Beverly E. Cross

Learning or Unlearning Racism: Transferring Teacher Education Curriculum to Classroom Practices

In the United States, urban public schools are attended primarily by students from various racial minority groups. Statistically, teachers in these schools are often White and becoming more so annually. Issues of race and culture are critical in todays educational contexts at every level–including pedagogy, curriculum, and teachers. Considering the severity of what these statistics mean for educational quality and teacher quality, research efforts to understand this situation are essential. This article presents the findings of a study about what a group of teacher education graduates learned about race as they prepared to teach in multiracial classrooms. The findings of this study are then used to discuss what the university curriculum may actually produce and what future considerations would be beneficial to enable teachers to teach in a context where their race and culture differ dramatically from their students.

New Racism, Reformed Teacher Education, and the Same Ole' Oppression

This article builds on a case study about how teacher education students may actually learn racism through their program. It employs an analysis of how new racism is operationalized in todays sociopolitical contexts. Field placements and knowledge taught about various groups are critiqued as major teacher education reform efforts that particularly facilitate teaching racism. It seeks to examine and theorize about this occurrence through an analysis of new invisible forms of racism, power, and whiteness. It finally explores how this racism can be unlearned through reanalyzing teacher reform efforts and choosing to purposefully center programs on a systematic analysis of how these invisible operations shape programs and unintended program outcomes.

Urban School Achievement Gap as a Metaphor to Conceal U.S. Apartheid Education

This article uses the metaphor of the achievement gap to make transparent, discuss, and critique the analytical frame/lens used in the articles to analyze urban education. Doing such an analysis is essential to producing an additional lens that has utility in theory and practice. It facilitates a historical analysis of urban education and leads to creating an argument for the new frame in advancing future work in urban education. This will not represent a response to the articles in the issue, but will advance possible alternative analytical frames, scholarly possibilities, and practical approaches to a new generation of urban educators (scholars, school educators, youth, and community members) who utilize the multiple voices, axes of analyses, and perspectives as a tool of urban education thinking, practice, and improvement.

Global Issues in Curriculum Development

Marshall McLuhan (1989) coined the term global village to characterize a world bound ever more tightly together by communications technology. Although global village is an evocative metaphor, clarifying what it means to be part of a global society raises difficult questions about our vision of America, the world, and America in the world not settled by a turn of phrase. The idea of a global society also invites rethinking our understanding of human nature and what it can become. To a certain extent, the global society one sees reflects where one stands. For example, business executives are concerned about what globalization means for their companies, while educators struggle to determine the values that should inform what children are taught about the emerging global society.

Messages to Teacher Educators from the Margins

At a recent annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), one of the nation’s most prominent African American scholars conceded to me that trumpeting the battle cry for racial and ethnic diversity in the teaching force is at a near loss. She stated, “In some cases the opposite is true—the teaching force is becoming less diverse year after year. And in some cases, the increase in teacher diversity is only slight.” She concluded, somewhat somberly, that teacher educators should redirect much of their energy to take to scale some of the promising work under way to explicitly and directly better prepare a White national teaching force to teach in diverse classrooms and schools. She stated, “We should be honest that most teacher educators are preparing White teachers for diverse classrooms and schools, and we should be exact in doing so rather than imagining we are creating a diverse teaching force.” When she heard me gasp for air as if I had the wind knocked out of me, she kindly and sympathetically stated, “We do not have to totally abandon the idea because the children in these classrooms depend on us to give them an experience with teachers who look like themselves.” This is a scholar who has dedicated so much of her work to the struggle to diversify the teaching force, yet her deduction seemed somewhat resolute and distressing. Although she stated we should not abandon the work, her words delivered a jolting blow for American education and for what Banks (2006) referred to as the demographic imperative: “The significant changes in the racial, ethnic, and language groups that make up the nation’s population” (p. 155).