Urban Students: Facing Problems or "Problem" Embodied? Urban Teachers Construct Students Through/Against Discourses of Lack

• In Event: 75.058 - Student and Teacher Experiences in Diverse, Urban Settings

Abstract

Social justice scholars have demonstrated that, despite its harm to students, deficit discourse prevails in urban schools. Part of a larger qualitative study that explored teachers’ perspectives on urban schooling, this paper examines how urban teachers struggled to make sense of student needs outside of a deficit frame. While teachers routinely activated deficit discourse, teachers did not always essentialize lack as stemming from poor youth of color and their families. I distinguish between teacher talk that constructed deficiencies as inherent in urban students, and talk that recognized a structural or social source of a student’s apparent lack. For example, noticing that a student lacked a particular kind of cultural capital was different from believing a student’s culture itself was defective.

Author

• Heidi Pitzer, St. Lawrence University