Resume Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9: Interpretations (Last Chapter)

• Professionalism and Community 

Students in American urban classrooms do not have a choice—they must meet the requirements of modern life or be resigned to poverty, even though their families may represent a myriad of traditional cultures offering alternatives and lessons for modern life. The negotiation of a balance between the competing loyalties of traditional kinship and urban America takes place in schoolrooms and teachers need every multicultural insight available as they conduct that process. Teachers, however, are not simply instruments of modernization and professional expertise. Teachers have loyalties to identities and images from traditional cultures and local communities embodied in one or many generations of their kinfolk. The task of professional transformation must respect and address these loyalties in order to provide the optimum instruction for low-income, immigrant, and non-White students (Zeichner and Hoeft, 1996).

• Image and Respect: The Choice to Teach 

Teaching as a profession lacks color. Teachers, as professionals and regardless of their race, gender, class, or any cultural identity, allegedly possess a general or universal expertise that can be applied to any student within the well-managed world of the school building. To suggest that teaching might have color and that racial or other identities could be relevant in the recruitment and effectiveness of teachers is to call into question the very definition of a profession. In the world of urban school teaching in the United States, race and racism are endemic. Schooling is conducted within a social context that embodies racial assumptions and practices on an everyday basis and that rests on a history of racism. If we are to understand the ‘color of teaching,’ we must come to terms with the role of racial identity in the selection, recruitment, and retention of the teachers desperately needed for the students of urban America in all of their cultural diversity, economic deprivation, and subjugation to the racial myths ingrained in American life.

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