Lessons From The Dream Factory

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LESSONS FROM THE DREAM FACTORY: Urban school films for critically reflective practice in teacher education A NOTE OF EXPLANATION I have composed this essay as a manifesto loosely modeled after Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. My effort to explore the strengths and limitations of the genre of the manifesto as an alternative to traditional academic form is driven in part by my desire to develop an approach to scholarly writing that respects the role of voice, style and clarity in meaning-making. For as long as I can remember, I have read with pen in hand and paper within reach, eager to discover, transcribe and absorb some particularly elegant turn of phrase that captures the essence of a thing through an succinct distillation or an unexpected formulation. Although I am often underwhelmed by the sterility and anonymity of academic papers, it strikes me as highly unlikely that traditional academic form is in some way intrinsically incompatible with good writing. A more viable scapegoat, in my view, is the author's internal experience of shaping message to medium, the way anticipation of writing in traditional academic form might activate in the writer certain habits of mind conducive to the real task at hand, the mandate of knowledge production, at the expense of voice, style and clarity. Perhaps it is the meta-conceptual project of constructing an argument with the intent of encoding it in a particular discourse and in accordance with a predetermined organizational structure for eventual publication and dissemination to an audience of peers that constricts the scope of the possible. This is my interpretative schema for making sense of the prevalence of bad writing in the academy. With all this said, I assume the daunting task of writing a manifesto as a way of forcing myself to contend with the challenges of developing a distinctive voice, employing unconventional discursive strategies, and pursuing clarity and readability by limiting the use of jargon and specialized disciplinary language when it is possible to communicate the same idea at least as clearly using unpretentious language, appropriate for a general audience. I aim in this essay to resist the temptation to lapse into academic-speak to: a) establish credibility on the cheap based less on the quality of thinking than on command of privileged discourses; and b) distract readers from a known flaw in my argument by intentionally obfuscating meaning via complicated constructions. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway instructively models a range of discursive alternatives to the conventions of traditional academic form. As early as the subtitle An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit, Haraway begins to signal

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that the text to follow will test readers' patience, defying their expectations in her disregard for established disciplinary boundaries, her frequent use of hyperbole and other impressionistic literary devices that convey a sense of wonder at the marvelous flexibility of language. She adopts a refreshingly mischievous tone, and brings a sense of humor to the task, demonstrating a comfort with ambiguity that she fairly flaunts in the subtly irreverent goal of “build[ing] an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” but in which blasphemy is re-envisioned as the purest expression of faith and reverence. The manifesto seems on first read meandering, expansive, and associative, but subsequent readings reveal an internally rigorous logic to its layered organization. She develops in this text an identity as a public intellectual through the explicit linkage of scholarship and activism while calling on women to unite in opposition to the tyranny of the profit-maximization imperative enforced by the neoliberal regime of free-market fundamentalism. Haraway's postmodern skepticism of objective truth and totalizing metatheories leads her to assert that “liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.” She advocates for a loose coalition among identity-oriented interest groups, all united behind a common agenda. Their political work would be to undermine the hegemonic authority of a Western rationality predicated on the view that history unfolds in a prefigured trajectory of progress in which social relations are mere side effects and value-neutral phenomena. Taking my cues from Haraway, I have attempted to incorporate some of the aforementioned discursive strategies into my own manifesto. In Lessons from the Dream Factory I build the case for critical reflective practice through the use of urban school films in teacher education. I direct my argument in particular toward progressive teacher educators who work with pre- and in-service teachers in fast-track alternative certification programs, who I believe are well-positioned to implement this pedagogical approach.

THE ARGUMENT Few new teachers, particularly those who come into the profession through alternative certification programs, have first-hand knowledge of high-poverty urban classrooms, yet all new teachers are intimately acquainted with the representations of urban classrooms that abound in popular culture. I will use the phrase urban school films to refer to those Hollywood productions that follow a messianic teacher figure, typically young, white and middle-class, into the racialized space of a ghetto classroom. But there are range of other terms used by

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scholar-practitioners in the field which refer more or less to the same set of films: heroic teacher film, teacher-savior film (Stanford, 2008), teacher-martyr film, superteacher myth (Farhi, 1972), and inspirational teacher film. In the conventional narrative, this heroic teacher figure, the great white hope, recovers easily enough from the initial culture shock and swiftly wins the respect and loyalty of her students. Although lacking in formal training, the upstart teacher is steeped in heartland values and deeply committed to the myth of the American Dream, traits she uses to domesticate her charges by convincing them to adopt the value system of the dominant culture. In this paper I argue that new teachers' attitudes and classroom practices will likely be shaped by this category of urban school films unless teachers possess critical tools to challenge the distorted narratives seen on screen. Scholars and teacher educators interested in enhancing the quality and equity of urban public schools must therefore take up urban school films as objects of inquiry. An act of sincere, embodied teaching met by the focus of an engaged learner can be a profoundly intimate and mutually transformative experience. Yet seasoned educators are well aware how elusive such a pure pedagogical encounter can be, while among the newest generation of teachers, inexperience is but one of the serious obstacles to effective classroom practice. The difficulties posed by our current situation of rapidly changing student demographics and a comparatively homogenous teaching force are similar to those faced many times over in the historical record of public schooling in the United States. Now, as then, teachers' discomfort with a student population they construe as Other prohibits the development of trusting relationships between teachers and students. By exhibiting a lack of cultural sensitivity, well-meaning teachers may exacerbate the strain of cultural difference, limiting their effectiveness in the classroom. I therefore advocate that teacher educators incorporate decentering pedagogical tactics into their instructional repertoire, challenging and ultimately helping to reconfigure new teachers' worldviews. Critical analysis of urban school films is one promising decentering approach. When situated in the current ideological, political, social, economic and technological context, these films help raise important questions about teachers' expectations, assumptions, and unexamined biases. Perhaps unremarkable in the theatre, inside the classroom of a skilled and strategic teacher educator they are pregnant with sharp insights into American popular culture – the very mashup that informs teachers' work environments and interaction with students. To summarize: school films can be positioned as cultural texts in the pre-service classroom and critiqued as complex manifestations of the implicit values and beliefs of the American mainstream.

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The tidy narrative arc of the heroic teacher subgenre of school films propagates unrealistic ideas about what constitutes success for a new teacher in a ghetto classroom. These films divorce urban schools from the overarching social, political, and economic conditions in which they are inextricably bound. They decenter systemic critiques that could reveal the racist, classist and sexist structures upon which the myth of the meritocracy rests. The films convey a sense that transformative work is possible but only within prescribed boundaries that do not problematize the existing social hierarchy. So individual teachers might enact transformative agendas in the isolated domain of their classroom, but to depict teachers as politically engaged active participants in an emancipatory movement would constitute a threat to the status quo – a risky business move when your business is making money. While the declared intention of the entertainment-industrial complex that is Hollywood is to entertain audiences, the profit maximization imperative is always the real bottom-line in the tyranny of the neoliberal regime.

OWNING UP TO WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silence and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. –Peggy McIntosh (1988, p. 152) From my vantage point as a white woman and a once-new teacher, and now as a student of education policy and a coach of new teachers, I argue that many white teachers for urban classrooms lack awareness of the very existence of a white racial identity.1 I establish the need for a critical approach to Hollywood films with my claim that the failure of many white teachers and teaching candidates to acknowledge whiteness as a racial identity and to own up to white privilege in the context of their work in ghetto schools severely limits their ability to build the kind of trusting and respectful relationships with students that must be in place before instruction can be effective. To be clear, the research does not indicate that white teachers cannot be effective teachers of non-white students. While the unconscious oppression of minority students by white teachers is well-documented, Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) demonstrates that it is far from inevitable. Recent literature does claim, however, that in order to establish the sort of connection and trust that is a prerequisite of effective instruction, a teacher must step outside the cultural framework that positions difference as deficiency – which requires one to first acknowledge a white racial identity.2 It is also critical that white teaching candidates

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expecting to work with high poverty students of color interrogate their own motivations for entering the classroom. For some, a stint teaching in a high needs school is an exculpatory exercise, a brief detour in the inevitable march to vague but lucrative employment and bourgeois respectability. In fact, Teach For America [TFA] explicitly markets itself as a sort of domestic Peace Corps, a socially responsible way to pass a few years after college before pursuing one’s “real” career (Veltri, 2008). But good intentions are no antidote for unintended consequences. Pedagogies of oppression can all too easily take root in this context – a context that mirrors society-at-large and upholds its oppressive discourse. In her article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” McIntosh explores the nature of white privilege and the social mechanisms, processes and practices which ensure its continuation. McIntosh's conception of white privilege is two-fold: it refers in part to the daily enjoyment of a whole range of social, cultural and political advantages, but its most deadly weapon is societally-cultivated ignorance, that socially-sanctioned pose of neutrality naively adopted by some beneficiaries of white privilege. The text is used in many courses in urban and multicultural education, and its point is well-taken: white teachers must explicitly address issues surrounding their own identity to build a safe space where learning can prosper. There is, it seems to be, a paradox embedded McIntosh's assertion that white privilege renders itself invisible. Much of our country's wealth - the surplus capital, David Harvey would say – has been amassed by private citizens born into the ruling class who use some mixture of persuasion and coercion to compel members of the various groups that comprise the underclass to trade labor for wages. Many of those in the latter category are, tellingly, members of persistently subjugated and historically brutalized groups – like the descendants of slaves and Mexican migrant workers. Our nation's history is short and violent morality tale with a devastatingly simple premise – that dark skinner people are somehow less human than those of fair complexion, and therefore existing standards of humane treatment are unnecessarily indulgent and inapplicable, and that these not-quite-fully-human beings are happier and perhaps even better off when relieved of the burden of autonomous self-directed action. America's original sin of race-based slavery gave binary oppositions great resonance in the collective psyche: enslavement versus self-determination, black versus white. While this sort of either/or identification in no way captures the present wikipedic reality of a radically spectral diversity in New York City, the epistemic binaries of whiteness and blackness still influence the way we think and talk about race, and their deep and enduring salience in spoken and written language as signifiers of relative value and character are still evident in literary tradition and in many contemporary expressions of figurative language.

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Our national legacy of race-based oppression, domination and enslavement indicates that white Americans were at one time far less squeamish about race and privilege than is now the case. In the pre-Reconstruction era, for example, many whites would readily admit that they considered blacks their inferiors. This was a society built on race-based enslavement and it seemed that continued economic prosperity depended on the preservation of the “Peculiar Institution.” Now, forty years after the civil rights movement, to utter such an explicitly racist statement is to invite censure and to court outrage. Our standards of civil discourse may be more stringent than in the past, but the sincerity of our alleged commitment to equality of opportunity for all citizens is seriously undermined by our failure to commit the resources that such a project demands. I am referring to the policies of disinvestment in urban centers – in terms of public transportation and other infrastructure, preventative medicine, welfare reform, race-based discriminatory and predatory lending practice, real estate development, urban renewal, school funding linked to local property values, the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, the so-called school to prison pipeline that disproportionately affects men of color, and so on – that have drained our cities of resources and redirected public monies to suburbs. It is no coincidence that the roll-out of such parasitic policies coincided with a large-scale exodus of middle class white families from the urban core to the suburban periphery, drawn by the promise of green space, fresh air, and safe (read: racially homogenous) schools and neighborhoods for their children (Anyon, 1997). The rhetorical talking point of equal opportunity will remain just that – rhetorical – until we commit to fully funding a comprehensive system of urban reinvestment policies. It is relatively easy to support racial uplift as an abstract concept or ideal; far more difficult to stomach are the material consequences of such support. The sort of policy regime change I outline would necessarily redirect funds from the suburbs to the cities and imbue the debate with racial dimensions. Such redistribution makes sense only insofar as whiteness is understood as a historically privileged status, linked to clearly unearned material advantages. Acknowledgement of white identity therefore enables white teachers to build productive relationships with minority students, but it can also be of broader social utility as a framework through which to fundamentally re-envision the terms of our entire social contract. Reluctance to claim a white identity often reflects a sense that one has not enjoyed the full range of benefits typically associated with whiteness, common among those with working class backgrounds. Others imagine that by acknowledging race at all they expose themselves to charges of racism, which leads some to rather preposterous claims of “not seeing race.”

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Still others may be accustomed to some degree of racial diversity but in the context of socioeconomic homogeneity, as in fairly common in elite liberal arts colleges. So, rejection of a racialized identity might reflect a range of attitudes that include guilt, shame, selfrighteousness, fear, avoidance, and powerlessness.3 I believe, as does McIntosh, that it is precisely because of the deafening silence that a myth of color-blindness so blatantly and literally false could gain the traction that it has. Racism has not been eliminated; it has just been moderated and sublimated to political correctness. Political correctness has come to mean using the right words with the right audience. Language (African American instead of black, colored, or Negro; special needs or learning disabled rather than retarded) comes to represent belief, and use of the proper terminology immunizes the speaker against charges of racism and other -isms. But the change is cosmetic, not substantive, and the focus on the signifier has detracted public attention from the signified, obscuring meaning and intent. The public discourse seems more respectful and enlightened, but the familiar normative processes are still at work in their camouflage. White (heterosexual middle-class able-bodied masculine) identity is still the standard against which other identities are measured. White requires no politically correct alternative referent; these are only useful for groups about which we have politically-incorrect ideas.

ON THE GROUND At present, the teaching force in this country, both experienced educators and those entering the profession, is dominated by white monolingual middle-class women. Teacher educators describe the majority of incoming teachers as rooted in racially and culturally homogeneous communities (Trier 2005, Robertson 1997).4 Our student population is meanwhile becoming increasingly diverse, fueled by a wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia (Banks, in Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. vii). Latinos comprise the fastest growing segment of our nation's population, and students with limited English proficiency are the fastest growing segment among the school-age population. In 2001, students of color composed 40% of the school population; by 2020 the figure is predicted to rise to 50% (Nieto, 2006). The growing demographic mismatch between teachers and students has serious implications; an extensive body of research documents the limitations of mono-cultural familiarity, raising serious doubts about the ability of these teaching candidates to effectively teach ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse students.5

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High attrition rates plague both alternatively credentialed and traditionally certified new teachers, but the turnover rate in high poverty schools is 50% greater than that of low poverty schools (Futernick, 2007). High poverty schools thus become virtual dumping grounds for inexperienced new teachers and dead weight veterans, exacerbating existing inequity by concentrating experienced high-quality teachers in well-run schools, while struggling new teachers and ineffective old-timers are left to languish in poorly managed schools. This trend further degrades the quality of education offered in under-served communities and imposes great economic expense on poor schools and districts that are forced to continually recruit and mentor new teachers (Quartz et al., 2008).6 Learning to teach is challenging and often emotionally wrenching. Often, new teachers simply don't have the instructional repertoire, the instinct for designing engaging curricula, or the strategic classroom management skills necessary to boost students' achievement, especially when school culture is weak or counter-productive. Competencies like these are developed through painful trial and error and critically reflective practice. Mastery of these skills does not automatically equal effective teaching, but I would argue that teachers must develop expertise in these areas in order to maximize their impact in the classroom. Personality and character traits like empathy, consistency, flexibility and intellectual curiosity are also integral to teaching excellence, but dispositional attributes in and of themselves do not add up to effective teaching. No matter how stellar their credentials, how rigorous their pre-service preparation, or how personally charismatic they may be, new teachers on-theground experience to develop the skills that will make them effective. Thus is not reasonable, or fair, or honest, or wise to expect that new teachers will be as effective as critically reflective experienced practitioners at raising student achievement. Beginning teachers already often fail to appreciate the scope and intensity of the challenges they will face teaching in high poverty urban classrooms, and the cognitive dissonance between expectations they hold and the reality they face causes many to abandon the profession (Joseph & Burnaford, 1994, p. 6). It is therefore essential that pre-service teacher educators take pains to help teaching candidates understand in clear and certain terms the nature of the task that lies before them, and what “success” looks like in the classroom of a first year teacher in a high poverty urban school. MY WORKING FRAMEWORK I intend to articulate a vision of critically reflective practice using urban school films that progressive teacher educators could use in pre-service teacher education courses.

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Through this vision I will contest the simplistic and superficial representation of urban schools in Hollywood productions by looking at racist and sexist policies and practices as among other inequitable school conditions that are all consequences of unequal power relations in society. I believe that as educators and academics we must agitate for a theory of teacher education explicitly aimed at preparing culturally responsive teachers capable of enacting an antioppressive transformative multicultural pedagogy in diverse classrooms. I advocate that teacher educators promote critically reflective practice in new teachers by incorporating into their pre-service curriculum critical analysis of films about maverick teachers who transform troubled ghetto schools. My notion of film as text is borrowed from cultural studies which defines as text any artifact of social life, whether tangible like a scroll or intangible like a moving image or even a phone conversation. Meaning, according to cultural theorists, does not reside within the text itself but is rather ascribed from without. Meaning is contingent, transitive not fixed, continually becoming and never being, created in the temporal interpretive space between the screen and the spectator's subjectivity. Scholars in cultural studies made film safe for academia, but seeking to dissolve the boundaries that limit truth telling in academia, such as the dichotomy between high culture and low culture that until recently situated mass media outside the purview of legitimate scholarship. Feminist scholar of spectatorship Judith Mayne (1993) critiques cultural studies for tending to overestimate the contestatory capabilities of viewers. She reminds us that neither the viewers nor the studios are a monolith, that each group has internal diversity. In her discussion of models of spectatorship, Mayne characterizes what she refers to as the institutional model of spectatorship as totalizing and monolithic, and discusses the notion of cinema as ideological institution implicated by its mechanics of representation to uphold the dominant order. The field of critical pedagogy has also influenced my own teacher identity through its intensely politicized commitment to examine how power and authority interact in the classroom to construct particular relations between students and teachers. Henry Giroux and other proponents of critical pedagogy position popular culture as ideology. Giroux describes film as a “powerful force for shaping public memory, hope, popular consciousness, and social agency” and mass media as “veritable teaching machines in shaping the social imaginary of students regarding how they view themselves, others, and the larger society” (2001, pp. 1456). Naming acts of domination and repression perpetrated in the name of education are opportunities within critical pedagogy (re)appropriation of schooling for emancipation rather than cultural imperialism. The exercise of agency is, by this formulation, autonomous,

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unmitigated, and seminal, as if founded on (the illusion of) omnipotence. But critical feminist Patti Lather (1986) identifies another snag in critical pedagogy: that its proponents/adherents/practitioners/articulators imagine themselves vigilante warriors in the resistance, bold leaders of the struggle to dismantle systems of oppression and injustice, but they seem unwilling to recognize their privileged identities as constitutive of their contestative agency. This alienates otherwise like-minded scholars whose intellectual projects incorporate identity issues like gender, sexuality, ethnicity and disability status, and prohibits mutually-beneficial collaboration. I do believe that feminist discourses are highly aware of the dialectics of subjectivity/objectivity, subjugation/domination, and legitimacy/illegitimacy. Feminist analyses have much to say about how gendered power dynamics influence the construction of women's social identities and women's agency to name and give voice to their experiences. Feminist perspectives join my theoretical bricolage for the ways in which they illuminate the gendered aspect of teachers' portrayal in Hollywood films. I come to this investigation in hopes of exploring the mechanisms by which a series of moving images come to operate as proxy for lived experience in the public imagination. I envision this project as a statement of dissent as naming becomes an act of personal empowerment and a way of claiming agency in opposition to systemic injustice. To name a systemic injustice is to expose it in a declaration of non-compliance. Without the active, vocal, conscious, explicit, and continual disruptive acts of naming one becomes complicit with agents of injustice. I draw on Lather's discussion of research as praxis which engages in “explicit critique of the status quo” directed at “building a more just society.” This notion of research as praxis is predicated on the conviction that just as there is no neutral education, there is no neutral research.

THE IDEOLOGY OF URBAN SCHOOL FILMS From Blackboard Jungle (1955) to Freedom Writers (2007), the same story is told and retold in Hollywood productions about urban schools, while very different stories are told about suburban and elite private schools in films like The Breakfast Club (1985) and Dead Poets Society (1989). While these other subgenres of the school film category are outside the scope of my inquiry, the fact of their distinction from urban school films raises important questions about the subtext and implications of the urban category. In Robert Bulman's (2005) analysis of 185 school films, domestic as well as foreign, he argues that students' socioeconomic status is the most important variable affecting the their representation in

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American cinema. In Hollywood Goes to High School, Bulman distinguishes three kinds of films about schools: urban, suburban, and elite private school films. He finds that suburban school films represent “middle-class frustration with the conformity and status hierarchy of suburban middle-class life and express fantasies of self-expression and individual rebellion” and elite private school films reflect “middle-class ambivalence about wealth... [and] an abiding belief... that schools are fair and meritocratic institutions” (pp. 10-11). And urban school films, within Bulman's framework, are commercially successful because they play on middle-class anxieties about the threat from within, the strangers in our midst, the urban “rainbow underclass” with the most to be angry about and the least to lose. Thus urban school films represent middle-class hopes that the students in urban schools can be rescued from their troubled lives not through fundamental social change, but by the individual application of common sense, good behavior, a positive outlook, and better choices (p. 10). Viewers experience vicarious redemption through their identification with the benevolent protagonist and leave the theatre with their faith in humanity renewed. Bulman's analysis posits Hollywood as a narrative delivery system designed to satisfy the ideological desires of a monolithic middle-class audience. By foregrounding the independent variable of the students' social class, Bulman's analysis helped me delineate the scope of my argument. I have adopted his term urban school film to denote Hollywood productions that depict an idealistic rookie teacher, often white and middle class, who enters the racialized space of an urban classroom determined to deliver a rowdy bunch of students from the manacles of the culture of poverty ~ be it a negative attitude, poor work ethic, weak morals, or a penchant for petty crime. But there is a range of other terms used by scholarpractitioners in the field which refer more or less to the same set of films: heroic teacher film, teacher-savior film, teacher-martyr film, superteacher myth, and inspirational teacher film. I prefer Bulman's term because his use of the word “urban” invokes, I think, the race- and class-based threat of the cities in the suburban white middle class imagination in a way that the alternative teacher-centered terms do not. Indeed, “urban” has become a euphemism for racial otherness and poverty in the public discourse with safe suburban homogeneity as its foil. In urban school films, the cities are depicted as lawless jungles, teeming centers of blight and decay, filled with people Not Like Us. Invoking the urban is thus a way of talking about race without talking about race. The euphemistic use of “urban” also supports my claim about the tendency of many whites not to recognize whiteness as a racial identity and consequently, not to acknowledge white privilege. White teachers of poor minority students must find new ways to talk about race and class with their students that do not shy away from naming and validating difference.

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But in two recent Hollywood blockbusters about urban schools, Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds, the female teacher protagonists uncritically graft their societally-bred sense of agency on to their students' experience in a demonstration of self-delusion. Michelle Phieffer as LouAnne Johnson acts out a paternalistic pedagogy of choice, arrogantly proclaiming that “There are no victims.” And Hilary Swank as Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers invokes figurative baptism and cultural erasure, as if she could speak redemption into their lives. She insists that inside the walls of her classroom, students are freed from their past. She berates one student for a bout of self-doubt, declaring, “I don't want excuses. I know what you're up against. We're all of us up against something... I see who you are. Do you understand me? I can see you. And you are not failing.” Both women fail to recognize that their privileged position offers them a wider range of choice than those available to most students. The heroic teacher figures are often loners with a penchant for anti-conformist antics that run afoul of administrative procedures and test supervisors’ patience. These characters may test boundaries within the narrow space of the school, but they are essentially reformers, not revolutionaries. They instill in urban students middle class values like personal responsibility, self-determinism, and the value of hard work, while functioning as agents of redemption for their students, shouldering their share of the White Man's Burden. Mary Dalton, author of The Hollywood Curriculum (1999), these teachers are “narrowly emancipatory” figures who represent an alternative to the fascist dictator model of bad teacher who abuses his or her limited authority. Yet their challenge to authority is a safe one, according to Dalton, because it limits its critique to individuals’ character flaws and so does not threaten the dominant ideology. For example, the film Freedom Writers commits a vile white lie of omission by centering the teacher and classroom at the expense of the broader context. As William Ayers explains generally of urban school films, “There is no hint that the problems facing... young people include structures of privilege and disadvantage, social class, racism, or the existence of two societies, separate and unequal (2001, p. 149). And so by avoiding structural critique Freedom Writers fundamentally misrepresents the challenges facing teachers in urban schools. The myth of the teacher as savior “places an impossible burden on real teachers… by forcing them to compete with their cinematic counterparts” (Farhi, 1997). More pernicious is the way the narrative of the heroic teacher as messianic figure situates teacher quality as the solution to the problem, and implicitly, the cause for urban poverty in all its various dimensions. By rejecting the conventional solutions of the educational establishment and

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succeeding wildly, maverick teacher characters function to scapegoat inefficient bureaucracies and self-interested teachers unions for the ills of urban schools. In so doing, the teacher-savior myth distracts attention from the real but solvable systemic issues that threaten public education.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION From Ronald Reagan's trickle down economy and now-infamous report A Nation at Risk, through the waning days of the second George W. Bush administration, in the last quarter century we have seen the our public schools bend and droop under the strain of conservative leaders whose personal attitudes toward public institutions for the common good have fluctuated between ambivalence and outright hostility. The Department of Education [ED] was still in its infancy when Reagan took office in 1980, just months after Carter had signed it into law. Reagan was famously hostile to the ED, but his campaign promise to dismantle what he considered an illegitimate and unnecessary department was rendered impossible by publication of a government document that warned of schools facing a “rising tide of mediocrity” so dire we might have considered it “an act of war” had we a plausible scapegoat. The first alternative certification program was authorized by the state of New Jersey in 1983 to address a persistent teacher shortage. The “Provisional Teacher Program” was heralded by the local business community but scorned by teacher educators still flustered by the insult of A Nation at Risk who recognized even then that alternative certification programs would threaten their authority. Texas and California followed suit, authorizing their own alternative certification programs, the movement did not truly gather momentum until Clinton designated research funds to build the knowledge base about the emerging movement. Reagan's conservative legacy remained largely intact throughout the intervening decades of the Bush I and Clinton administrations. George W. Bush announced in 2000 his intention to make the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA], renamed No Child Left Behind [NCLB], into the trademark accomplishment of his administration. NCLB instituted a range of unfunded mandates, but among the most costly was the requirement to ensure that a “highly qualified” teacher for every classroom by 20052006, but the task of defining the term was left to individual states. The legislation carved out space for private companies to land major contracts to provide supplementary services to students both inside and outside the school building by creating mandates for the provision of

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certain services that schools were never expected to be able to provide. The radical conservatives had effectively positioned themselves as the vanguard of the privatization movement through the Bush II's unexpected but strategically clever decision to insinuate his incremental privatization policies at the apex of the money stream. In June 2002, the assault continued as the Annual Report of Teacher Quality lambasted university-based teacher education programs, charging them with failure “to produce the types of highly qualified teachers that the No Child Left Behind Act demands.” The report called on states to develop alternatives to university-based teacher education that removed barriers to entry by eliminating coursework and redefining a “highly qualified” in terms of content knowledge. Traditional teacher education programs' ongoing solvency was further undermined by the establishment in September 2003 of the National Center for Alternative Certification [NCAC] through a $2.5 million grant from the Department of Education. By 2007, alternative certification programs had been adopted by 47 states and the District of Columbia, and fully one in five new teachers was taking advantage of an alternative pathway. The traditional model of university-based teacher education programs in which course work was to be completed prior to certification, is being supplanted by a whole range of niche programs, each with distinct admission criteria, preparation requirements, and support services. Now public schools in districts all across the country face the same litany of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The spirit of NCLB, that all students are entitled to a high quality education regardless of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, family wealth, country of origin or religion is consistent with the aims of progressive educators. But the law's professed intent was squelched by the disaster of its implementation. Federal funds promised to states and municipalities never materialized, and the burden of financing the law's mandates fell to states and municipalities. Demands for accountability, a rhetoric of high expectations for all, and threats of sanctions for not meeting the prescribed goals are among the law's requirements, all of which reflect a naïve and paternalistic ideology of tough love and a desperate need to feel powerful even as our tenure as world bully draws down. We must therefore understand the movement for data-driven instruction as the culmination of a quarter century of fear and dread at the possibility, or likelihood, of waning global influence predicted in A Nation at Risk. Data-driven instruction is an iteration of what Zeichner calls the behaviorist approach to teacher education. The behaviorist approach is concerned with imparting to teachers a specific set of performance-based skills and competencies, all observable, measurable, and therefore "scientific." Teachers' work is

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construed along a metaphor of "production." It is standardized, systematized, and ultimately de-professionalized. But despite the vigor with which the United States has struggled to retain its vaunted position in the global hierarchy, our resistance has been futile from the outset. We would be wise to take heed of this last point, and of the damage already done, and to guard what remains against the unthinking imposition of quantitative measures to qualitative problems. We must resist narrowing teaching preparation to measurable outcomes, and revision teaching not as an objectifiable craft but as a contextualized social practice with innumerable contingencies. The other paradigm of teacher education relevant to this discussion is inquiry-oriented teacher education, which is concerned with fostering in future teachers habits of critical inquiry. The goal here is complete reflexivity, a deeply embedded tendency to call every decision that one makes in the classroom into question and ultimately problematize the social and institutional context of teaching. This outlook posits that teachers must model the intellectual posture they seek to develop in students. Driven by questions of what ought to be rather than what is, the inquiry- oriented approach sees action research as a valuable engine for the empowerment of teachers as active agents in shaping the direction of educational environments. The teacher is a developing being whose self and whose subjectivity is constantly evolving. Multicultural pre-service training develops in prospective teachers knowledge of diverse cultural groups, challenges beliefs and attitudes surrounding difference, and training in pedagogical skills useful with diverse student populations. Transformative multicultural education refers to action-based pedagogical practice aligned with the principles of social justice to help eliminate racist practices in schools. Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) asks teachers to fold students' cultures, experiences and perspectives into the curriculum and prioritizes frank discussions of social disparities in power and privilege.7 All three of these forms of teacher preparation and pedagogical practice foreground racial, ethnic, and cultural difference as the first step toward flattening power relations. These social justice projects are committed to reconfiguring social relations and reformulating what counts as educational achievement such that old metrics of measurement are rendered extinct. The process begins in the microcosm of a single classroom and moves incrementally into the broader public sphere, the classroom retained as the project’s fulcrum and spiritual ground zero. Inquiry-oriented teacher education in its various iterations thus aims to dismantle oncepersistent race-bound disparities in educational achievement and to render unintelligible the framework of the achievement gap.

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Proceeding from an interruptive agenda that seeks to vigorously interrogate culturally dominant narratives of the social context of schooling, I call on the inquiry-oriented paradigm of teacher education, which seeks to liberate teachers by fostering habits of critical inquiry. Teachers are thus enabled to model the intellectual posture they seek to cultivate in students. Driven by questions of what ought to be rather than what is, inquiry-oriented approaches try to encourage intellectual curiosity and develop teachers' sense of agency. Yet it is ironic that despite understanding the oppressive potential of the dominant narratives of popular culture and despite having achieved recognition in the academy, cultural studies has scarcely infiltrated teacher education programs. How can we expect classroom teachers to help students deconstruct complex multimedia texts if they have no experience doing so themselves? This problematic frames the task I have set out for myself: to explore how school films might be utilized in teacher education courses to foster critical identity construction. In the past few years a movement has been building among scholar-practitioners to use urban school films in teacher education classes to promote critically reflective practice. Within the teacher education community, critically reflective practice refers to the practice of continually critiquing institutional policy and one's own decisions about pedagogy, curriculum, and classroom organization and management in order to see relationships between daily practices in the classroom and issues of schooling as society (Zeichner, 1996). I envision this project as a statement of dissent against the intensely conservative climate that prevails at present. Naming becomes an act of personal empowerment and a way of claiming agency in opposition to systemic injustice. Without the active, vocal, conscious, explicit, and continual disruptive acts of naming one becomes complicit with agents of injustice. I draw on Lather's (1986) discussion of research as praxis, a notion predicated the conviction that just as there is no neutral education, there is no neutral research. If we recognize the impossibility of truly objective inquiry then we acknowledge that our framework limits what we can perceive. I will proceed by briefly summarizing the limited literature situating urban school films in terms of critically reflective practice. Henry Giroux has been outspoken advocate of incorporating a cultural studies approach, which he defines as “a concern with the relationship between culture, knowledge and power” into university-based teacher education programs. Notwithstanding Giroux's enthusiastic support, cultural studies' notorious interdisciplinarity as well as its trendiness inside the academy may have been read as threats by the leadership of mainstream schools of education. The behaviorist paradigm discussed above is the operative framework in many university-based teacher education programs, a phenomenon that I would attribute in part to

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impression management by schools of education in their campaign to be seen not as a bastion of mediocrity but as a valued arm of the university. To this end, schools of education have organized themselves around scientific rationality. There are, of course, notable standout teacher educators working from within university-based schools of education who are engaged in the sort of intellectual labor I advocate. The most prolific publisher among them is James Trier at the University of North Carolina. Trier uses urban school films with his homogenous group of teacher education students to help them develop the competencies of critical reflection. While it is reasonable to assume that others are also doing this work, the sparseness of the body of scholarship on the topic does not help verify this assumption.

HARAWAY REVISITED Feminist poet Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” This quotation represents one of the competing theories about the origins of social change and the processes by which such change is effected. The main issue here is one of means; specifically, the relevance of means to ends, and the moral implications and potential for damaged integrity that one assumes in approaching a project of social change from the “inside” - which is to say, through existing channels and via established modes. The alternative, insofar as it is intellectually honest to presume the existence of two diametrically opposed ways of being in the world, is a campaign that seeks to undermine and delegitimize the very source and structural underpinnings of the existing political, economic and cultural powers. There is, I think, a persistent and salient tension that characterizes both the individual psyche as well as the collective. For example, a recent college graduate eager to help rebuild to the languishing labor movement might agonize – law school or grass-roots activism? Armed with the skill set of a trained attorney one's effort and energy expenditure might be more fruitful, more useful to the cause. On the other hand, to pursue an advanced, prestigious and highly specialized course of study could be viewed as evidence of deep and unexamined complicity with the same profoundly unjust political, economic and cultural system that prevents so many of our citizens from securing the bare essentials while others enjoy unprecedented affluence; as a society, we continue to invoke quaint notions like the ever-popular myth of the American meritocracy. My view of the roots of authentic and legitimate movements for social change strays from Lorde's notion of “what works.” It seems to me that her argument may be circular in a certain sense, in a way that is very human. I think that it is very difficult for our species to

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distinguish very clearly between cause and effect when reflecting on our decisions and beliefs. The two are closely related and mutually constitutive; I would go further to argue that they are interactionary and incestuous and often incompatible, and that the purpose of memory is to facilitate our transition from actress on a screen to spectator gazing at the screen through the inventive haze of memory, piecing together motivation, action and implication and somehow making sense of the narrative. From this perspective, one's stated beliefs both influence and are influenced by life's constant daily decisions. It is not surprising that a poet identifies nonconformity as a prerequisite of resistance; this is her constant reality as an artist, perhaps even a prerequisite of success in that line of work. But a successful politician, in contrast, can never stray too far from the line, the law, convention, appearances. Bound by high calling and a sense of mission, these are nonetheless her prerequisite habits. Maverick academic Donna Haraway entranced me with the seemingly effortless rhythmic cadence of her language. She is a prominent feminist scholar, professor and chair of the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and regular lecturer at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has dug out a space for her work within the academy, even as she has flouted conventions of discipline-bound scholarship and contributed to the burgeoning discourses of cyberculture, feminist primatology, and cyborg politics, as spawned by her way of gracefully massaging the language into submission in her Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway deploys the metaphor of a cyborg – a hybrid of machine and organism – to challenge feminist scholars to collaborate toward additive feminist theories that are not fundamentally hypocritical for failing to properly account for the suffering of other oppressed peoples, such as racial minorities, who bleed real blood – though perhaps transfused, in the spirit of the cyborg. In rejecting the patriarchal science of her, and our, inheritance, she delivers a surprisingly brutal injury to the continued authority, integrity and viability of our society as is, resting on the Freudian notions of women's partiality, the condition of perpetual under-stimulation framed as a deficit. She is a fully embodied representative of tenured radicalism. I admire her nuanced and subtly principled but firmly pragmatic, her text at once strident and understated, theoretical and worldly. She engages in conceptual activism aimed precisely at the culture of power. Rather than adopting new battle weapons she simply stretches existing ones to the limits until they collapse upon themselves. Neoliberal ideology must self-implode simply because it is an unsustainable regime. Similarly, my call for critically reflective teacher education rejects the wholesale divestment of university based teacher education but it calls for a profound re-visioning of premises in which pedagogical practices reflect a transformative multicultural reflexive paradigm of teacher education. The old approaches to teacher education are incompatible with the exigencies of

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our contemporary society and effectively institutionalize inequality, just as the logic of neoliberalism threatens to atomize collective agency. Like the cyborg metaphor, the sort of teacher education I propose is rooted in a sense of the political imaginary, which nourishes a vision of a possible, even plausible future. As a classroom teacher working with seventeen to twenty-one year old students at an alternative high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I became aware of my own racial identity in a way that I never had before. For the first time I found myself Other-ed, the only white person in the room. Incapable of projecting confidence that I did not have and lacking the emotional calluses of experience, I felt like crying when, on a few occasions, students’ dismissed me as a “cracker bitch.”My attempts at humor bombed, my cultural touchstones were all wrong. I was like a bad actor imitating a teacher. Fast forward five years. By now I have learned to embody my role as a young female white teacher of non-white students. I am a human among humans. The students can tell. Sometimes one will remark, “You black, Miss. You real, just like us.”They distinguish Caucasian from white; the former is a physiological designation reflective of European heritage, the latter is a way of being in the world, an ethos, the essence of inauthenticity. In tribute to Haraway’s memorable declaration that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, I would rather be an albino politician than a white poet.

WORKS CITED Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform. New York: Teachers College Press. Aronowitz, S. (2004). Against schooling: For an education that matters. New York: Routledge. Ayers, W. (2001). A teacher ain't nothin' but a hero: Teachers and teaching in film. In P. Joseph & G. Burnaford (Eds.), Images of schoolteachers in twentieth-century America: Paragons, polarities, complexities. New York: St. Martin's Press. Baudrillard, J. (1983). The ecstasy of communication. In Foster, H. (Ed) Postmodern Culture. Pluto Press. Brooks, R. (1955). Blackboard Jungle. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

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Brunner, D. Stories of schooling in film and television: A cultural studies approach to teacher education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of AERA (Chicago, IL, April 3-7, 1991). Bulman, R. (2002). Teachers in the 'hood: Hollywood's middle-class fantasy. Urban Review, 34(3), 251-75. Bulman, R. (2005). Hollywood goes to high school: Cinema, schools, and American culture. New York: Worth. Causey, V., Thomas, C. & Armento, B. (2000). Cultural diversity is basically a foreign term to me: The challenges of diversity for pre-service teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education. 16 (1), 3345. Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Walking the road: Race, diversity and social justice in teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press. Dalton, M. (1999). The Hollywood curiculum: Teachers and teaching in the movies. New York: Peter Lang. Dalton, M. (2003). Media studies and emanicipatory practice: An autoethnographic essay on critical pedagogy. Journal of Film and Video, 55(2), 88Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement: A review of state policy evidence. Education Policy Analysis Archives. 8 (1). Farhi, A. (1999). Hollywood goes to school: Recognizing the superteacher myth in film. Clearing House, 72(3), 157-9. Giroux, H. & McLaren, P. (1993). Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. (1996). Counternarratives: Cultural studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. (1997). Race, pedagogy and whiteness in “Dangerous Minds.” Cineaste, 22(4), 469. Giroux, H. (1997). Racial politics and the pedagogy of whiteness. In M. Hill (Ed.), Whiteness: a critical reader. New York: NYU Press, 294–315. Giroux, H. (2001). Breaking into the movies: Pegagogy and the politics of film. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 21(3), 583-98. Haraway, D. (2001). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the last twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

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Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hytten, K. (1999, Fall). The promise of cultural studies of education. Educational Theory, 49 (4), 527-544. Joseph, P. & Burnaford, G. (Eds.) (1994). Images of schoolteachers in twentieth-century America: Paragons, polarities, complexities. New York: St. Martin's Press. Kumashiro, K. (2008). The seduction of common sense: How the right has framed the debate on America's schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). Who will teach our children? Preparing teachers to successfully teach African American students. In E. Hollins, J. King & W. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It's not the culture of poverty, it's the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(2), 104-9. LaGravenese, R. (2007). Freedom Writers [Film]. United States: Paramount. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review, 56(3), 257-77. Mayne, J. (1993). Cinema and spectatorship. New York: Routledge. Mazzei, L. (2008). Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(5), 1125-36. McIntosh, P. (1998). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In E. Lee, D. Mekart & M. Okazawa- Rey (Eds.), Beyond heroes and holidays: A practical guide to K-12 anti-racist, multicultural education and staff development. Washington, DC: Network of Educators in Americas. McLaren, P. (1994). White terror and oppositional identity: Toward a critical multiculturalism. In D. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism: A critical reader. New York: Blackwell. Moore, A. (2004). The good teacher. Dominant discourses in teaching and teacher education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Nieto, S. (2006). The cultural plunge: Cultural immersion as a means of promoting selfawareness and cultural sensitivity among student teachers. Teacher Education Quarterly, 33(1), 75-84.

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Robertson, J. (1997). Fantasy's confines: Popular culture and the education of the female primary school teacher. Canadian Journal of Education, 22(2), 123-43. Smith, J. (1995). Dangerous Minds [Film]. United States: Hollywood Pictures. Trier, J. (2000). Using popular “school films” to engage student teachers in critical reflection. Paper presented at the annual meeting of AERA (New Orleans, LA, April 24-28, 2000). Trier, J. (2005). “Sordid Fantasies”: Reading popular culture “inner-city” school films as racialized texts in preservice education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(2), 171-89. Veltri, B. (2008). Teaching or service?: The site-based realities of Teach for America teachers in poor, urban schools. Education and Urban Society, 40(5), 511-42. Walsh, K. & Jacobs, S. (2007). Alternative certification isn't alternative. Washington DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation & Institute. Zeicher, K. (1983). Alternative paradigms of teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 34(3), 3-9. Zeichner, K. (Ed.) (1996). Currents of reform in pre-service teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press.

1 The field of whiteness studies took shape in the 1990s as scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, influenced by postmodernism notions of polysemy and multiple subjectivities, began to theorize whiteness not as a racial category but rather as a socially constructed ideology bound up in social class and institutional authority. Regimented ethnic hierarchies and notions of differential race-based genetic capacities had gone unquestioned for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the heyday of eugenics and the mental hygiene movement. But the notion of race itself was discredited by scientists' discovery that are no biological characteristics by which to empirically distinguish one so-called “race” from another, a finding that strongly indicates that the actual or perceived deficits of some groups, like for instance African Americans, must be due in large part to social conditions. A look in the historical record reveals great permeability and flexibility in white identity, especially for European immigrants and their native-born progeny. Recall, for example, how immigrants from southern and eastern Europe – Irish, Italians and Jews – were once considered non-white. But as the population of New York City further diversified in the twentieth century, with black sharecroppers and Puerto Ricans migrating en masse to New York City around the midcentury, these European ethnics – once regarded with suspicion and disdain by the Protestant Anglo-Dutch establishment – must have suddenly seemed far more palatable. Eastern and southern Europeans soon shed their status as racial “Others,” becoming accidental beneficiaries of an altered social landscape. Readers interested in further exploring the genesis of white ethnics as such might refer to Roediger, D. (1991). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. London: Verso. 2 See, for example: Gibson, C. (2004). Promising multicultural pre-service teacher education initiatives. Radical Pedagogy, 6(1); Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). Who will teach our children? Preparing teachers to successfully teach African American students. In E. Hollins, J. King & W. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching diverse populations: Formulating a knowledge base. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Mazzei, L. (2008). Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(5), 1125-36; Vavrus, M. (2002). Transforming the multicultural education of teachers: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press. 3 Several scholars have written the frustrations of teaching about whiteness. See, for example, Bruna's description of counter-productive discussions with teacher education candidates at Iowa State University: Bruna, K. (2007). Finding new words: How I use critical literacy in my multicultural teacher education classroom. Journal of Education for Teaching, 33 (1), 115-18. For another interesting treatment, refer to Solomon, P., Portelli, J., Daniel, B. & Campbell, A. (2005). The discourse of denial: How white teacher candidates construct race, racism and “white privilege.” Race, Ethnicity and Education. 8 (2), 147-169. In this article the authors develop a typologies avoidance strategies employed by their teacher education students. 4 See all articles listed above, plus: Trier, 2005; Robertson, 1997. 5 See, for example: Aaronsohn, E., Carter, C. & Howell, M. (1995). Preparing monocultural teachers for a multicultural world: Attitudes toward inner-city schools. Equity and Excellence in Education, 28(1), 5-9; Gay, G. & Kirkland, K. (2003). Developing cultural critical consciousness and self-reflection in pre-service teacher education. Theory into Practice, 42(3), 181-7; Moss, G. (2008). Diversity study circles in teacher education practice: An experiential learning project. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies. 24(1), 216-24; Solorzano, D. & Yosso, T. (2001). From racial stereotyping and deficit discourse toward a critical race theory in teacher education. Multicultural Education, 9(1), 2-8; Perry, T., Steele, C. & Hilliard, A. G., III (2003). Young, gifted, and black. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; 6 Exact attrition figures vary from study to study; Ingersoll (2001) found that approximately 40% of teachers leave the profession within five years, while Johnson and Birkeland (2003) report a 50% attrition rate among new teachers. Quartz et al. (2008) point out that attrition rates may in fact under-represent the personal losses of urban districts, noting that in addition to those leaving teaching for other professions, many others early-career educators first hired in urban districts will transition to positions in more affluent districts or to non-teaching but education-related positions. If teacher quality is indeed the single most important variable affecting student achievement (Guarino, Santibañez & Daley, 2006), the retention crisis among new teachers represents yet another obstacle to achieving equity in already resource-poor communities. See, for example: Darling-Hammond, L. (2003). Keeping good teachers: Why it matters, what leaders can do. Educational Leadership, 60(8), 6-13; Futernick, K. (2007). A possible dream: Retaining California teachers so all

students can learn. Sacramento, CA: Center for Teacher Quality, Office of the Chancellor, California State University; Guarino, C., Santibañez, L. & Daley, G. (2006). Teacher recruitment and retention: A review of the recent empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 76(2), 173-208; Ingersoll, R. (2001). Teacher turnover and teacher shortages: An organizational analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 499-534; Johnson, S. & Birkeland, S. (2003). Pursuing a “sense of success”: New teachers explain their career decisions. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 581-617; Quartz, K., Thomas, A., Anderson, L., Masyn, K., Lyons, K. & Olsen B. (2008). Careers in motion: A longitudinal retention study of role-changing among early-career urban educators. Teachers College Record, 110(1), 218-50. 7 For a discussion of multicultural pre-service training, see Gibson, C. Promising multicultural pre-service teacher education initiatives. Radical Pedagogy, 6(1). For a detailed treatment of transformative multicultural education, refer to Vavrus, M. (2002). Transforming the multicultural education of teachers: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press. For culturally reflective practice, see Gay, G. & Kirkland, K. (2003). Developing cultural critical consciousness and self-reflection in pre-service teacher education. Theory into Practice. 42 (3), 181-87.