What a difference a year makes. At last year's Annual Conference, Grace Cureton Stanford, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Media, Penn., enthusiastically described a new program designed to prepare education students for the challenges of teaching in urban schools.
This year, in a progress report to conference attendees, Stanford was no less certain about the goals of the program, but her passion was tempered somewhat by the difficulties she and her students had encountered in bridging the gap between theoretical concepts and the hard realities of urban classrooms.
In the first semester of this four-year degree program, students examined urban schools and how they fit within urban family and community systems. "We thought it was very important for students, early on, to develop an understanding of urban communities" so they could be more effective teachers in such communities, said Stanford. Through readings and field experiences, students learned about the social contexts of urban schools.
For example, students read Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Kozol, a book that vividly describes living conditions in a poor community near the Bronx. "It's a sad, painful book to read," noted Stanford, but it helped students better understand how poverty and violence can sometimes rob children of any possibility of academic success. As one student observed in a journal entry, "They're so caught up with such big problems that school is practically an afterthought—and who can blame them?"
Although readings and class projects proved enlightening for students, field experiences in Philadelphia-area schools were problematic, said Stanford. "Students kept weekly journals," she explained. "In reading the journals, I sensed the students' struggles."
One such struggle was the need for students to reconcile what they learned about "best practices" with actual teacher practices. Many students, for example, "noted the emphasis in their schools on controlling students," said Stanford. Indeed, one student wrote that the "learning of useful knowledge is secondary to children acting in a way that is acceptable to the teacher." This reality conflicted with what students had been told in class—that engaging students in meaningful learning experiences would reduce behavior problems, thereby minimizing the need to control student behavior. Sometimes, this same student noted, the field experiences provided "examples of things not to do."
Students also received conflicting messages from their mentor teachers, said Stanford. "Some teachers actually told my students that they should change their majors . .. . that teaching in urban schools is something they should avoid at all costs," she said. Still, Stanford noted, her students remain very excited about going out to the schools and working one-on-one with the children.
Despite the challenges, Stanford considers the first semester a success. The hard lessons, she concluded, will "help us make informed decisions about what we need to do and where to go to make this program better next year and the succeeding years."