Urban

Education
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A New Era in the Preparation of Teachers for Urban Schools :

Linking Multiculturalism, Disciplinary-Based Content, and Pedagogy
Barbara L. Bales and Felicia Saffold
Urban Education 2011 46: 953 originally published online 17 March 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0042085911400320
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A New Era in the

Preparation of
Teachers for Urban
Schools: Linking
Multiculturalism,
Disciplinary-Based
Content, and Pedagogy

Urban Education
46(5) 953974
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0042085911400320
http://uex.sagepub.com

Barbara L. Bales1
and Felicia Saffold1

Abstract
Disconnects between the demographics of teacher candidates and the
students attending todays public urban schools are well documented. At the
same time, research points to the educational value of linking students lived
experiences to their classroom learning. This article presents the researchbased findings of faculty who implemented a field-based pedagogy lab in
an urban-focused, collaborative teacher education program. The lab offered
teacher candidates deliberate opportunities to interrogate their ethnicity,
gender, and social class then use that knowledge to enhance various
disciplinary-based instructional activities for PK-12 pupils. The findings suggest
new ways of preparing teachers for the children attending urban schools.
Keywords
culturally relevant pedagogy, preservice teachers, teacher education, urban
education
1

University of WisconsinMilwaukee, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Barbara L. Bales, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 383 Enderis Hall, 2400 E. Hartford
Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA
Email: bbales@uwm.edu

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As teacher educators at Great Lakes University (GLU),1 our missions core

guiding principle forefronts our commitment that educators licensed through
our certification programs will demonstrate an understanding of the unique
characteristics of diverse urban contexts, and issues of race, class, culture and
language are kept at the forefront of equity considerations. Our partnership
with the Great Lakes Public Schools (GLPS) is designed to uphold that mission. However, in the past year, GLPS was declared a District Identified for
Improvement (DIFI). This sanction came because students failed to make
adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward meeting the states academic learning standards (Great Lakes State Department of Public Instruction, 2008).2
This obvious gap between our mission and the expected outcomes of our
own practice forced us to ask, How might we better infuse a teacher candidates experiences with the unique context of urban schools so pupils have
access to culturally responsive teaching in mathematics, science, English and
history?
This article offers the findings from a Teachers for a New Era (TNE)
research project3 that offered students of teaching deliberate opportunities to
interrogate their ethnicity, gender, and social class then use that knowledge
to explore how they could enhance various disciplinary-based instructional
activities. We begin by providing a background for the study and review the
multiple knowledge bases of learning to teach. The second section offers the
theoretical underpinnings of the pedagogy lab. Next, we share the studys
research design. Within that section we share how we generated and analyzed data associated with the lab and its participants. Following that, we
present responses to the research questionHow might we better infuse a
teacher candidates experiences with the unique context of urban schools so
students have access to culturally responsive teaching in mathematics, science, English, and history? We conclude this article by sharing the studys
implications for institutions preparing teachers for urban schools.

Background of the Study

Banks et al. (2001) suggests, If teachers are to increase learning opportunities
for all students, they must become knowledgeable about the cultural backgrounds of their students (p. 6). Research indicates that same knowledge
should inform teachers pedagogical and curricular decisions in the classroom
so disciplinary-based content knowledge is accessible to every student (Gay,
2000; Grant & Gillette, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Moll & Gonzalez, 2004;
Quartz & TEP Research Group, 2003; Sleeter, 2005; Tharp, Estrada, Dalton,
& Yamauchi, 2000). Yet teacher-preparing institutions have struggled with

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955

instantiating these outcomes in their certification programs. As Zeichner

(2003), drawing on the works of others, observed, The typical response of
teacher education programs . . . has been to add a course or two on multicultural, bilingual/ESL, or urban education to the curriculum and leave the rest of
the curriculum largely intact (p. 493).
At GLU, we believed our mission as an urban research university exempted
us from such criticism. We knew our programs needed to acknowledge that
barriers to [teacher] candidates increased knowledge growth about cultural
differences and ways of providing appropriate and responsive pedagogy to
students from cultures other than their own included positivistic thinking,
dualistic thinking, a belief in one right answer, and relying on personal biographies as guides to how to teach others (Hollins & Guzman, 2005, p. 512).
At GLU, we responded to that understanding by requiring all educationintended students complete a 3-credit, field-based courseIntroduction to
Teachingbefore they are admitted to the School of Education (SOE). In that
course, students explore teaching and learning while participating in 50 hr of
field experience in GLPS classrooms. Throughout the course, students are
given multiple opportunities to reflect on their identity as prospective teachers
and the complex work of teaching in the citys schools. We assumed the curricular and pedagogical arrangement of this course, prior to admission, supported our mission, and grounded their preservice preparation.
But students SOE admissions essays, regardless of the certification program they were applying to, failed to reveal (a) any awareness of the social
and political structures that bear down on children attending city schools;
(b) any interrogation of their privilege within those structures; or (c) any
insights on how their roles as teachers might (re)shape childrens opportunities to learn. More often than not, they were willing to accept the status
quo, as thats just the way things are . . . [and believed] that children and
parents just needed to try harder to work their way out of poverty and
intergenerational failure (Leland & Harste, 2005, p. 62). These essays
forced us to (re)examine the learning-to-teach professional sequence4 we
provide students and identify gaps in their opportunities to learn about, and
push on, the structures that limit childrens learning. In doing this, however,
we exposed the institutional structures that create isolated islands of knowledge in the sequence.
As Figure 1 illustrates, students of teaching, acquire discipline-specific
content knowledge and a foundation about the histories and cultures of
diverse groups during their liberal arts preparation in the College of Letters
and Sciences (L&S). Then they focus on attaining pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) expertise through their SOE coursework

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Teacher Candidate Learning at GLU

College
Of
Letters and
Science
Disciplinespecific Content
Knowledge and
the Histories
and Cultures of
Diverse Groups

School
Of
Education
Pedagogical,
Pedagogical
Content
Knowledge
Expertise and
Initial
Clinical
Experiences

Great Lakes
Public
Schools
Full Time
Student
Teaching
in
Urban
Classrooms

Figure 1. Disparate arenas in the learning-to-teach professional sequence at GLU

and initial clinical experiences. Their preservice preparation concludes with

a full-time student teaching experience. But the institutions historical,
cultural, and structural differences across the campus complicate, if not
impede, the integration of these knowledge bases. By default, students of
teaching are left to bridge three disparate learning arenas without contiguous faculty support.
For teacher education programs that partner with urban school districts
like GLU, the gaps in this arrangement are exacerbated by three programmatic and pedagogical issues. First is the need to clarify the characteristics of
a quality urban field experience (Foote & Cook-Cottone, 2004). Second is
the issue of how to structure programs so prospective teachers have earlier
and more frequent experiences in these settings (McKinney, Haberman,
Stafford-Johnson, & Robinson, 2008). The third issue is how to provide pedagogically sound opportunities for teacher candidates to meld their campus
and off-campus learning experiences. Given this myriad of issues, how could
we expect students of teaching to learn how to draw on students cultural
knowledge to support learning . . . [and] think critically about how that
knowledge maps onto the demands of the academic domain? (Grossman,
Schoenfeld, & Lee, 2005, p. 220).
The confluence of these learning disjunctures, our mission as an urban
research university, and our status as a TNE site5 forced us to revisit fundamental
assumptions about the way we were preparing teachers for the children attending
GLPS. We started with the challenge from Murrell (2000), who reminded us

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To meet the needs of an increasingly culturally and linguistically

diverse school population in America will require collaboration among
schools of education, arts and sciences faculty in higher education,
community stakeholders, parents and school personnel to prepare multiculturally competent teachers. (p. 339)
Then we asked, what if students interrogated their ethnicity, gender, and
social class then used their new ways of knowing to explore how culturally
relevant and responsive pedagogy could be used in the teaching and learning
of mathematics, science, English, and history? Next, we acknowledged our
TNE obligation to bring together those entities across the campus that share
responsibility in the preparation of teachers. What emerged from the conversations between SOE and L&S faculty was a 1-credit pedagogy lab tied to
students Introduction to Teaching coursework and field experiences. In this
laboratory-like setting, students would have opportunities to make earlier
and deeper connections within the multifaceted knowledge base of learning
to teach.

The Multifaceted Knowledge Base of Learning to Teach

Like most city-based teacher preparation programs, many students attending GLU are not familiar with the unique assets children in the city bring to
the classroom nor have they experienced the structural inequities around
race, class, culture, abilities, and language that permeate urban schools.
With that in mind, we designed the lab so students had the opportunity and
support to grapple with the complexities of their own learning to teach histories. We did this by designing a curriculum that asked them to interrogate the
relationships between and among the way they were taught, how they learn,
and how they envisioned their classroom practice in an urban school. The
curriculum we crafted drew together multiculturalism content, disciplinarybased content knowledge, and candidates field experiences.

Multiculturalism Content as a Learning to Teach Knowledge Base

Teacher candidates, as a collective, are homogeneous populations, the large
majority of whom are White and middle-class, woman, from suburban or
rural backgrounds . . . [and] enter preparation programs with negative or deficit attitudes and beliefs about those different from themselves (Hollins &
Guzman, 2005, p. 511; as well as Gay, 2000; Haberman & Post, 1998; Irvine,
2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Sleeter, 2001). Although most states require
candidates engage in some form of multicultural education coursework prior

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Urban Education 46(5)

to licensure, the critical attributes of that knowledge base are not specified
(Akiba, Cockrell, Simmons, & Han, 2007). Furthermore, most states INTASCbased Teacher Standards conflate the tenets of multiculturalism with other
diversity frameworks. National accreditation agencies like the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (National Council for Accreditation
of Teacher Education, 2006) and Teacher Education Accreditation Council
(Teacher Education Accreditation Council, 2006) offer some guidance (viz.,
NCATE Standard No. 4: Diversity and TEAC Quality Principle I: Evidence
of Student LearningMulticultural Perspectives and Accuracy), but each
groups focus on instruction fails to take into account the complex ways a
candidates own ideological beliefs about teaching, learning, and knowledge
gird their pedagogical choices.
Research in the field of multicultural education, however, offers distinct
direction for programs pursuing this important work. Banks et al. (2001), for
example, suggests that teacher preparation programs should offer experiences
that help students of teaching:
1. Uncover and identify their personal attitudes toward racial, ethnic,
language, and cultural groups;
2. Acquire knowledge about the histories and cultures of the diverse
racial, ethnic, cultural, and language groups within the nation and
within their schools;
3. Become acquainted with the diverse perspectives that exist within
different ethnic and cultural communities; and
4. Understand the ways in which institutionalized knowledge within
schools, universities, and popular culture can perpetuate stereotypes
about racial and ethnic groups. (p. 6)
For teacher-preparing universities that partner with large, city school
districts, candidates should also have a working understanding of the systemic structural inequality extant in urban environments (Murrell, 2006, p. 83).
To those five outcomes, we drew on the students 50 hours of required
field experience in a local elementary classroom and, with probing questions, pushed them to investigate those dynamics of teaching that are
unique to urban schools. For example, we asked how the multiple and often
conflicting purposes of schooling affect what teachers do and what students
learn and what characterizes urban schools? We also asked students to problematize their classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. More specifically, we challenged them to examine their assumptions
about urban schools, students, teachers, and communities.

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These activities not only revealed gaps in what we wanted students to learn
but also discrepancies in our perceptions about how they were being prepared. To ameliorate these disjunctures in the learning-to-teach professional
sequence, we brought L&S and SOE faculty together so students of teaching
had opportunities to use the knowledge base of multicultural education to construct pedagogically sound lessons for children in the citys schools.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge as

a Learning to Teach Knowledge Base
Shulman (1987) suggested that the knowledge base of teaching lies at the
intersection of content and pedagogy, in the capacity of a teacher to transform
the content knowledge he or she possesses into forms that are pedagogically
powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented by the students (p. 15). But teacher candidates use their own learning
histories to filter what they learn about the knowledge base of teaching. Such
filters include their own understandings about the purposes for teaching a
subject matter, what he or she knows or does not know about a students
knowledge and misconceptions of the discipline, their own conception of curriculum, and the associated instruction they deem important to shape students
learning of a particular discipline (Grossman, 1990). The complex nature of
PCK suggests that teacher-preparing faculty across the institution should provide a laboratory setting where candidates can critically examine how their
own disciplinary-based learning shapes the fusing of content and pedagogy
that they then offer children in classrooms. It also suggests that faculty, across
the institution, should provide candidates access to PK-12 students; a feat, in
and of itself, that requires most disciplinary-based courses to breach the
familiar boundaries of their campuses.

Disciplinary-Based Content Knowledge

as a Learning to Teach Knowledge Base
The importance of a teachers disciplinary-based content knowledge is
acknowledged in most states teacher education program approval policies
(U.S. Department of Education, 2006) and requires a formal relationship
between L&S and SOE faculty. The theory of action in these policies assumes
students of teaching will develop the deep disciplinary-based content knowledge that translates into more effective, instructional decision making, which,
in turn, improves student achievement levels. But as Floden & Meniketti
(2006) point out, the demand for this cross-campus relationship has strong

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intuitive appeal, but exactly what [students of teaching] need to know to

teach at various levels, with what desired outcomes, are still topics for debate.
Authors may agree on the general principle that some subject matter knowledge is important, yet disagree about the specifics (p. 283). We contend the
specifics of how to meld disciplinary-based content knowledge, PCK, and
multicultural content knowledge can be learned in the pedagogy lab.

Pedagogy Labs as Sites for a Confluence of Learning Theories

The first purpose of the pedagogy lab was to fundamentally alter teacher
candidates socialized beliefs about children of color. This would open space
for them to combine what they were learning about the histories and cultures
of diverse groups in their L&S courses with their subject-specific content
courses, they meld it with what they were learning about culturally relevant
pedagogy in Introduction to Teaching. The combining of these knowledge
bases provided candidates with the needed foundation from which to reconceptualize disciplinary-based, instructional activities. The uprooting of their
own learning histories required that we use the theory of conceptual change
to support their new learning in the lab.

Conceptual Change Learning Theory in the Pedagogy Lab

Conceptual change learning theory puts forward the idea that people hold to
their beliefs and understandings until they recognize discrepancies with new
ideas then reconcile the resulting dissonance. Teaching for conceptual change
also requires a social environment that promotes this interrogation so new
understandings have a higher status than previously held beliefs. Learning,
then, results from an interaction between new and existing conceptions with
the outcome being dependent on the nature of the interaction (Hewson, Beeth,
& Thorley, 1998, p. 251). This meant the pedagogy lab needed to provide
education-intended students opportunities to
1. consider why new practices and their associated values and beliefs
are better than more conventional approaches;
2. see examples of these practices, preferably under realistic conditions;
3. experience such practices firsthand as learners; and
4. incorporate new ideas with ongoing support and guidance (FeimanNemser & Remillard, 1996, p. 78-79).
At the same time, we wanted students to take ownership of their new
belief system. As such, we needed to create a learning environment that confers

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. . . both the power and the responsibility to take control of her own learning,
become aware of her personal epistemological commitments, represent her
conceptions to her peers and teacher clearly, and monitor her [or his] own
interpretations of . . . phenomena and the expressed views of others (Hewson
et al., 1998, p. 202). By acquiring this foundation, students of teaching are
better positioned to understand the importance of connecting disciplinarybased knowledge with pupils lived experiences.

Developing a Culturally Relevant

Teaching Practice in the Pedagogy Lab
Culturally relevant teaching has three observable criteria: an ability to
develop students academically, a willingness to nurture and support cultural
competence, and the development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness
(Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 483). Culturally relevant teachers, who embody
these dispositions and behaviors, create learning environments that support,
develop, and draw from the students cultural and ethnic identities. But generating this type of pedagogy cannot occur within the academys white walls
or with fragmented field experiences. Such insulated experiences reify traditional notions of racial separatism. So in the lab, we drew on students
Introduction to Teaching field experiences to disrupt the binaries created
from their previous monocultural experiences and helped them learn how to
engage with students and the assets they bring to the classroom. This deliberately created dissonance demanded that the lab offer students of teaching
an intellectually safe space. We created this safe space with case-based
instruction.

Case-Based Instruction in the Pedagogy Lab

Drawing from the students understanding that a laboratory is a place to
experiment and practice a field of study, we used teaching cases to frame our
instruction. Teacher educators use cases to focus on the complexities of a
classroom and offer students an opportunity to connect theory with practice
in a supportive environment. According to McDade (1995) the most important purpose of a teaching case is to create realistic laboratories so candidates
can apply research techniques, participate in a critical analysis of the cases,
and use their problem-solving skills. Cases that focus on the issues of gender,
ethnicity, race, special needs, and language in authentic classroom events
provide students with opportunities to identify and analyze the instructional
hazards of whitewashing students identities. We used teaching cases in the
pedagogy lab to help students interrogate their pedagogical histories, learn

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how to draw on students assets to better support their academic progress,

and explore how that learning could be coupled with a sociopolitical
consciousness.
The cases became a more powerful pedagogical tool when we coupled
them with an online discussion board. The online forum provided students
with an opportunity to engage in a threaded, asynchronous discussion about
each case. For students of teaching, this type of interactional reflection
offered them an opportunity to focus on themselves, their own experiences,
life worlds, privileges, struggles, and positions in relation to others (their
students, their students parents, their students communities, and their students
ways of knowing) (Milner, 2006, p. 371). So although the cases offered a
safe environment in which to practice teaching, each persons interactions
with the case were now posted and open to scrutiny by their peers. But their
postings also provided students the opportunity to chart how their professional practice was developing.

Developing an Embodied Understanding

of Practice in the Pedagogy Lab
Teaching, as a professional practice, is unique because no classroom situation
is ever repeated and no one pedagogical strategy meets the needs of every
learner. The interactive and ever-changing dynamics of the classroom demand
that students of teaching develop a professional practice that continually
expands their intellectual capacity to make responsive and pedagogically
skillful decisions. For these reasons, the pedagogy lab was designed to create
opportunities for learning that both call into question and extend participants
current understanding of, and in practice (DallAlba & Sandberg, 2006,
p. 402). Furthermore, the labs curricular underpinnings needed to help students of teaching embody the disposition that views professional development
as an unfolding circularity6 that is, as their understanding developed over
time, it presupposed and elaborated something already understood (p. 392).
This type of learning and professional development challenges traditional
understandings of learning to teach as the acquisition of a finite package of
knowledge and skills and replaces it with an embodied understanding of
teaching as a professional practice that has no end point. This theoretical
framework, in combination with the theory of conceptual change and casebased instruction, grounded the labs pedagogical and curricular focus.
By marrying multicultural content with candidates disciplinary-based
L&S coursework and the pedagogical understandings they were developing
in their Introduction to Teaching course, students of teaching could develop

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a PCK-base that was intersubjective and culturally relevant. The research

presented in this article focuses on how students linked these traditionally
disparate bodies of knowledge.

Studying the Pedagogy Lab: The Research

Design, Participants, Data Sources, and Analysis
This project offers preliminary research on how concepts from the academic
subjects in the colleges of letters and sciences can be taught in ways that
make them more valuable for the practice of teaching (Floden & Meniketti,
2005, p. 287). The study took place at a large Midwestern University that
prepares over 1,000 teachers annually. The studys focus was to examine
what students of teaching experienced through the pedagogy lab and how it
affected their ability to develop culturally relevant practices, particularly in
the traditional discipline-based content areas.
The 1-credit pedagogy lab met every other Friday morning from 8:00 a.m.
to 10:40 a.m. during the spring semester. Nine students from the Introduction
to Teaching class volunteered to participate in the lab, 8 women and 1 man.
All were White, middle-class individuals from suburban or rural backgrounds.
Two were parents of adolescent children; 7 were under 25 years of age.
Our investigation was mixed-methods research. Data were generated
through participant-observations of the lab by one of the authors, student, and
instructor interviews, and a document analysis of various texts related to the
course (e.g., the newly created syllabus, readings, posted online discussion
forums, and student work). In addition, students were asked at the beginning
of the pedagogy lab course to examine a particular teaching case and generate
a pedagogically based response. During the last class meeting, students
responded again to the same case. Pre- and postlab scores were compared.
Data were also generated from students responses to the other teaching cases
as well along with reflections about their classroom-based field experiences.
Two exit interviews were conducted; a group interview with the students and
a private interview with the instructor. Each interview was digitally recorded.
The transcribed interviews, the participant-observers field notes, and the text
samples from the course were entered into the qualitative software, Nvivo.
We used the analytic process of abduction (Agar, 1996) to structure our coding and analysis of these data. Our first coding began with broad sweeps across
the generated data. Preliminary patterns emerged. Initial coding nodes drew
from the theoretical foundations of the pedagogy lab and the theory of action
in the innovations design. A secondary analysis of these data revealed additional patterns tied to the students professional learning and development.

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Three themes emerged from this process. The first theme shed light on
how students PCK was strengthened through a deeper understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy. A second theme illuminated how students used their
new PCK to enhance their clinical reasoning skills with each case. The third
theme draws on the first two and highlighted students new levels of pedagogical confidence. Woven together, these themes made visible the labs role
in helping education-intended students learn the foundations of a culturally
relevant pedagogy grounded in the academic disciplines. Themes were resituated in the data where we looked for connections, similarities, and negative
examples. Our interpretations of these data helped us better understand how
student of teaching develop PCK. More importantly, we were pushed to new
conceptions of how we might better prepare teachers for the students attending urban schools.

Interpretations That Extend Our Conceptions

of How to Develop Teachers for Urban Settings
Three noteworthy findings emerged from our interpretation of these data.
First, students in the pedagogy lab made rich and contextualized links between
their Introduction to Teaching course content and the diverse needs of pupils.
For example, the students asked questions like How are my actions in the
classroom linked to my deep-seeded beliefs about a childs ethnicity? and
As their teacher, have I been a cultural anthropologist? (Student AB, CRLab
field notes, March 7, 2007)
Students then used these links to enrich the PCK they were developing
in science, mathematics, social studies, and English/language arts. In other
words, this particular group of education-intended students came to know the
disciplinary-based content more broadly and in more complex ways because
they had a concurrent eye on how they might translate it in ways that drew on
childrens ethnicity, gender, language, and social class. Two students shared
these understandings with each other during an online, asynchronous posting
as follows:
I really liked the apartment hunting case we looked at in class today.
It was easy to see how the project could be a great math lesson but
I never even thought about how it also could lend itself to talking about
issues of social justice. (Student NW, CRLab Online Posting, April 5,
2007)
I agree with you. When we talk in Intro [Introduction to Teaching]
about integrating subject areas, I always thought it was something that

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would be easier to do in a Language arts classroom [sic]. In the lesson

we did today, I could see how talking about where students decided to
live, based on the budget they were given, could easily move into a
discussion about poverty and the inequities that exist in our society.
(Student LB, CRLab Online Posting, April 7, 2007)
This finding suggests that students PCK was strengthened through a
deeper understanding of culturally relevant, subject-specific, course content.
The second finding extends from the first. Case-based instruction helped
preservice teachers develop more complex clinical reasoning skills and, as a
result, they made more thoughtful and culturally relevant responses to the
cases. The cases used in the pedagogy lab brought the complexities of a
classroom into focus and allowed students to connect theory with practice in
a supportive environment. But each case was not an isolated pedagogical
event. Each case had a different intended learning outcome and each scaffold students to more complex thinking about the relationships that support
academic learning. The instructor shared her purposeful selection of each
case as follows:
Students were first given a written case, where they had to dissect what
was happening in the texts scenario. They were asked to evaluate what
the teacher did well in his preparation for the class, the learning activity
he selected, and his actual teaching of the lesson. In the second case,
students watched a video that focused on a teachers actions in the
classroom and her interactions with the students. Then they discussed
the classroom dynamics. They were asked what they had observed then
pushed to talk about what they didnt see. Their observations became
discussion points for exploring the underlying reasons for the behaviors they noted. The third case was an interactive one. It had internet
hyperlinks that students could tap for additional information about the
situation and the people in the case.
As they read about this young, Hispanic first-graders struggles in
school, they made predications about what they would do if they were the
classroom teacher. Then they clicked on the links and accessed information about his home life and his background so they were better prepared
for their talk with his parents. Other links let the students talk with the
childs other teachers. As they progressed through the case, you heard
them saying, Oh, well that kind of changes things. This case provided
a forum where they could uncover their assumptions about the student,
his home life, and the school; assumptions they didnt necessarily know
they had. (Ped Lab Instructor, CRLab Interview, May 15, 2007)

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Through this series of cases, students interrogated their understandings

about children unlike themselves and developed a new awareness about
their fledgling classroom practice. The instructor explained the pedagogical
value in these particular cases:
Helping students unpack their assumptions is critical in their development as multicultural teachers. Only then, could they better predict the
outcome of the case.
At each point in the case, they wrote down what they were thinking. So
when they talked to the parents and discovered that neither spoke English, they revisited their initial assumptions and took a very different
approach to the case. And, because the focus teacher didnt have a
hyperlink, students could not access her reasons for the classroom
decisions she made. This information gap created a pedagogical space
where students in the pedagogy lab could reconcile their original beliefs
with their new thinking. (Ped Lab Instructor, CRLab Interview, May
15, 2007)
The labs online component allowed students to post their responses to
the case then compare it with their classmates postings. The instructors
goal was to have the group of all White students engage in rich dialogue
about teaching students from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds
and to explore boundaries and standards in teaching. The instructor used
guidelines presented by Wasserman (1994) to encourage student dialogue by
directing their attention to an event of consequence in the case, elevating
tension between conflicting points of view, and using focus questions to
make sure they attended to pertinent urban issues. Through these interactive
postings, students were able to draw on the connections they were making
between their Introduction to Teaching course and their field experiences.
One student explained it this way during a group interview,
I always got more out of the lab than just our Intro course alone. In
class, it was like, here is the chapter. In lab we had really deep conversations about what it means to be an effective teacher. The cases
gave me an example for everything we covered in Intro. We really had
a chance to see how the theory we are learning works in the classroom.
(Student CD, CRLab Student Interview, May 11, 2007)
These theory-to-practice connections point to the third findingstudents
developed a noticeable degree of confidence in their ability to critically assess

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classroom interactions and offer more culturally responsive options. As one

student shared, It was eye-opening to me to realize just how little some
teachers do to level the playing field for all of their students. That realization
made me feel much more confident in my own newly acquired skills (JM,
CRLab student, May 4, 2007). This confidence was visible during the students online discussions when they challenged each others postings with
higher levels of complex thinking. For example, during the labs first meeting, students anxiously sought the correct answer to the case but during the
last session they felt people at the school had failed the student being studied.
More important, they detailed their reasoning for that decision. One student
confidently stated,
I think my partner and I did a better job assessing Andres than the actual
school officials. They took a wait and see approach in order to take
care of the situation. That approach would probably end up working as
well as the if you ignore the problem it will go away approach that
Andres classroom teacher seemed to be using. Everyone in Andres
case just needed to be involved. I mean really involved. But the parents
were never fully brought into the loop and they should have been. Just
because they did not speak English was not an excuse. Get a translator
already [emphasis added]. (Student AB, CRLab Online Posting, March
16, 2007)
As students confidence levels grew, they used what they observed in
their field experiences to illustrate the complexities of a teachers decision
making. One student acknowledged it in the following way:
Now when Im looking at a case and asked to think like a teacher.
I think, yeah I know what I would do. But then I think, I dont know.
Because when I was in Mr. Joes classroom and you have 35 kids, it is
a little different. Or in Intro, were talking about our role with parents
and at this site I am not even seeing where the parents are welcomed in
the school and now, in this case, you are asking what I would do?
(Student FB, CRLab Student Interview, May 10, 2007)
So even as they grew more confident, they recognized how much they still
need to learn. This was the unfolding circularlity (DallAlba & Sandberg,
2006) we hoped the pedagogy lab would kindle.
This studys findings highlight how the pedagogy lab helped students
strengthen connections between their L&S disciplinary coursework and the
culturally relevant pedagogy they were developing in their SOE experiences.

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Through their participation in the lab, students were able to interrogate their
beliefs about teaching and learning, consider why new practices and their
associated values are better and experience such practices as learners with
ongoing support (Feiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1996). This type of crosscampus, pedagogical connection has significance for how we prepare teachers
for urban schools.

Significance of the Findings and

Contribution to the Field of Teacher Education
McKinney et al. (2008) observed, Although some urban high-poverty
schools have overcome the bureaucratic, societal, and cultural challenges
often perceived as obstacles to success, many continue to struggle and fall
short of meeting the educational needs of students in poverty (p. 69). Today,
the high stakes accountability mechanisms in No Child Left Behind and the
demographic gap between who becomes a teacher and the children who
attend urban schools ought to force introspective examination of teacher
preparation programs. Teacher candidates need an understanding of urban
cultures and PCK skills so they can implement a meaningful and academically rich curriculum for the children who attend city schools. Teacher
candidates also need to understand that a commitment to teach in multicultural
settings goes beyond a knowledge of curriculum and cognitive development
and includes the ability to critically examine and interrogate their ideological orientations as part of their learning process (Bartolome & Trueba, 2000,
p. 282). Only then can students of teaching confront and scrutinize disconnects between their beliefs about teaching and learning and the professional
practice needed in todays urban classrooms.
The academic importance having teachers draw connections between the
richly diverse experiences of childrens daily lives and the specific nature of
the academic disciplines is well documented (see, for example, Doherty,
Hilberg, Pinal, & Tharp, 2003; Irvine & Armento, 2001; Ladson-Billings,
1995; Moll & Gonzalez, 2004; National Research Council, 2004, 2005;
Sleeter, 2005). But it requires teacher education courses to focus on the reality of [urban] schools, the diversity as well as the homogeneity that are present within them, and on the knowledge and understanding necessary to meet
the needs of all students (Milner, 2006, p. 345). In this study, the pedagogy
lab became a place where culturally relevant, disciplinary-based lessons could
be openly explored and debated.
Murray and Porter (1996) argued that understanding how teacher education students learn to convert their knowledge of subject matter (p. 155) into

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learning opportunities for pupils remains the weakest link in teacher preparation. The significance of this link is amplified as research examining the
relationships between a teachers content knowledge understandings and their
pupils acquisition of that content intensifies (see, for example, Goldhaber &
Brewer, 2000; Grossman, Stodolsky, & Knapp, 2004; Loewenberg Ball,
Thames, & Phelps, 2008; Solmon & Schiff, 2004; Wayne & Youngs, 2003).
The pedagogy lab encouraged prospective teachers to construct pedagogical
practices with academically rich content that have relevance to the social
and cultural realities of students attending urban schools.
The research presented in this article suggests that collaboratively
designed pedagogy lab, like the one described in this study, bridges the learningto-teach programmatic structures between the Colleges of Letters and Science
and Schools of Education. The curricular and pedagogical focus of the lab
takes what we know about effective teaching practices for diverse learners
and works backward to teacher preparation (Sleeter, 2001). With the expected
outcome of helping students in the citys schools acquire the academic learning and agency needed to move beyond the the powerful forms of structural inequality that persist in schools (Murrell, 2006, p. 88), the lab
offered education-intended students opportunities to interrogate their learning histories and tackle the complexities of developing a responsive teaching
practice.
That said, three limitations shape the studys findings. First, this study does
not examine learning theories in relation to social identities and structural
inequalities. Such a study is beyond the scope of this work. Second, this
research does not examine how the programs admissions criteria and course
structure influence who is attracted to and successfully enrolled in this particular certification program. We might find, for example, that using different
admission criteria would attract teacher candidates with a deeper understanding of urban schools. Third, because we studied students of teaching, we do not
know how they will translate what they have learned into their classroom practice. A longitudinal study, now underway, examines the question of transfer.
Despite these limitations, this research contributes to the knowledge base
on how to improve the preparation of teachers for urban schools by better
understanding the importance of cross-campus connections in learning to
teach professional sequence. Furthermore, the labs structure and focus is
applicable to the array of course/seminar/field-based configurations present
in most teacher-preparing institutions. The studys findings highlight the
importance of having teacher education curricula provide future teachers with
the requisite knowledge and experiences necessary to develop an embodied
understanding of practice.

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In this article, we have argued that the preparation of these teachers must
begin with teacher educators who articulate a vision of how to better infuse a
candidates experiences with the social and cultural contexts of students lives
across the academic disciplines valued by a learned society. By bringing
together multiculturalism, disciplinary-based content, and pedagogy in the
pedagogy lab, we advance possibilities on how to prepare culturally responsive teachers. We believe this structure provides the conceptual coherence
needed to prepare teachers for a multicultural society. In doing so, teacher
education programs can be sites where the next generation of teachers better
supports the academic learning of children attending urban schools.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.

Notes
1. As is customary in all research, any of the participants identifying markers have
been removed. Great Lakes University is a pseudonym.
2. The 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization, commonly
referred to as No Child Left Behind, mandates that states must annually evaluate the
performance of both schools and districts on at least four components as follows:
test participation, achievement in reading and mathematics, and one other indicator. For high schools, the other indicator is graduation rates. States can choose the
indicator for middle and elementary grades. When schools and districts do not meet
the established performance targets, they miss Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
3. This study was made possible in part by a Teachers for a New Era (TNE) grant
from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Annenberg
Foundation. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility
of the authors.
4. We contend that the learning-to-teach professional sequence begins on admission
to a teacher-preparing institution, includes all required course and field experiences
in any college and department across the campus and extends through induction
and tenured employment.
5. Two project goals of the Teachers for a New Era project address the normative beliefs that surround pedagogical content knowledge and the complexities in preparing teachers who can make pedagogical decisions that meet the needs of a diverse

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group of pupils. The first is to explore how programs can offer professional learning
opportunities so candidates engage with families to ensure coherence and develop
a repertoire of teaching strategies so children with a range of learning styles, abilities, and cultural backgrounds have effective access to schooling (Teachers for a
New Era, 2004). The second is to consider how faculty can reconceptualize the
Letters and Sciences and School of Education learning relationships so teacher
candidates gain an integrative knowledge of the nature of a discipline (its premises,
modes of inquiry, and limits of understanding) and can translate this knowledge
and ways of thinking into learning opportunities for K-12 pupils.
6. This pattern of professional development was first identified by Martin Heidegger
in 1927.

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Bios
Barbara L. Bales is an associate professor of teacher education and instruction. Her
research examines how the theory of action in local, state, and national policies supports and/or constrains the translation of teacher learning and development into
program practices that ultimately influence the opportunities to learn afforded children in public schools.
Felicia Saffold is an associate professor of teacher education. Her research interests
include teacher preparation for urban schools and multicultural education. She teaches
urban education courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

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