Urban Educational Identity: Seeing Students on Their Own Terms

by Sara M. Childers

Overview

WINNER 2017 O.L. Davis, Jr. AATC Outstanding Book in Education Award

WINNER 2017 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award

Through rich ethnographic detail, Urban Educational Identity captures the complexities of urban education by documenting the everyday practices of teaching and learning at a high-achieving, high-poverty school. Drawing on over two years of intensive fieldwork and analysis, author Sara M. Childers shows how students, teachers, and parents work both within and against traditional deficit discourses to demonstrate the challenges and paradoxes of urban schooling. It offers an up-close description of how macro-government policies are interpreted, applied, and even subverted for better or worse by students as active agents in their own education. The book moves on to develop and analyze the concept of "urban cachet," tracing how conceptions of race and class were deeply entwined with the very practices for success that propelled students towards graduation and college entrance. A poignant, insightful, and practical analysis, Urban Educational Identity is a timely exploration of how race and class continue to matter in schools.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317551393
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Series:	The Critical Educator
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	330 KB

About the Author

Sara M. Childers is an independent scholar and assistant director of The Women's Place, the women's policy office at The Ohio State University. She resides in Dublin, Ohio, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Series Editor Introduction

Chapter 1: Rethinking Urban Education

Vignette: Can I get into Trouble? Negotiating the Terms of Research

Chapter 2: Ohio Magnet School Before and After Brown

Vignette: "See What We Don’t Have:" The Myth of the Boutique School

Chapter 3: "State Standards are the Minimum of What We Do"

Vignette: Winter Formal Assembly

Chapter 4: Excellent Intentions: Racialized Enrollment Practices of a Successful? Urban School

Vignette: International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge Course at OMS

Chapter 5: Urban Cachet

Vignette: Mr. Hart’s English and History "Split" Class

Chapter 6: Those Students

Vignette: "He Just Gave Us All the Answers:" Boys Participation in 10th Grade Humanities

Chapter 7: On Their Own Terms

Appendix I: Getting in Trouble

Appendix II: Recommendations

Editorial Reviews

“This book is an important contribution to the literature on urban education. It refutes the deficit and pathology-driven orientations so common to studying schools, school reform, and youth from historically marginalized urban areas. The author’s analysis provides a powerful testament to how one particular school is finding success through a hopeful, positive, and potential-driven lens.” –Brian D. Schultz, Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor and Department Chair, Educational Inquiry and Curriculum, Northeastern Illinois University

“In an era of shrinking resources for public education and inner-city schools confronting daily unkempt, sleepy children from troubled families, this book offers a story that is at once grim and full of hope.” –From the Foreword by Richard Delgado, John J. Sparkman Chair of Law, The University of Alabama

“Urban Educational Identity articulates the complexities and paradoxes of U.S. urban education and is an exemplar of necessary shifts in policy studies, theory, and methodology. Childers provides a refreshing model of how to think poststructurally with race theory, deftly arguing that without these co-thinkings the discursive and material complexities of urban education—such as how equity and excellence are defined and experienced through daily practices and policies—will continue to be overlooked.” –Wanda Pillow, Associate Professor of Education and Gender Studies, University of Utah

From the Publisher