With a profession that’s characteristically white, female, and middle class—and with students of color and children in poverty rapidly making up the majority of the public-school population—teachers equipped and willing to talk about race and racism has become a necessity. The mere mention of these topics can be awkward and difficult, yet various research findings point to the need to confront the discomfort to improve student learning. Increasingly, that duty has fallen to urban-education programs—a special category of teacher preparation that is reimagining how teaching candidates are prepared and disrupting the race and class stereotypes surrounding urban students and communities.
Melissa Katz, an urban-education student at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, strongly agrees, and credits her professors and the extensive fieldwork she’s completed with unlearning and relearning what it means to be a white teacher in an urban school district. Now in the fourth year of a five-year integrated bachelor's and master's program, Katz student-taught in a North Philadelphia public school, where she was teamed with a white teacher she soon discovered was unequipped to work in an economically disadvantaged, mostly black and Hispanic neighborhood. The assignment was short-lived, but the memories were lasting. “She would talk about wanting to go back to the suburbs and students having alcohol- and drug-addicted parents … every stereotype you could imagine,” Katz said. “Worst of all, she approached [teaching] completely from a deficit mindset … it’s the students who suffered.”
The experience forced Katz to ponder the implications of her own racial identity in the classroom. “I definitely felt it on a personal level,” she said, adding that self-reflection was crucial when “students were so explicitly saying your whiteness is preventing you from seeing our humanity.” Katz further explored the subject in a blog post titled, “Teaching While White,” where she aimed to push white educators to “think critically about race, justice, and our own privilege, and most importantly—how these play out in the classroom as teachers.”
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