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Critical Teacher Education in Urban Contexts: Discursive Dance of A Middle School Teacher

This paper explores whether an urban school teacher’s participation in an inquiry based Master’s degree programme contributes to any shifts in her understanding of her non-dominant students and her own teaching. In the first section I define the theoretical constructs of critical education and dialogic discourse. The second section, through a micro-analysis of representative data, demonstrates how the English Language Arts teacher’s discursive practices at the beginning of the year positioned non-dominant students as deficit learners. By the end of the year, however, the teacher was affording her students multiple literate identities. The analysis also shows how the school’s disciplinary and tracking policies throughout the year impacted the teacher’s process. The final section reflects on the need for urban school–university partnerships to use teachers’ inquiry-based research as an essential component of any critical dialogue about local sociopolitical issues of schooling.