Subject-Matter Experts in Urban Schools

Abstract

This study explored how two mathematics/science subject-matter experts (Fellows) conceptualized urban classrooms and the students they worked with for a year, how they negotiated academic achievement with cultural and sociopolitical competence, and how their identities as educators were co-constructed and enacted. Using grounded theory, Fellows' weekly journals were analyzed using Ladson-Billing's three tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy. The Fellows' journeys point to the formation and presence of a prevalent tenet in their identities as urban educators, to the difficulty of integrating all three tenets, and to the tensions that educators experience as they try to become sociopolitically critical.