Introduction

Abstract

This book documents the recent efforts of seven teacher education faculty members in an urban teacher education program to “transform the discourse of the academy so that it more closely reflects the polyphonic discourses of [our students] multiple and often intersecting communities” (Artz-Vega, Doud, and Torres 2007, 249). As we pursue this objective with the teacher candidates from working-class, ethnically and linguistically diverse communities with whom we work, we hope and intend to cultivate these individuals’ identities as active agents in the creation and revision of curricular and pedagogical innovations. In so doing, we hope to “shift the locus of the learning process from teacher to student” with the eventual intent of inciting “an overt alteration, not only in the power relationships in classrooms but in the broader social canvas as well” (Aronowitz 1993, 9). Our efforts in this direction are ultimately intended to create possibilities for the teacher candidates with whom we work to view the world “not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation” (Freire 1970, 71).

Few educational philosophers or academic planners favor extending the encounter between canonical works and works of subordinate cultures to working class students.

—Stanley Aronowitz