Knotty Articulations: Professors and Preservice Teachers on Teaching Literacy in Urban Schools

In this qualitative study, we examined preservice teachers’ articulations of what it meant to teach literacy in urban settings and the roles that we as university instructors played in their understandings of the terms urban, literacy, and teacher. We framed the study within extant studies of teacher education and research on metaphors. Data indicated that the participants metaphorically constructed literacy as an object that could be passed from teacher to student and that was often missing, hidden, or buried in urban settings. Implications of the study suggest that faculty members are one factor among several important influences in preservice teachers becoming professionals, and the metaphors faculty use in teaching preservice teachers deserve careful consideration

Knotty Articulations: Professors and Preservice Teachers on Teaching Literacy in Urban Schools

In this qualitative study, we examined preservice teachers' articulations of what it meant to teach literacy in urban settings and the roles that we as university instructors played in their understandings of the terms urban, literacy, and teacher. We framed the study within extant studies of teacher education and research on metaphors. Data indicated that the participants metaphorically constructed literacy as an object that could be passed from teacher to student and that was often missing, hidden, or buried in urban settings. Implications of the study suggest that faculty members are one factor among several important influences in preservice teachers becoming professionals, and the metaphors faculty use in teaching preservice teachers deserve careful consideration. Each semester when we greet our preservice teachers in our methods courses, we welcome them into the ongoing journey of becoming a teacher. While we teach these preservice teachers in the content area of literacy and English education over several semesters and in two different departments-elementary and secondary education-in all of our courses there are recurring themes: urban education, diversity, and continual learning. As professors of education in an urban research institution, we are committed to helping students become excellent teachers for students in urban and metropolitan schools; however, we find ourselves revisiting the concept urban in the context of our own practices as we teach future teachers. Indeed, in research meetings, we pondered our definitions for urban, surprising ourselves with how quickly in our talk the term could encompass disparate qualities: cosmopolitan, diverse, and enriched, as well as impoverished, crowded, and underfunded. The reality is that even as faculty we puzzle over the meaning of urban and question how the use of this word can lead to judgments that dismiss the value and potential of schools located in communities describe