Education Commons^™

Being Black In U.S. Urban Schools: No Assumptions, Lavada Taylor Brandon, Mary J. Didelot

Essays in Education

To be an African-American student attending a school dominated by working class, urban, minority learners means failure. Working class African-American students are not experiencing education, they are colliding with education. These collisions will continue as long as they are facilitated by the assumptive dominant theories regarding African- American students’ educational experiences. One strategy to constructively disrupt these assumptive theoretical notions buried within current theory is to look to a working class, urban African-American student’s qualitative longitudinal formation of identity as she progresses from student to teacher within the learning process as categorized by Bateson (1972). The understanding gleaned from this …