"Urban, but not too urban”: Unpacking teachers’ desires to teach urban students

Watson, Dyan. (2011). "Urban, but not too urban”: Unpacking teachers’ desires to teach urban students. Journal of Teacher Education 62(1), 23-34.


This article examines how teachers perceive “urban” schools and “urban” students. The discussion here mirrors the issues my own teacher education students struggle with, and the perceptions I as a teacher educator struggle to make them examine. As was clearly shown in Watson’s interview data, “urban” usually means students of color, and particularly African-American and Latino students. Watson discovered that the perception of deficiency often extended to the parents of the children in the “urban” schools. Both children and their parents are seen as deficient in the “correct” values for school success, which are, of course, synonymous with white middle-class values. One of my own students, when describing the context in which she was completing a field experience, wrote that “these children come from nothing.” What she really meant was that she saw “these children” (that phrase alone shows a distinct perception of “otherness”) and their homes as lacking in the prerequisites necessary for success in school and in learning. As with Watson’s study participants, the problem is seen as being caused by deficiencies in the children and in their homes, rather than pointing at the root causes (i.e., institutional racism and lack of equal opportunity) or looking for solutions that might cause some deviation from the white, middle-class (“suburban”) norms, values, and practices that resonate with the white, middle-class backgrounds of the majority of today’s teachers. In my own case, I tried introducing Nikki Giovanni’s book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children, as a vehicle for engaging African-American students by celebrating their rich poetic heritage. Though my preservice teachers seemed generally receptive, some had difficulty getting beyond some of the deviations from “Standard English” (“but that’s just wrong”) and differences in some of the way ideas were expressed (“but they’re all talking at once”), and there was some resistance to honoring some of the genres (e.g., rap) celebrated in Giovanni’s excellent and varied anthology. The overwhelming notion, in both my own experience and in Watson’s data, is that teachers are OK with a little difference from the norms they were raised with, but not too much. Watson’s participants did not mind the idea of teaching in an urban environment if the children were not “too urban” and exhibited behaviors and values congruent with white, middle-class values. A theme that was repeated in Watson’s interview data was the perception that teaching students in “urban” settings would require extra work and be harder than teaching “suburban” (read: white middle-class) students who were more like themselves. In general, these teachers wanted to “make a difference” in the children’s lives, but not if it required too much adaptation to those children’s cultures. They preferred to think of themselves more in a “great white father/mother” mode as people who could transmit their own white, middle-class values and skills to these poor “disadvantaged” children. Until we can take teachers past these perceptions, the “achievement gap” will remain a gulf.