Becoming Critical in an Urban Elementary Teacher Education Program

Abstract

The authors share the experience of introducing critical pedagogical approaches in a teacher education program for students preparing to work in urban elementary schools. This chapter is an account of parts of that experience and our reflections about what it is like to become more critical in our work with preservice teachers. As a professor and an advanced graduate student, we are strongly committed to infusing the instructional experiences we provide with opportunities for our students to learn to “critically read”(Quintero & Rummel, 2003, p. 12) the complex social, economic, and political processes that impact urban schooling. As we have worked toward this aim with others in our urban multicultural teacher education program, we have learned a great deal about ourselves. Because we work very closely with small groups of students over an extended period of time, we also have learned something about how future teachers respond to our efforts to raise their consciousness about social issues and lay the foundations for applying critical pedagogies in their own urban elementary teaching. In addition, each of us has conducted independent qualitative research projects related to the development of critical perspectives in our urban multicultural teacher education students.

This chapter was completed while Wendy was a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee. She is now an Assistant Professor at Rowan University.