Imagining the "Urban" Student: Signifying Students in Teacher Educators' Facilitation of Episodes of Practice

• In Event: Toward a Complex Understanding: Disrupting Essentialization in Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

As teacher educators (TEs) guide teacher candidates’ (TCs) thinking about teaching, they implicitly construct images of the students receiving that teaching. Given longstanding concerns about TCs’ perceptions of urban students, this comparative multi-case study observes six TEs representing a spectrum of views about practice to ask how urban students are represented in episodes of practice in methods courses. I find that each TE engaged in pedagogies of practice that showcased urban students. In their discussions, TEs tended to homogenize urban students, rarely prompting TCs to consider individual students or diversity within the class. And TEs frequently portrayed urban students as capable thinkers, rarely highlighted students’ funds of knowledge, and almost never addressed students’ subjectivity beyond their role as learners.

Author

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY