There are hegemonic commonsense narratives about urban life in the United States. A lack of critique of these narratives undermines the possibility of transforming urban education to better serve the interests of urban students and their families, an example of what Freire (2000/1970) calls “narration sickness” (p. 71).
According to Banks (2006), schools face a demographic imperative, a claim that as the student composition of American schools becomes more diverse that teacher education programs must begin to change how they prepare teachers so they can meet this imperative. Nowhere is the demographic imperative more evident than in urban schools in the U. S. In accord with the demographic imperative, teacher education programs must do more to subvert the narration sickness that currently defines urban education.
As a curriculum inquiry, this study illuminates the narrative curriculum of students in a pre-service urban teaching cohort program. Using the methodology of educational criticism (Eisner, 2002), this study investigates students’ use of particular cultural narratives to talk about urban life and education. Cultural narratives constitute a particular form of dialogic speech act (Volosinov, 1986) that may be read and analyzed as a cultural text. Critical education theory grounds the study, which investigates the dialectical relationship between the narratives pre-service urban teacher education cohort students use to talk about urban life and schooling and the material realities of urban schooling in American society.
Throughout this dissertation, I unfold some of the commonsense narratives about urban life as they circulate in American culture but especially as they are reproduced, mediated, and contested by pre-service teachers in the Urban Teaching Cohort at Miami University. I claim that students’ narrations have begun to account for the material realities of urban life, counter-narrations that subvert many dominant narratives of urban pathology. They have begun to align themselves narratively and ideologically with the interests of urban communities. Yet, students also inhabit an ideological middle space between uncritical reproduction of hegemony and critical praxis.