Inclusion in Urban Educational Environments (PB)

This book is motivated by our work with students and their families in urban communities, and the urgent imperativeto address the endemic educational and societal inequities that pervade the lives of urban students, particularly those who live
in poverty, are of minority and immigrant backgrounds, and are otherwise marginalized within current educational discourses
and practices. In spite of the fact that over the last three decades policy makers, educators and communities across the globe
have called for in-depth structural adjustments to urban education, these changes are rarely evidenced in the academic and
practitioner spheres. On the contrary, guided by normative assumptions that ignore the realties of students' lives, narrow outsider
notions of what ought to be continue to focus on deviance and constrain urban students within restrictive boundaries.
These underlying discourses, in the form of deficit beliefs, thoughts, and actions, shape urban research, theory, and practice
and blind prospective change agents to students' strengths, and delimit the transformative potential of social justice praxis
within urban environments. This volume brings together a range of scholars from Canada and the United States that present a
variety of different lenses on issues of diversity, equity and social justice in urban schools. Their analyses highlight the richness
and complexity of urban education, and illustrate how multiple theoretical and practical configurations of difference
impact students, their families and communities, and facilitate or hinder the creation of inclusionary learning environments.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; PART I: INTERSECTING EXCLUSIONS WITHIN SCHOOL CULTURE; Exclusion in Urban Schools and Communities, Jim Ryan; Understanding School Culture: In/Exclusion Within Year-book Discourses, Rene Antrop-Gonzalez, Dehra Freedman, Jennifer L. Snow-Gerono, Anne L. Slonake, Pey-chewn DuoPey-chewn Duo, and Hsiu-Ping Huang; PART II: SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND ABILITY; Reflecting on Mary H. Wright Elementary: Ideologies of High Expectations in a "Re-Segregated" School", Susan L. Schramm-Pate, Rhonda B. Jeffries, and Leigh Kale D'Amico; Seeing the Glass as Half Full: Meeting the Needs of Underprivileged Students Through School-Community Partnerships, Catherine Hands; Flipping the Special Education Coin: The Heads and Tails of Administering Schools for Students with Different Needs, Lindy Zaretsky; PART III: GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY; Gender: A H.O.T. (Higher Order Thinking) Link in Educating Urban Students, Amy Barnhill; LGBTQ Students in Urban Schools: Sexuality, Gender, and School Identities, Dominique Johnson; My Favorite Martian: The Cry for Visibility of Sexual Minorities in Urban Schools, Kevin Alderson; Urban Girls Empowering Themselves through Education: The Issue of Voice, Gunilla Holm and Bill Cobern; PART IV: RACE AND ETHNICITY; Black Boys Through the School-Prison Pipeline: When "Racial Profiling" and "Zero Tolerance", Collide R. Patrick Solomon and Howard Palmer; White Fragility: I'm Leaving, Robin DiAngelo; Anne Frank Teaches Teachers About the Holocaust, Leslie Shore; Addressing Multicultural and Antiracist Theory and Practice With Canadian Teacher Activists, Darren Lund; PART V: TOWARD INCLUSION IN SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES; Support That Matters: A Case Study in Raising the Achievement of Economically Vulnerable Youth, Norman Rowen and Kevin Gosine; Framing Equitable Praxis: Systematic Approaches to Building Socially Just and Inclusionary Educational Communities, Brenda J. McMahon and Denise E. Armstrong; About the Authors.