Social Identities of Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools

• In Event: 52.036 - Identities of School(ing) in Urban Contexts

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide a larger sociopolitical context to consider how urban public education is perceived and the identity of schools in cities. An interpretive study on the social identities of teacher and students in urban schools led me to investigate the identities of urban public schools more broadly, and what is at stake for them in the future.

The notion of education as a common social good has been eroded by the re-casting of citizens as consumers of schooling rather than citizens who have the right to high-quality education (Lipman, 2011) regardless of their identities or zip codes. Whether it is intentional or not, national school reform policies are designed to fail because they negate the capacities of teachers, students, and families. Scholars of neo-liberalism and education point to the fact that the redefinition of social policies, such as education, facilitates a reframing of thought and our subjective identities. In the process of re-making public schools a new marketplace is created for the accumulation of capital (testing and text book companies, for profit-management organizations, educational intermediaries) that creates the illusion of a commitment to improving schools and equalizing opportunity while facilitating their demise.

In a year-long ethnographic study, I conducted life-histories of 6 teachers, engaged as a participant observer in two classroom in neighboring k-8 urban district schools, interviewed 5 focal students in each classroom, and conducted focus groups with students at each school as well as a cross-school interracial study group with the six teachers participants.

Insights of teachers’ and students’ can help us to reimagine the role of teachers, curricula, and schooling as they simultaneously direct our efforts when restructuring policies for the most optimal learning outcomes and life experiences for students. More than re-centering the marginalized voices of teachers, students and community members in processes of educational reform we must understand the current economic and political project that circumscribes the conditions and possibilities for teaching and learning. Implications are proposed, such as more bottom-up approaches to reform that are informed by classroom-based qualitative studies. In addition, other recommendations: educational policies that account for the identity of teacher and learner, more autonomy for teachers and curriculum and pedagogy that attends to the interests and identities of the learner, are understood as insufficient to resurrecting urban public schooling without larger scale interventions. Changing the discourses that constructs urban schools and urban students as failures requires organizing national campaigns that will interrupt policies which are dismantling educational systems rather than improving them.

Few scholarly studies have illustrated how classroom and school-level reforms led by teachers and the accompanying identity-making provide a model for re-envisioning urban school reform. The identity-work at stake in school-reform efforts is a new contribution to identity literature and urban educational policy. As one review of my forthcoming manuscript, Learning and Becoming pointed out “what is a stake in school reform efforts are not just the identities of teachers and students but of schools and public education itself (personal communication, September 2013).”

Author

• Cheryl E. Jones-Walker, University of San Francisco