| Popis: |
This article documents a collaborative, teacher inquiry process to uncover a diverse sample of 271 students from an urban high school reflect on teachers they admire and classes in which they feel the most comfortable. The findings indicate that the students described teachers in terms of who the teacher is as a person, the role that he or she plays in creating positive learning environments, and in reference to the learner. Major themes that emerged across these dimensions were related to student-teacher connections, teaching all students, and balancing extremes. Implications for teacher education, induction, and school reform are made. The nineteenth-century halls of City High School are narrow and tall, with black and white pictures of young women in long skirts and young men in boaters on the lawn that still stretches from the old front door to the street. The windows look out onto the cheek-to-jowl, pastel, triple-decker houses typical of New England cities. The school stretches along a ridge, the backbone of this city, which has been home to working-class, immigrant peoples for generations. For much of the twentieth century, these families were predominantly Irish and Italian as still evident in the bakeries and pubs of the neighborhood businesses. In the last twenty years, many of the children and grandchildren of Irish and Italian immigrants have moved farther into the suburbs that ring the metropolitan area. Now the faces of the city are changing, as are the languages spoken in homes and the hallways of the school. Today, the Irish pubs and Italian bakeries sit next to Brazilian travel agencies, Haitian/Creole restaurants, and Asian groceries. Students of all shapes, sizes, colors, fill the narrow halls as a crush of bodies stream from room to room. Students greet friends, tease, call, and talk to each other in Portuguese, Haitian/Creole, Spanish, English, and 37 other languages including Russian and Khmer. With 55% of the student body identified as White, the city is approaching the estimate put forth that within the next two decades about 65 percent of America's population will be described as people of color (Hodgkinson, 2001). The first author approached the high school in 2000 as a staff member at a research institute seeking a school-university partnership around inclusion of all students in the general curriculum (Lieberman, 2000; Meyer, Park, GrenotScheyer, Schwartz, & Harry, 1998; Sagor, 2000). Grant funding for this reform initiative was available, and teachers expressed interested in the challenge explaining that, as a whole, the teachers of the school look racially and ethnically different than much of the student body. The teachers also looked forward, with some trepidation, to the day in five to seven years when approximately 25% of their faculty would retire and a large, new cohort of teachers would come into their community to teach. Many of the teachers, in the partnership, were, themselves, leaders in the school, approaching retirement, and saw themselves as responsible for simultaneously mentoring new teachers in the culture of the school they knew so well and serving the rapidly changing student body. The teachers started the project wanting to mentor young teachers not just to stay in the field but to be "good teachers." Upon the suggestion of the third author, we soon moved into an inquiry that took us to the primary stakeholder: the students. Over the course of this project we began to uncover a moral imperative put forth by a diverse sample of urban high school students: first, do no harm and second, help students learn. The students we heard from gave us insight into what Hansen (2001) describes as the moral dimensions and practice of teaching. In their written responses, the students described the "pervasiveness of the moral in teaching" (Hansen, 2001, p. 836) by listing for the researchers, teachers' qualities, values and practice; the environments created by teachers; and themselves as the beneficiaries of teachers' actions and decision. … |
