Resiliency, resistance and persistence to be an urban teacher: Creating standards that respond to the context of knowledge construction and learning to teach about teaching

Abstract

Brian's story captures the premise of (and a metaphor for) this chapter Context matters! Where, how, and what one teaches is simply and clearly related to the defining characteristics of your community, school, and classroom. While teachers may choose at critical times to focus solely on what goes on inside the classroom and teach content, we cannot choose to ignore what goes on outside our classroom windows if we are to positively impact learning within them and change the cycle of inequity that exists within our communities. In America's urban communities, context means poverty, diversity, bureaucracy, cultural incongruence, often violence and hopelessness. Yet, in the United States, today generic standards for teacher competencies set at the national and state level focus mostly on what goes on inside the classroom how the teacher teaches and, these standards are set to apply across settings with little attention to the differentiating characteristics of large, diverse, economically depressed urban communities. In this American milieu of standards-based teaching, learning, and teacher preparation, many organizations have set forth standards and outcomes to guide the evaluation of teacher candidates, novices, and seasoned teachers. A majority of the United States have adopted, adapted, or replicated PRAXIS, a creation of the Educational Testing Service (2004), or Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards as measures of teacher performance required for initial and/or professional teaching licenses. Consequently, these standards are mirrored in those set to guide and assess teacher preparation programs and their graduates' preparedness for teaching and licensing. Even when states and institutions "invent" their own standards they generally reflect similar expectations for teacher performance during entry to a career in teaching. Each set of standards takes a particular political or theoretical stance and was established to address a variety of classroom settings across a varied educational landscape. Thus, context was implicitly unimportant as a determinant of what a teacher must know, be able to do, and express as values, attitudes, beliefs or dispositions. In general, American standards for teaching performance are based upon the assumption that a teacher in any setting will succeed in the classroom that is, his/her children will achieve if he/she can demonstrate proficiency in the established standards. After reading this chapter it will be evident that context matters. Specifically, urban teachers require context-based knowledge, skills, and dispositions that go beyond those delineated in the current sets of standards that guide teacher preparation and licensure, particularly the INTASC standards. Therefore, this chapter will (a) present the results of a study of new teachers' reflections upon urban teaching and how a specialized program prepared them for teaching in urban schools and (b) suggest a set of standards that are contextually responsive to urban teaching. © 2005 Springer.