Mary E. Finn – författare

Teachers, community activists, and parents acknowledge and applaud democratic educational systems that establish partnerships between universities and the urban communities they serve.This book profiles local and national efforts to transform urban education and reinvent urban teacher preparation. It describes real programs in real urban schools that have developed policy initiatives that promote educational equity, community-based curricula, and teacher education and parent empowerment programs that emphasize democratic collaboration among universities, urban teachers, parents, and community members. By involving all stakeholders, this comprehensive approach provides a model for creating urban schools that not only excite and inspire, but also serve as engines for social change. Contending that urban education reform will fail without public engagement and a commitment to social justice, the contributors challenge urban educators to become accountable to their students and the communities they serve.

Teachers, community activists, and parents acknowledge and applaud democratic educational systems that establish partnerships between universities and the urban communities they serve.This book profiles local and national efforts to transform urban education and reinvent urban teacher preparation. It describes real programs in real urban schools that have developed policy initiatives that promote educational equity, community-based curricula, and teacher education and parent empowerment programs that emphasize democratic collaboration among universities, urban teachers, parents, and community members. By involving all stakeholders, this comprehensive approach provides a model for creating urban schools that not only excite and inspire, but also serve as engines for social change. Contending that urban education reform will fail without public engagement and a commitment to social justice, the contributors challenge urban educators to become accountable to their students and the communities they serve.

Explores collaborative, democratic ways of preparing teachers to educate urban, working-class students.Using a social justice approach to teacher education, the contributing teacher educators address the need to prepare teachers to understand the way social class, race, and culture impact their efforts to educate working-class students. By helping prepare teachers to strengthen democracy through education, the contributors offer ways to help them develop "critical consciousness"-the will to address society's injustices and inequities. Teachers who collaborate actively with their students, their families, and others, such as community and labor organizers, to challenge the economic and educational policies that keep the hierarchical structure in place, develop their own educational and political power alongside their students. These educators see schools as sites of struggle for democracy, and their students learn to direct their attitude toward outcomes that are in their collective self-interest.