Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students

Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students takes on the continuing challenges of White teachers in increasingly de facto re-segregated schools of the present. Drawing on the author’s eighteen years of experience as a classroom teacher and his research on White teachers of inner-city students, Becoming Teachers provides key discussions on professional identity for preservice teachers, professional educators, and researchers interested in diversity education or urban education. Driving at complex recognitions of race, class, culture, language, and gender as a basis for teaching and learning with diverse urban students, the author’s and other White teachers’ life and teaching stories move beyond prescriptive models of professional identity for preservice and professional teachers to “follow.” Instead, life and teaching stories in Becoming Teachers demonstrate again and again that in teaching the personal is political, professional knowledges are forged in practice, and – overall – that becoming a professional teacher is a process that draws on one’s experiences and inner-most convictions. Becoming Teachers, updating Vivian Paley’s White Teacher and reworking Christine Sleeter’s multicultural research on White teachers’ race-evasive identities, moves discussions on White teacher identity toward a second wave of race-visible professional identity for White teachers in the present. James Jupp’s book is an instruction on how to keep the democratic educational experiment on the workbench... – Roger Slee, Professor and Director of the Victoria Institute for Education, Diversity, and Life Long Learning at Victoria University, Melbourne James Jupp thoughtfully explicates the complexity of the social justice literature in education related to race, class, culture, language, gender and other differences in classrooms. Jupp is one of the leading scholars in education who challenges static notions of difference and opens up new curriculum spacesfor a second wave of critical race work. Challenging the field to consider more nuanced possibilities that will advance social justice in the present, Jupp provides generous readings for new intercultural alliances. Jupp’s Becoming Teachers of Inner-city Students offers a fresh understanding for those who are looking for new ways to understand teachers’ lives and professional identities. – Patrick Slattery, Professor of Curriculum, Texas A&M University Jupp does the hard work, here, of understanding where we have been in conceptualizing the racial identities of White teachers. And then he does something harder. With abundant intelligence, courage, and generosity, Jupp opens up new pathways for our thinking and feeling and action. Read this book. – Timothy Lensmire, Associate Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Minnesota