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‘Sordid Fantasies’: reading popular ‘inner‐city’ school films as racialized texts with pre‐service teachers

This article discusses a multi‐phase project designed to inquire into and challenge pre‐service teachers’ assumptions, beliefs and knowledge about inner‐city schools. Prior to beginning their student teaching in inner‐city schools, pre‐service teachers articulated in essays and seminar discussions their opinions and beliefs about inner‐city schools. They then examined in depth selected cinematic representations of inner‐city schools to deconstruct those representations for their ‘racialized’ and ‘deracialized’ discourses, as well as for the ‘sordid fantasies’ and ‘lullabies’ that films set in the inner‐city typically construct. Finally, after their experiences student teaching in inner‐city schools, pre‐service teachers rearticulated their views about inner‐city schools, based on their own experiences teaching in such schools. Pre‐service teachers discovered the extent to which their views of inner‐city schools had been formed through popular representations, and they also discovered how their own experiences in schools revealed the great discrepancy between popular representations of inner‐city schools and what such schools are actually like. Pre‐service teachers found the process of analysing the school films through the theoretical lenses provided by academic texts to be engaging and productive.