Urban secondary education : poverty, power, class : A pathway to change

Urban secondary education : poverty, power, class : A pathway to change

VTS Thesis Collection
Education, urban -- United States
Education, secondary - - United States

By Leonard Cambra, 2016. "There is an economic divide between educators and students. It is reflective of deeply rooted ideological principles that perpetuate educational inequities. Culture is rooted in socio-economic class. Schools mirror the societies that have created them. The culture of testing directly relates to these ideological principles and injustices. Only a process of co-subjecctivity rooted in a shared human, historic experience could provide a proper fulcrum for conscientization to occur. The poverty simulation was selected to provide faculty this window into a shared experience with the urban poor. Its purpose, to begin a process of 'conscientization' in order to begin a process of structural reform which will improve teaching and learning at the school and raise the percent of students who graduate. Without further professional development and in tandem with other attempted reforms tied to the dominant culture, the immediate results were encouraging, subsequent ones were not. These latter results highlight the need for ongoing professional development to provide a different language expressive of a different reality. To be human is to be relational and exist within a spontaneous dynamic of love fostered in deep respect and understanding but also rooted in challenge and promise. To the fostering of these ends the Poverty Simulation was undertaken as a necessary preamble to comprehensive reforms and adjustments in what we do as urban educators." -- (Abstract)

Cambra, Leonard

See record for print version in VTS Library Catalog.

Virginia Theological Seminary

2016

© Copyright Leonard Cambra, 2016.