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Trust is an important factor affecting parent-teacher relationships. In urban schools, the lack of trust between parents and teachers is exacerbated by racial and social class differences (Bryk and Schneider, 2002). This paper examines how relational trust was both fostered and inhibited between low-income parents and their children's teachers in a low-income urban school. Data was collected through a qualitative research design based in observations and interviews in one high poverty urban school. Results suggest that teacher demonstrations of care for their profession, for parents, and for students were the most crucial factors for building parent trust in teachers. Parent competence and integrity emerged as the most salient facets of teacher trust in parents. This research highlights the importance of purposeful teacher action to build trust with low-income parents by demonstrating personal regard for their profession, their students, and their students' parents. Additionally, teachers must become knowledgeable about the strengths and struggles of low-income urban families and the way social class shapes parents' beliefs about childrearing methods and their role in their children's education. / Urban Education

This paper explores concepts and theories in the tradition of critical pedagogy as they relate to teaching practices in contemporary American urban public schooling. Objectives for critical pedagogies are discussed and applied to various aspects of teaching and education, including urban schools and school systems as problematical institutions; establishing a healthy classroom climate and learning community; creating a learning partnership with students; posing-problems for study; generating ideas through collaborative dialogue; guiding inquiry and critical thinking; providing ongoing and authentic assessment; and the imperatives of ethical values, ideology, and multiple perspectives in critical teaching praxis. Critical educational scholarship informs teaching and learning in schools to provide liberating opportunities to achieve critical and academic literacies. Theories of liberation, freedom, democracy, justice, power, oppression, transformation, community-building, humanization, authority, dialogue, agency, instructional ideology, social reproduction, standards, curriculum, culture, learning, thinking, questioning, literacy, assessment, and pedagogy are explored from critical perspectives and discussed as they are brought to bear on classroom teaching and learning in urban K-12 schools. / Urban Education

This dissertation poses the question, “Who cares and who does not care for poor, black, brown, red and economically disadvantaged children in urban school settings?” The study takes a deeper look at some of the underlying human dynamics that inform teacher retention and student academic achievement as an education problem, specifically related to notions of care and emotions in the urban school environment. The central focus of the study is on identifying what might be the factors that contribute to the development of a “pedagogy of care” by white female teachers, and the impact of hidden dimensions of affect in the environment on their motivations and commitment. Exploring care and fear is central to the framing of this study and is done by looking beyond the cognitive structures that inform the perceived rational processes of the teachers’ engagement in the environment. This study explores the process by which the phenomenon of care and emotions is connected to the personal and professional developmental tasks of the teachers and is viewed through the interactions of their biographies and event episodes across their life story. Phenomenological Variance of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) (Spencer, 2006) is used as a human development frame for situating this study. This work provides the context for understanding how pre-service teachers’ beginning identity formation is impacted by their perceptions and experiences when they enter the urban environment, and how practicing teachers’ real time experiences can help us understand the ways in which veteran teachers have negotiated perceptions and developed emotional resilience to remain in the environment. The findings of this study identified the process by which veteran white female teachers vulnerabilities led to aspects of their generative caring concerns and served as supports towards the development of their emotion-capacities and caring motives for becoming resilient in the urban environment. Data from this study could be used to help schools of education, teacher educators, professional development initiatives, and policy makers to construct and implement more appropriate and stage specific trainings, curriculum, in-service supports, and legislation that would provide a variety of critical supports to help retain teachers in urban schools. / Urban Education

Grounded in theories of culturally relevant and hip-hop pedagogies, this ethnographic study of a demographically diverse "community nominated" cohort of urban public high school teachers who integrate hip-hop pedagogies into their English/language arts classrooms responds to the methodological and theoretical shortcomings of a burgeoning body of research known as "hip-hop based education" (HHBE). HHBE has argued that curriculum and pedagogy derived from hip-hop culture can be used to transmit disciplinary knowledge, improve student motivation, teach critical media literacy, and foster critical consciousness among urban students in traditional and non-traditional K-12 learning environments. However, the field's overreliance on firsthand accounts of teacher-researchers, the vast majority of whom position themselves as members of the "hip-hop generation," discounts the degrees to which teachers' cultural identity informs hip-hop based curricular interventions, pedagogical strategies, and minority students' academic and socio-cultural outcomes. I argue that the hip-hop pedagogies evidenced by non-researching "hip-hop based educators" were diverse and reflected different beliefs about hip-hop, pedagogy, and the politics of education. Three primary findings emerge from 280 hours of classroom participant-observations and ethnographic interviews (January-June 2010): (1) teachers psychologically and discursively construct and perform individual hip-hop cultural identities through "necessary and impossible" politics of difference, (2) teachers' respective curricular approaches to hip-hop as literary texts are closely linked to their respective hip-hop cultural identities, and (3) hip-hop pedagogues employed hip-hop methodologies and literacies that reoriented conceptions of self and other, teacher-student relations, and notions of knowledge around "pedagogies of hip-hop." Study findings are salient to the fields of hip-hop studies, critical multicultural teacher education, and English/language arts education as they provide robust portraits of the instructional and relational nuances, as well as cultural-political implications of HHBE for a largely White, middle-class prospective teacher workforce and an increasingly diverse hip-hop nation. / Urban Education