Abstract
Teacher candidates assumptions about urban students shape their expectations and approaches to teaching them . In this chapter I document how a community of teacher candidates learned about teaching English in urban high schools through investigating adolescent literacies with their students. Beginning with an examination of the social construction of “risk,” I analyze teacher candidates’ inquiries into urban adolescents’ literacy practices and the cultural and linguistic resources they bring to classrooms. Findings suggest how a critical inquiry stance encouraged individuals to interrupt deficit perspectives and “risk-laden discourses” (Vasudevan and Campano, Rev Res Educ 33(1):310–353, 2009). This informed counter discourses about the talents and capabilities of urban students that provided a basis for developing more culturally relevant and relational approaches to teaching them.
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All names of teachers, students, and schools are pseudonyms.
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Simon, R. (2016). “Just Don’t Get Up There and ‘Dangerous Minds’ Us”: Taking an Inquiry Stance on Adolescents’ Literacy Practices in Urban Teacher Education. In: Lampert, J., Burnett, B. (eds) Teacher Education for High Poverty Schools. Education, Equity, Economy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22059-8_14
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