Disrupting deficit notions of difference: Counter-narratives of teachers and community in urban education

The author reports on research conducted of teachers and their instruction in a US urban public school, with narrative and counter-narrative employed as analytic tools. Central questions guiding the study included: How do teachers’ counter-narratives and experiences influence them in their urban school classrooms? How do teachers’ multiple and varied identities, especially their racial and cultural backgrounds, emerge in their counter-narratives and in their conceptions of and representations of their teaching? And how do teachers’ stories “counter” ways of knowing urban education in the US and influence their interactions with their students and the learning opportunities available in their classrooms? The evidence in the study suggests that although teachers in urban schools may employ pedagogical and curricular tools that differ from many mainstream classrooms, different does not necessarily mean deficit or deficient. The study does not present a romanticized version of the school or those in it; the teachers and students in the study experience adversity and difficulty as is the case with teachers and students in other contexts. However, implications are drawn from the teachers’ successful practices in urban schools to counter, disrupt, and interrupt pervasive discourses that only focus on the negative characteristics of teachers and students in urban schools.