Waiting for Superman

My class has just finished reviewing Waiting for Superman.   While this movie is very controversial in terms of how teachers are depicted and their role in educational reform the issue of race are ignored.    For this round of posts, please discuss how you see race as relevant to the issues of educational reform in urban areas.

Welcome to Issues in Urban Education at Long Island University- Brooklyn!     Our class blog is intended to share our ideas about teaching in an urban context.   In our first blog we will address the work of Leonardo and Hunter (2007) and their conceptual framework regarding how Urban spaces are imagined.   For me their work is important to the preparation of new teachers as it focuses on the many unexamined assumptions we have about urban spaces and the people who inhabit them.  It provides teachers with the language to articulate how they have experienced and come to understand urban spaces.  More so it directs teachers to consider the importance of social context in shaping the conditions of school.  My goal is for prospective teachers to create a professional teaching identity which reflects an understanding of the historical roots of the urban context in order to shape a teacher -student relationship characterized by imagining new possibilities in the structure of social relations within our society.  My use of the term imagining the possibilities is taken from the scholar/historian Robin D.G. Kelly's work Freedom Dreams. 

My students' posts are in response to their reading Leonardo and Hunter (2007).  Here is a quote from the text.

Urban as a Blessing and Burden  

Excerpt from Leonardo and Hunter (2007) 

...the urban is socially and discursively constructed as a place, which is part of the dialectical creation of the urban as both a real and imagined space.  The urban is real insofar as it is demarcated by zones, neighborhoods, and policies.  However, it is imagined to the extent that it is replete with meaning, much of which contains contradictions as to exactly what the urban signifies.   

Leonardo and Hunter (2007) provide 3 categories to help us understand urban as both place and space.

1. Urban as Sophisticated Space 

2. Authentic Place of Identity 

3. Disorganized Jungle  

How have you experienced the urban space?  What were (are) the implications of the way the urban space is conceived as both  place and imagined to your educational experiences? 

My Post

This is my Post Dr. Munn-Joseph! Have fun.

Welcome

Welcome to Issues in Urban Education