing many of these economically poor and racially

Introduction xxix

marginalized students as abstract individ­ uals who are "weak students" with a pro­ pensity for crime, many right-wing politicos maintain that such students are not worth the public's financial invest­ ment. They argue that monies devoted to their education should be diverted to the cognitively able; to the gifted, and talented who score high on IQ and other standard­ ized tests (Hermstein & Murray, 1994; Kincheloe et al., 1996).

Such ways of seeing urban students emerge from particular constructions of culture. In this formulation culture is assumed to be a monolithic concept, a homogenous set of conventions and prac­ tices, not a multilogical domain of differ­ ence, interconnections, and power. Attention here is diverted from the multi­ ple subcultures and ways of being in a contemporary nation-state. Indeed, only one variety of a national culture (e.g., that of the United States) is validated as a legit­ imate social identity (Apple, 1993, 1999; Steinberg, 2001; McLaren, 2002; Rose & Kincheloe, 2003). Even though there is a constant synthesis of diverse cultural characteristics from diverse social loca­ tions in contemporary electronic societies, within the right-wing construction of cul­ ture the national culture is superior and must be protected from these pollutants. Thus, the school curriculum takes on a fetishistic importance in the larger effort to defend the dominant civilization. As Philip Anderson and Judith Summerfield (2004) contend, urban areas of the United States, with their "multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, multiclass, multigendered, multinational, multidimensional" (pp. 38- 39) emergent culture are always posi­ tioned as a threat to monological notions of U .S./Western homogeneity. Such per­ vasive right-wing ways of seeing dramati­ cally change the ways advocates of a critical urban education approach their jobs.

In this cultural context the politics of knowledge becomes profoundly imper-

xxx Introduction

tant in urban education. Here the stan­ dardization of curriculum movements we find in many societies and the ideological control of textbooks become markers of the larger effort to perpetuate the domi­ nance of "mainstream" culture-white supremacy, Christian ascendancy, patriar­ chal hegemony, class elitism, heteronor­ mativity, and so on. Because in the decontextualized right-wing pedagogical framework learning is an individual activ­ ity, none of these social dimensions are rel­ evant in the educational conversation. Indeed, in the conservative construction talk about such social, cultural, political, and economic factors is merely a left-wing way of politicizing what should be a non­ political, relatively simplistic dialogue about inculcating human beings' greatest insights on the true, the beautiful, and the good into the minds of our students. Those individuals who possess inherited intellectual capacity-high !Qs-will leam these truths; those who don't, won't.

Thus, in the decontextualized right­ wing educational cosmos we (representa­ tives of dominant power) need to simply get on with the task of identifying the creme de la creme and separating them from the urban whey. In our just merito­ cratic system such activity represents the hand of a benevolent Calvinist God benignly intervening in human affairs. To hell with multilogicality, multiculturalism, and multidimensionality, we know the truth, who's talented, and whose culture is of the most worth. Those minority kids from poor urban neighborhoods will have to accept their level of competence and find commensurate social/vocational posi­ tions. If we can keep contextual under­ standings of the social construction of competence, truth, and curriculum out of ' the mix, we can protect the privileged ' position of those from dominant cultural and class backgrounds. If we can use only one-dimensional notions of intelligence that exclude contextual insights about the test taker's linguistic, socioeconomic class, ·

racial/ cultural milieu, then we can justify (diverting educational monies to the gifted \ and talented few.

In this decontextualized mode of urban education a standardized curriculum is constructed that effectively works to keep practitioners of a critical pedagogy from forging a course of study reflective of stu­ dent cultural concerns and what is mean­ ingful for them in the context of their lived experiences. Thus, urban education becomes less timely, less flexible, and less connected to the dispositions and the immediate and long-term needs of its most marginalized students. Local community needs are irrelevant and evaluation becomes something imposed on schools, not an important learning process directed by schools (Elmore, 1997; Norris, 1998). Look­ ing only at decontextualized data about the low levels of urban teacher and student per­ formance on standardized evaluation instruments, right-wing analysts can paint a picture of hopelessness that justifies aban­ doning the effort to provide an empowering education for city kids. Advocates of a lib­ eratory urban pedagogy refuse to allow this decontextualized, elitist, and nihilistic way of representing urban education, urban teach­ ers, and urban students carry the day. We believe that the struggle for a rigorous, prag­ matic, empowering, transformational urban education can be won.

DISEMPOWERING URBAN CONTEXTS: OVERCOMING MARGINALIZATION, ASSERTING AGENCY

The sociopolitical, cultural dynamics that frame urban education, to say the least, are not conducive to personal and social transformation. Indeed, it is not a stretch to maintain that such dynamics operate to undermine the life chances of marginalized students. This is the stark reality that faces all urban educators. As previously main­ tained, we can with great commitment and effort overcome its effects with individual students in specific classrooms, but there is

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nothing simple and easy about the process. When the success of right-wing political alliances over the last 25 years is added to this sobering mix, efforts for just, demo­ cratic reform of urban education become even more difficult. The goals of the right­ wing coalition-maintaining dominant power relations, enhancing international competition, increasing corporate profit margins, and strengthening the social reg­ ulation of the "dangerous" poor and non­ white-do not provide more hope for poor urban students.

Activists in urban communities can help teachers in city schools connect their cur­ ricula to such ideological understandings. For students to grasp these concepts, interpretive frameworks must be con­ structed in close relationship with their collective lifeworlds and a community­ based historical consciousness. Such a relationship creates an ideological zone of proximal development (ZPD) where new meanings emerge in dialogue with stories from the community. These interpretive frameworks and new meanings constitute a much needed ideological shield against the assault on learning poverty unleashes on urban students. Boys and girls from poor urban neighborhoods need this ideo­ logical shield to fight off poverty- and rac­ ism-induced

• Aoger that works to subvert efforts to socially survive in schoo~

• Low expectation to succeed in school • Hopelessness concerning life expectations • Resentment of the middle class that makes

it impossible to cooperate with many teachers

• Rejection of the possibility that education may be worth pursurng

• Equation of getting an education with "sell­ rng out" one's friends and neighbors (Apple, 1993, 1996, 1999; Henke, 2000; Carvan et al., 2002)

When many sociologists characterize inner-city schools. as being populated by those left behind, ensnared in hopeless­ ness by their economic unimportance

Introduction xxxi

(Bartlet, quoted in Wang & Kovach, 1996), then time has come for a dramatic change. In less than sixty years these urban schools have moved from white, middle class bas­ tions with a broad tax base to low-income, minority systems with an ever-shrinking share of economic resources and political , power. In what many call the metropolitan problem, well-to-do urban and suburban districts have not been willing to help those caught in this urban briar patch with shared resources and financial aid (Hal­ ford, 1996). In the electronic hyper-reality of the last three or so decades racial inscriptions ideologically frame discus­ sions of urban issues such as these (Leonardo, 2004).

In the right-wing cultural logic that shapes our ideological landscape residents of well-to-do urban and suburban districts are often not willing to help people in poor neighborhoods because they are black or Latino/-a. In the racial ideology

/ of our contemporary era such peoples are / often represented as bringing on them- I , _,

I selves the problems that they face. The I , . normalizing impulses found in many edu- / , , f1 cational and developmental psychology ll '!J i.Y' departments relegate these students to the i ~J :

dustbin of incompetence. Using middle- ,;'\ r{ , : class and upper-m_ iddle class, white, first- i f~; 1-~ ,; '/ \ ,' \ (\ , language English-speaking children as the i\ / , /\ norm, such psychologists pathologize t'S= •. ' those who are culturally different (Kinche- '

Joe et al., 1999; Haberman, 2002). The indi- · vidualizing, decontextualizing impulse of contemporary right-wing ways of seeing again rears its unsightly head.

Community has been shattered in these domains and self-efficacy has been assaulted by decontextualized and "objec­ tive" psychological pronouncements that play the deficit game. In such a displaced culture our critical urban pedagogy's cur­ riculum of place seems apropos, as it attempts to create a sense of belonging­ ness in a world that rejects those very urban students we admire so much and care about so deeply. Urban dwellers in

xxxii Introduction

poor neighborhoods are alienated and iso­ lated in a plethora of ways. Poor African Americans and Latinos/-as, for example, are purposefully secluded by city plan­ ning and are districted politically to mini­ mize their political influence (Ng, 2003). Advocates of criticality understand that urban students and their families desper­ ately need a sense of community. One of the roles of urban schools in poor settings, therefore, is to create this community consciousness wherever and when the opportunity arises in the classroom, in out-of-school activities, in personal rela­ tionships, in. community organizations, and so forth.

Criticai urban educators understand that their students who are marginalized by race and class are alienated individu­ als. To be isolated from other humans, to be cast aside as worthless is to be cursed in contemporary society. Right-wing, ethno­ centric Western values thrive on such alienation and the creation of human detritus. Positivist academics stand ready with their standardized tests and person­ ality profiles to validate such inhumane actions with the imprimatur of science. All of this is justified in the hypermasculinity of rugged individualism. To conceptualize the world in cooperative rather than com­ petitive modalities, to fight rather than passively accept alienation is to be unmanly, a wimp in the patriarchal dis­ course of right-wing hypermasculinity.

The fear of such epithets moves many young urban (and other) men to reject humanistic values and critical ways of being. Critical urban teachers make it a point to understand these dynamics as they play out in the processes of marginal­ ization and the assertion of agency and empowerment. With such understanding at the forefront of their consciousness, they understand that a wide variety of fac­ tors will shape students' relationship to the critical urban curriculum. Divergent students will react totally differently to different curricular experiences for a vari-

ety of reasons. Once again the ante of urban educational complexity increases. A critical urban education engages students in analyses of these complex reactions to its goals and purposes. Indeed, this is a key aspect of the critical curriculum.

MOTIVATION IN URBAN EDUCATION

In technical models of urban education and the right-wing reforms being pro­ moted in the twenty-first century, advo­ cates of a critical urban pedagogy witness an abject failure to motivate urban stu­ dents from marginalized

'Far too often such students fail, opinion quite understandably, to any connection between th,:, they encounter and their lives. Much the learning in which they engage in this fragmented context seems to them an empty exercise devoid of intrinsic value. ··'""•''"''" Once urban teachers gain a contextual, multiperspectival understanding of the purposes, the ideological dynamics, and 'ttc>?i'.' many contexts that frame urban school­ ing, they are ready to engage in one of the toughest educational tasks imaginable­ developing a pedagogy that engages mar­ ginalized urban students in academic c~c,;,:ct, work that is life transforming and is con­ nected to larger social problems and issues. I am amazed by those brilliant ·""'·' "· p

urban teachers who accomplish this task month after month, year after year.

In the spirit of critical teaching that pro­ motes social and personal transformation, these brilliant urban teachers are able to ,,,, ... ,o make sure .that students find academic learning instantly gratifying. As John Dewey (1916) put it time and time again, education is not for the future but is· for the present. We become smarter, more Ji'''""''~ socially adept, better citizens in relation to our present lives-not for some imagined life far from our present circumstances. Our motivation comes from felt needs in the present. Few teachers have been suc­ cessful who attempt to inspire their stu-

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dents with the assertion that they will need this knowledge in a couple of decades. Advocates of a transformative pedagogy attempt to balance motivation between the dialectic of social and per­ sonal transformation. They understand that no education for personal transforma­ tion is complete without a commitment to social transformation and vice versa.

In this context critical urban teachers work to cultivate the intellectual ability to acquire, analyze, and produce both self­ knowledge and social knowledge. Grounded in such knowledge and schol-· arly facility, individuals would be equipped to participate in the democratic process as committed and informed citi­ zens. A basic assumption in this civic con­ text involves the belief that, in terms of a critical vision of a democratic social order and education, Western societies in the twenty-first century are in great trouble. As previously mentioned, corporations · and other power wielders have gained increasing control over the production and flow of information. Here, public con­ sciousness is aligned in a complex and never completely successful interactive process with the interests of power. I havei

I -._found throughout my teaching career that I

· students once alerted to these power (_ dynamics tend to become extremely inter- IL ested in understanding them in more j detail and discerning their effects on their -\ own lives.

-- I;, In this context critical urban teachers understand that one of the most important

• goals of public life over the last few decades has been the cultivation of more and more social obedience and less -democracy. The effort to win the consent of the public (hegemony) via appeals to both logic and affect, for privatization :projects that may not be in the public's best interests, has been frighteningly suc- cessful. Of course, what makes this priva­ :tization impulse so messy and complex is -that public urban schooling driven by

· --'many of the same forces has failed to pro-

Introduction xxxiii

mote a rigorous, democratic education. Operating in the shadow of Frankfurt School critical social theorist Theodor Adorno, critical educators reference his notion of "half-education," which describes how mainstream education per­ petuates students' alienation from knowl­ edge of the social and the self.

In this process, agency is undermined in a sea of social confusion (Sunker, 1994). To confront this alienation, critical teachers must provide specific examples of formal and informal educational programs that promote a progressive curriculum that fights such alienation. Understanding the affective dimensions of these programs, critical urban educators analyze why stu­ dents and other ind iv id uals are emotion­ ally invested in specific programs, why energy is produced and absorbed by par­ ticipants, and why the disposition to imagine and create new projects is culti­ vated in some pro grams and not in others. This is where advocates of critical frame­ works formulate and deploy their recon­ ceptualization of the prevailing notions of what it means to be an intellectual. There is absolutely no reason that a scholar who studies hard and learns how to produce knowledge about social and personal transformation can't become a positive model for marginalized urban students.

As we consider the above-mentioned alienation in urban educational context, urban teachers know that there is a crisis of academic motivation within contempo­ rary Western societies. The larger society has represented academic work as a form of mental drudgery that should be avoided at all costs. The joys of develop­ ing disciplined forms of thinking, read­ ing, and writing are not a part of the twenty-first century cultural landscape. Most psychologists-not to mention most educators and parents-have not under­ stood that learning always involves a change in identity. I understood that before I became a writer, I had to change the person I was as a human being. I had

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xxxiv Introduction

to actua!I y become a writer, one who loved the process and was willing to sacri­ fice particular dimensions of my life in order to claim this "persona." To become what I wanted to become, I had to learn to like to write: to gain pleasure from turning a good phrase, set goals for publication, understand how I would integrate writing into my life, and appreciate the relation­ ship between my personal transformation into a writer and larger issues of social transformation.

Critical urban teachers challenge their students to change their lives as learners. They help urban students construct con­ ceptual frameworks tied to personal and social goals that create a taste for academic work. This dispositional dimension of learning is far more important that educa­ tional psychologists have ever under­ stood. Advocates of a critical pedagogy appreciate the dispositional domain and always consider it when engaging in cur­ riculum development, constructing peda­ gogical methods, and evaluating their students' work. Being lucky enough to

' grow up in a marginalized subculture­ the southern Appalachian Mountains-I have always been able to empathize with to many of my marginalized urban students // in regard to their feelings about intellectu- I als. Often times these scholarly types were exactly the ones who looked down on us for being stupid hillbillies with funny , accents.

I could often see my African-American and Latino/-a, as well as my Russian and other recently immigrated, urban students reacting the same way to such condescen­ sion as my hillbilly friends and I did-we all "played dumb" for the elitists. We would exaggerate our accents and stupid- ity and play hillbilly. Hell, I still find myself in adulthood doing just that when some­ one talks down to me because of my low­ status Tennessee mountain accent. I always knew what Thurgood Marshall­ the first African-American member of the U.S. Supreme Court-meant when asked

about his favorite pastime. He would say something like, "I like to jive white peo­ ple." Thus, for Justice Marshall and myself-not that I should compare myself to a man of such great accomplishment­ part of our passion to become scholars involved transforming ourselves into learned men who always remembered where we came from and pursued a humble, not an elitist, conception of intellectualism. I Thus, when we act on our understand­ / ing of the connection between learning,! \and identity, we pay serious attention ti!/, 'understanding our students' identiti1'. \: We take the knowledges they brmg t~ :,: ~lass very seriously, always exploring hoJ\} ( to acknowledge such data while building \ on and expanding them. In this context we l uncover as many entry points to learning "\ as possible, creating portals through which students can develop their own personal relationship to scholarship and the skills it demands. Such an approach poses an omnipresent question to urban students: How can I find both my individ­ ual and communitarian role as a learner?

, This all-pervading question is followed by two more queries: How can I imagine my life changing, as I become this learner? How does the learning with which I'm now involved relate to my larger efforts to create my new learner persona?

Critical urban educators keep these ideas in mind as they construct their learn­ ing communities. One way of thinking about a learning community is as a cul­ tural location where individuals engage in activitres where they learn to become par­ ticular types of people. In the interrela­ tionships and the connections made in these learning communities individuals come to see themselves in new ways as they learn new skills and insights. Noth­ ing could be more relevant to our lives than such learning. Nothing could be grounded on a more different view of the right-wing fragmented, individualized, abstracted, pedagogical act than such a

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sociocognitive conception (Cuello, 1999; Carvan et al., 2002; Morrell, 2003). Thus, a critical urban education is inseparable from a vision of social and individual transformation.

A CRITICAL URBAN EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: RELATIO~ALISM AND LEARNING

In a cognitive theoretical context under­ standing the relationship between human learning and identity fundamentally undermines the mechanistic learning the­ ories used for decades by mainstream ,educators. In the contextualized cognitive j

ff theory we begin to make distinctions , i~[ between "learning about" and "learning to / be." Thus, learning is as much an ontologi- 1

I cal (concerned with being in the world) act 1/ as it is an epistemological act. Most school learning in a decontextualized framework involves committing to memory preexist­ ing knowledge domains-the truth of sci­ entifically based disciplines. In learning to be, individuals become members of com­ munities of practice in the process con­ structing a new relational identity (Hung, Bopry, Looi, & Koh, 2005; Kinnucan­ Welsch, 2005).

Understanding this relational identity is · central to a critical urban pedagogy. Such an identity plays a key role in shaping what it is that a student learns. We can see this ontological dynamic play out in

:schools on a daily basis as students who enter particular youth subcultures where the changes in their identities profound! y shape not only what they know about the World but also how they see both the

. World and themselves. This is a profound learning experience. Thus, we cannot see learning and being apart from the contexts i_il which we operate. Thus, we are not self and world in the way coffee is in a can. .'I'he self is the world and the world is the self in a critical ontology (Kincheloe, 2003). The very concept of human being cannot be understood outside of sociopo-

Introduction xxxv

litical context. This is a subtle proposition. As Hung et al. (2005) remind us, "although being can be phenomenologi­ cally perceived separately from the world, being exists or takes meaning only in rela­ tion to the world."

In this context the absurdity of the way IQ tests have been developed and used comes into clear focus. Constructed as measures of the individual's ability, their failure to account for the connection between the individual and the contexts of which she is a part renders them useless. If the individual and her cognitive orienta­ tions are shaped by this being-in-the­ world, psychological tests miss the origins and causes of why individuals display particular cognitive characteristics. They attribute to nature what is.a manifestation of a particular set of social, political, eco­ nomic, cultural, and historical relation­ ships. Thus, the cognitive theoretical base (postformalism; see Kincheloe & Stein­ berg, 1993; Kincheloe et al., 1999) of our pedagogy views the self, the development of selfhood, and cognitive ability in new and exciting ways. These dynamics create a dramatic rupture with the past. Our rela­ tional ontological perspectives provide us with a new means of understanding the way individuals relate to and learn about the world around them (Taylor, 2005).

This notion of the relational self is central to our conception of urban education-all learning theories and pedagogies are directly connected to how we view the nature of selfhood. Obviously, selfhood is a profoundly complex concept. Advo­ cates of a critical urban pedagogy operat­ ing in light of this complexity understand that the distinction between the social and the individual is not as clear as traditional sociologists and psychologists assumed it to be. While retaining the notion of indi­ viduality and the agency of the individual, critical urban educators appreciate the instability of selfhood and the limits of rational regulation of one's intellectual activity. The notion of a fixed, unitary self

~---------.. - xxxvi Introduction

has been subverted by psychoanalytic, sit­ uated cognitive, and enactivist insights. When we examine a critical pedagogy's concern with context from this psycholog­ ical perspective, we begin to understand in even more detail its importance.

Context is not sirnpl y the "box" in which an abstract individual operates. Instead, context is a web of reality made up of human actions, cultural practices, linguistic dynamics, and matrices of human consciousness all working to con­ struct selfhood. Here we come to under­ stand that context influences not only the

/ types of experiences in which humans engage, but that it also shapes the ways individuals make sense of and act in response to such involvements. Thus, meaning and context are difficult to sepa­ rate-learning is situated, knowledge is inseparable from the context in which it is produced and comprehended. Theories of knowledge and pedagogy that see infor­ mation simply as some "thing" that one carries around in her head until she needs it again miss the significance of this con­ textualisrn. With this understanding in mind we can more clearly discern the ways our social location, our power /sta­ tus relations in particular settings shape our learning and how we are perceived as learners.

Thus, advocates of transforrnative urban education possess a process-oriented view of the self. With components both inside the individual and in the context around her, selfhood is always in process, meaning that it is an ever-evolving interaction between individual and setting. In such a process we can rethink our relationship to the world, we can reconnect to the natural order from which Western modernity has alienated us. In this construction people · are no longer alone in their own minds. Instead they are unfinished entities always reaching out to other selves in diverse contexts. Indeed, the self is ongo­ ing and as such cannot be "measured" by primitive instruments such as the IQ test.

If, as individuals, we are active in our own self construction, then an IQ is but a mere photograph of where we were at a particu­ lar moment in time in relation to a task imposed on us by outsiders from a differ­ ent context. There are insights we might gain from the test, but it tells us little about the capability of the self in some "natural state." As long as abstracted, decontextualized views of selfhood are accepted and IQ and other standardized tests are viewed as scientifically valid, objective statements of one's biological intelligence, marginalized urban students will be unlike! y to be perceived as high performing scholars.

What are critical urban teachers to do with this knowledge of the relational, con­ textualized, process-oriented self? How does such insight help them teach urban students oppressed by race, class, and gender forces? This is where my notion of critical ontology returns to a critical urban pedagogy. In this context teachers engage their students in the exploration of the construction of the self by power struc­ tures and other contextual forces. In addi­ tion students study the production of their own selfhood in particular. As students come to understand these productive dynamics, teachers constantly work to engage them in creating narratives that explain their role(s) in the society, the political state, the city, the neighborhood, the school, the peer group, and the family. In these narratives students attempt to articulate a positive role for themselves.

This process must.be directly connected to the academic curriculum. As a student of history, what are the possible roles a student can play in the metahistorical themes playing out in the world and in our lives? Arn I able to position myself as a young, African-American male, for example, to construct a story for myself in the as yet unfinished anticolonial move­ ment that swept through all parts of the world in the twentieth century? Arn I able to situate myself as a young Moroccan

woman w tion to the As I read t I might tel way? In rn roll music lives of rn organ play I study. H great blm play bette, style, wrib the concer cannot list my own 11

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woman who wants to be a writer in rela­ tion to the stories of Zora Neale Hurston? As I read them, do I gain insights into how I might tell my stories in my own unique way? In my own life as a wannabe rock 'n' roll musician, I constantly create narra­ tives of myself as a singer and piano and organ player in relation to particular songs I study. How does kn'1wing the work of great bluesman Howlin' Wolf help me play better, sing better, cultivate my own style, write better music, and understand the concept of soul in a deeper manner? I cannot listen to the Wolf and not think of my own "musical narrative."

Thus, in this context our emancipatory pedagogy teaches a rigorous academic curriculum that is always connected to the production of the self-human beings' selfhood in general and the student's in particular. Such a cognitive orientation enhances our efforts at social and personal transformation. As teachers and students study the self as a historical construction, they learn why they see themselves and the. world as they do. With such knowl­ edge students have a much better oppor­

•tunity to transform the self from what it now is to what they would like for it to be. This is not some New Age, touchy-feely phicess-it is a rigorous academic act. It is

· hot a narcissistic turning inward but an 'engagement with the world, with knowl­ edge production and its uses. It is an

·e')gagement with the contemporary Zeit­ geist, the prevailing social (un)conscious­

:ness. Indeed, it is a serious analysis of our · relational selves-in particular, of what

· tl'ley are operating in relation to. In this . process of critical transformation students · : !become more and more adept at negotiat­

. iJ;ig and traversing the ideological and dis­ . · · cursive landscapes that position them in

the world, in school, in the labor market, and in their communities. '/'Such a pedagogy enables students to eval­ -uate their agency-to assess their ability to 'cib what they want to do and become what ·their narratives portended. Because it is a

Introduction xxxvii

critical pedagogy the forces and structures that impede their agency are named and addressed. Such a process transcends anti­ quated beliefs that view learning as the pro­ cess of acquiring and filing information, as it moves into a far more complex and prag­ matic territory. Thus, we are formulating a , pedagogy of becoming-a dispositional, ethical, intellectual mode of teaching and learning that consciously changes teachers and students into something greater than they now are (Madison, 1988; May, 1993; Bruner, 1996; Badeau, 1999; Pickering, 1999; Fenwick, 2000; Kincheloe, 2005b ).

A TRANSFORMATIVE URBAN PEDAGOGY ANO PSYCHOLOGY: AGENCY AND INTELLIGENCE ARE LEARNABLE

·. '-.

(' .. Agency involves human beings' ability ·-.i 1 to instigate and carry out our actions in a i

\way that accomplishes our larger goals. J Such agency is closely aligned with self_..-­ hood, the relational self, and intelligence, as individuals and groups develop a con­ sciou.sness of "agentive encounters with the world" (Bruner, 1996, p. 36). These individual and group memories are inter­ preted and projected into the future, into considerations of what could be, in light of what is and what has been. Intelligence has something to do with a learning com­ munity's and/ or an individual's ability to engage in such projections into possi­ bility. How can our extrapolations in math help us in our efforts to rebuild the racing car we bought? How can our polit­ ical understandings facilitate our work in organizing the community to fight the toxic dumping by local corporations? Again, in these contexts individuals are creating narratives for themselves con­ cerning their participation in the world. Such an act provides a more specific ele­ ment to the critical notion of empower­ ment. Empowerment here is not some vague concept but a concrete one with very pragmatic outcomes.

xxxviii Introduction

Such empowerment provides us with an autobiography-a life story that is inseparable from other individuals and meso- and macrocontexts. Critical agency does not merely provide us with an abstracted autobiography free from con­ textual influences but one that under­ stands our situatedness, the construction and reconstruction of selfhood in relation to larger structures, forces, and processes. Students (or anyone, for that matter) who are able to describe themselves and their construction in this way have moved to a new cognitive and scholarly domain. They have gained an ability to engage in the hermeneutic circle, where they look at the specific (their individual lives) in relation to the general (the larger contexts and pro­ cesses in which they operate). In this circle they begin to discern connections and relationships that have operated to shape who they are. In such a context they are better able to imagine compelling narra­ tives of where they might go and what they might do.

Dominant power can be quite brutal in its evaluation of the worth of our narratives. In the case of marginalized urban students, the narratives they imagine for themselves as agents of social change and ideological resisters of oppressive dominant cultural practices may be deemed unacceptable. Stu­ dents must be ready for such condemnation and develop pragmatic strategies to deal with it. Dominant culture, for example, often denigrates marginalized urban stu­ dents' abilities to negotiate and survive life on tough streets. The types of skills needed in this struggle are, by nature, sophisticated and nuanced. The idea that such savvy stu­ dents who have not had the opportunity to learn basic literacy skills would be judged as cognitively incapable of doing academic work because of low standardized test scores is incomprehensible to me. Yet, this is the reality such students face. Critical urban teachers use these insights in their pedagog­ ical work with these students in their efforts to tie academic concerns to the narratives

the students create about themselves in the world.

These sociopsychological dimensions of our pedagogy are grounded in the under­ standing that intelligence and agency are linked and both are teachable and learn­ able. This simple statement in an era of right-wing reform and mechanistic educa­ tional psychology is a radical assertion. As I examine contemporary educational and cognitive practice, I am convinced that many political and educational leaders and psychological scholars do not believe that marginalized urban students can learn (Norris, 1998; Nations, 2005). Pro­ ducers of standardized tests, despite over­ whelming evidence to the contrary, maintain that nothing can be done to improve standardized test scores. Don't bother with test coaching, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) tells potential test takers, it won't help. The assumption here I is that intelligence is a genetic, fixed, /i __ intransigent entity and there is nothing\ one can do to increase it (Owen & Doerr, · 1999). The fact that test coaching consis­ tently works to help raise test scores must

· be suppressed-the implications of such knowledge are dangerous.

Such danger not only threatens the test­ ing industry and its explosive profits in the era of No Child Left Behind, but it actually shakes the foundation of the mer­ itocratic house of cards on which contem­ porary education precariously rests. If we reveal the intelligence myth, the corre­ sponding fable that assures us we live in a just society and the people who succeed in it do s0 because of their cognitive and moral superiority crumbles in its wake. Hurricanes and lightning, heavy metal thunder-here the cracks in the founda­ tions of dominant power are revealed. Yet for those of us not wedded to the protec­ tion of an unjust status quo, the news here is good and quite electrifying: Most human beings without severe brain dam­ age or physiological impairments can become much smarter, they can learn new

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s the test­ profits in 1d, but it [ the mer- 1 contem­ ists. lf we h.e corre­ e live in a ucceedin itive and its wake. 'Y metal , founda­ !aled. Yet .e protec­ ews here g: Most ain dam­ ~nts can ~arn new

forms of agency that help them realize their dreams and contribute to the larger social good. The key to using this knowl­ edge in education involves our concern with context. By understanding the con­ texts, processes, and matrices in which people operate, we begin to develop a net­ work-oriented, not a brain-centered. view of intelligence. Stated differently, we begin to see intelligence as a social as well as an individual dynamic (Perkins, 1995; Lep­ ani, 1998).

Psychometrics embraces a brain-cen­ tered view of intelligence where abstract individuals ply their inherited abilities in isolated situations. Our social distributed notion of intelligence understands that thinking is always shaped by the:

• Artifacts we use • Individuals/communities with whom we

come into contact • Symbol systems we employ • Nature of our interactions with our sociopo­

litical contexts and the dispositions toward particular types of learning they produce

• Knowledges to which we have or do not have access

• Our relationship with dominant forms of power, and so forth.

This critical cognitive theory-elsewhere I refer to it as postformalism-maintains that resources not located inside the brain affect what we refer to as intelligence.

Once individuals understand this dis­ tributed dimension of intelligence, they can begin to rearrange their lives as learn-· · ers. If I want to be a great critical scholar, I . need to build a community of critical / scholars in which I can participate. I need / to make use of their expertise to help me r: construct new narratives about my ·\ present and future role in the world, in particular my role as a critical scholar. If I am aware of these sociocognitive dynam­ ics as a teacher, I can create situations in which I facilitate students' efforts to build these communities, to gain access to help­ ful artifacts and tools, to monitor their dis-

Introduction xxxix

positions in relation to issues of power and inclusion, and to explore their self­ narratives in relation to these distributed forces. Thus, the relational individual is taught in a relatiotFb'as_e_c,!.°jJei:liiimgy.~-•-

. , Ifie rii!Ture of studenisTancf1eachers' social interactions with both one another and in general becomes profoundly,. important in our critical urban pedagogy (Morrell, 2003; Quartz, Olsen, & Duncan­ Andrade, 2003). Transmission of infor­ mation in this context is decentered as the basic form of instruction to a more situated location where it is used only in particular contexts and when the peda­ gogical timing is right. Pedagogical expertise in this context often revolves around connecting students to particu­ lar contexts and integrating them into specific learning communities. A central task of a critical urban teacher involves creating diverse learning communities. Such a charge involves bringing particu­ lar people together, creating affective and emotional climates that are warm, nurturing, inclusive, and inviting to stu­ dents who have often experienced rejec­ tion, tutoring particular groups and/ or individuals as to the dynamics of learn­ ing hidden in their everyday activities, naming the tacit knowledges and skills employed in particular contexts, and so on. This is how teachers and students become more intelligent and enhance their agency to make a difference in the world.

CREATING A SENSE OF BELONGING FOR URBAN STUDENTS IN CRITICAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

Urban students marginalized by poverty • and racism will rarely succeed in school \:f,,.­ until they gain a sense of belongingness in 1

particular classrooms and learning com­ munities. A central dimension of our ped­ agogy involves making sure that these students can find safe places where they

xi Introduction

belong. As critical urban teachers are work-· lng on this goal, they must also make sure that they themselves have safe places in'

'school where they too can belong. Too often, young teachers dedicated to the prin­ ciples of a critical urban education find themselves alone and isolated in their schools. It will be difficult to create a sense of belongingness for students if teachers do not have their own support structures. Urban schools in poor neighborhoods can be alienated, anonymous venues that con­ sume those who walk into them without social and emotional sustenance. It is important for teachers in such settings to remember that there are other teachers who may feel as lonely as they do. Building net­ works of teachers and then connecting those associations to students are necessary dimensions of critical urban teaching.

In this context many urban teachers make particular assignments directly for the purpose of building learning communi­ ties and solidarity among their students. No teacher ever constructed a classroom that was too safe, too inclusive, or too inter- , connected. In addition to making students ,feel better about school and setting up the ! type of learning communities needed to : engage in the curriculum of social and self- i transformation, the construction of class- \ rooms in which students feel like they I belong does more than any other single , action to create a well-managed classroom.

_1 A teacher can attend 37 workshops on classroom discipline or work individually with the five-thousand-dollar-a-day con­ sultant who devised the program "Ready, Set, Discipline" (RSD) and not find a better form of classroom management. Connect­

,ing classroom management with the larger ( goal of social and personal transformatioI) \:via learning communities in which stw . dents create their self-narratives is a holis'. tic, integrated approach to constructing classrooms that works.

Of course, there are no sure-fire, no-miss strategies when it comes to classroom management in urban schools-especially

if the teacher wants to control the behavior of her students to make them do what she wants. In urban settings where students' life experiences can come so quickly and intensely, teachers who want to make stu­ dents act in a particular way typically don't last too long. "With all the things we have to worry about," students often con­ clude, "we don't need that teacher telling us how to sit in our chairs." Thus, critical teachers articulate their macroexpecta­ tions (social and personal transformation) and their microexpectations (a climate of mutual respect, belongingness, coopera­ tion, and safety in the classroom). I have always let my students know as quickly as possible by both words and deeds that I would stand up for them-even when it was not in my own self-interest. They knew that I would tell them the truth and not defend school policies or actions that were unfair.

When I was a young high school teacher in the 1970s, for example, I had a group of students who had long hair, embraced radical politics, loved rock music, and wore funky and unusual used clothing. II was still a time that the word "hippie" was used and that's what many of my col­ leagues on the faculty called them-those "goddamn hippie kids." I loved these stu· dents. They were highly motivated and flourished in my American history and cultural geography courses. They worked with me on special projects during their study hall breaks and after school. We wrote songs about what we were studying and play.ed them on our guitars and key· boards for other students. They trusted me and I trusted them. One afternoon while I was sitting at my cubicle reading in the teachers' lounge, I overheard two other social studies teachers talking about how much they hated these students and how they wished they could remove them from the school.

As they mentioned particular names of my beloved students and what they would like to do to them, my stomach

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churned with anger. At that point in the conversation one teacher told the other, "I know those hippies are selling dope here in the school-especially Wavy [pseudonym]. I wish we could catch him and kick him out of school." Thinking for a second the other teacher said: " I think that can be arranged. My son can get me some pot. We'll put some •in his locker between classes and call t'he cops. We'll make sure that little bastard, Wavy, is expelled." I didn't hesitate for a second. Making sure the teachers didn't see me, I sneaked out of the lounge. I happened to know where Wavy was at that moment and ran down to his classroom. I knocked on the door and told his teacher that I needed to talk to him for a few minutes. I .told Wavy what I had just heard. He was shocked, he told me, but not surprised. Understanding the gravity of the situa­ tion, he agreed to check his locker after

. every class to see if the evidence had been planted. We never did find anything

.· in his locker but Wavy knew I could be trusted. This kind of relationship with students in marginalized urban settings

. is necessary in a transformative curricu­ .lurn. I don't believe such a personal

·•·approach to teaching and learning can work without it.

_ Thus, knowing students well, under­ standing what they are dealing with out­ side of school, appreciating the problems their parents are facing, and gaining an awareness of what is happening at home

·:that might undermine their ability to con­ <centrate on academic work are ihe ways

critical teachers operationalize a sense of •belonging among their students. There is ·no doubt that urban schools located in poor neighborhoods can be violent places. But most of the time violence is rare in "classrooms where students feel like they -Delong, work is meaningful and connected to.the world, and teachers are viewed by students as individuals who can be

. "l!'usted to stand up for them when needed. Also, when teachers attempt to

Introduction xii

understand rather than condemn the behaviors many students adopt to survive the violent streets on which they live, the threat of classroom violence is lessened.

The tough demeanors, self-protective bearings, and aggressive postures many urban students employ for their public persona seem to me quite logical given the circumstances they all have to face. If one doesn't understand this dynamic, a few late night rides on the B Train through Brooklyn may help get the point across. On poor urban streets one's effort to stay healthy is not enhanced by broadcasting signals of weakness. Should I be surprised when a student who has to deal with these everyday circumstances shows a little resistance, a toughness on the first day of class when I ask him to stop picking on the student in the seat next to him? I'm not surprised by such behavior and instead of vilifying the student, I reflect on how I would probably react in a similar context. When I think of a student's behavior/ demeanor in such a way, I find that the chance that I will ultimately connect with him or her is profoundly increased.

In a critical urban pedagogy teachers who treat students with respect and attempt to create a sense of belongingness in their classrooms do not feel morally superior to other practitioners because of such conduct. They know that once such feelings of arrogance seep in to their con­ sciousness, they are setting themselves up for trouble. In schools as troubled as many are in poor urban areas with racially, lin­ guistically, and culturally diverse students operating in economically trying circum­ stances, teachers should not be surprised when their actions are not received and interpreted by students in the way they intended them. In this context they must not feel that such students are betraying them because of the anger they show in such circumstances. I have watched too many urban teachers who say after an unpleasant encounter with a student: "to hell with her-I treat her better than any

xiii Introduction

other teacher in this school and she acts like that toward me." Because of the dif­ ference in the webs of reality of middle­ class teachers and students living in pov­ erty, particular actions will sometimes be viewed differently by divergent groups. Thus, there will be misunderstandings. The more students feel a sense of belong­ ingness and safety in one's classroom, the less the impact of such misunderstandings.

Most new urban teachers are nervous about these issues of classroom manage­ ):nent. Many white, middle-class, first-year '.teachers are fearful of poor students of )Color and the neighborhoods in which ithey live. Such feelings are not odd, given the media portrayal of poor urban schools. Just as examples, "The Substitute" series-"The Substitute," "The Substitute II: School's Out," and "The Substitute III: Winner Takes All"-grant us a look at the way the public sees urban schools and urban students. One learns from watching all three movies that the only answer to the problem presented by violent, animal­ istic urban high school students of color is the final solution: Kill them before they kill us. If such images permeate the social unconsciousness, wouldn't anyone be scared to walk into such pits of violence and crime? The alternative to such dysto­ pian, nihilistic views of. marginalized urban students rests with the contextual­ ization, dignity, understanding, ideological insights, and respect for all students pro­ moted by critical forms of urban education.

Certainly there are unprovoked attacks on great urban teachers, and this is always a horrific tragedy whenever it occurs. So many of the violent incidents that I've wit­ nessed in schools, however, have been perpetrated by overstressed students con­ fronted by teachers, administrators, or other personnel who showed them no respect or empathy. For example, too many times I watched an assistant princi­ pal keep pushing a student until she finally exploded, committing a violent act that got her expelled or incarcerated. As I

watched such incidents, I thought to myself, how easily this entire scene could have been avoided. Leaming from such observations, I always asked myself as a teacher: Are the actions I'm requiring of the students necessary to their social an~ intellectual development? Could sue~ goals be accomplished without the man'. dated behaviors? Do the students feel d greater sense of belongingness as a result of the classroom requirements? I

Many times, classroom conflicts can be avoided if we simply think of rules and regulations in these larger frameworks. If

I we are going to ask students to give up 1

1 their survival-mode street stare-their

, tough demeanors, self-protective bearings, and aggressive postures-then we have to make sure that they feel safe and have a strong sense of being a valued participant in our classrooms. The best way to accom­ plish this goal is to know what we're doing (Kincheloe, 1995, 2005a; Weiner, 1999). When students know that their teacher can help them and their families in a variety of important ways including overcoming problems that interfere with their academic work, constructing lessons that change their lives in positive ways, building communities where they are respected and valued, they will work hard to assist teachers in creating loving, vibrant, and happy classrooms.

There is no reason that critical urban edu­ cators can't take the sense of community and belonging they construct in their class­ rooms and extend it to the creation of broader learning communities that connect in-school an'd out-of-school experience. A key dimension of a liberatory pedagogy in this context involves making connections with community organizations and service agencies in the neighborhoods surround­ ing the school. The work begun in critical·, classrooms can be enhanced and extended by these organizations and agencies, and synergistic partnerships can be established that connect academic learning to social change projects in the neighborhood.

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Critical urban teachers are dedicated to taking advantage of the resources urban life provides and establishing connections with these groups is a central way of doing this. Through such community organizations urban teachers could, for example, hold "parents night" meetings in a Dominican Community Center employ­ ing numerous Spanish-English interpret­ ers. Such a move would work to make many parents who were not first-language English speakers feel more comfortable in ,their interactions with teachers. Also, it would help dispel the perception and too often the reality that schools are created for middle-class, white, English-speaking students. Critical urban teachers work hard to make sure that such disparities are openly addressed and overcome (Wang & Kovich, 1996; McDermott & Rothenberg, 2000; Carvan et al., 2002).

The complexity of the problems of urban education can often times be repre­ sented in such a way that all parties involved with the domain develop a sense

Introduction xliii

of para! ysis. kecia ha yes, Philip Anderson, Karel Rose, and I promote an urban peda­ gogy that works to overcome this inaction not by ignoring the social, cultural, politi­ ml, and ·economic forces that undermine our efforts to improve urban schools but by facing such impediments head-on. Advocates of a critical urban pedagogy " understand better than anyone the diffi­ culty of the task at hand, but plow on in the face of such adversity with an iron resolve to construct critical learning com­ munities both within the school and with the larger urban community. With our irrepressible belief in the power of human agency even in the face of potent oppres­ sive forces and structures, advocates of a transformative approach to teaching and learning maintain that urban schools can, despite the odds, accomplish great things for the benefit of students. Even in these dark times, the hope that Karel and Philip write about in the beginning of this intro­ duction can be kept alive and progress can be made in public urban schools.