For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)

by Christopher Emdin

One of the chief goals of coteaching in reality pedagogy is to train the teacher to teach in a way that reflects the needs of the student by creating classroom spaces where teachers are being trained by their students. Coteaching in this model is predicated on the fact that the teacher cannot fully meet the needs of students unless the students have an opportunity to show the teacher what they need and then demonstrate what good teaching looks like for them. This requires the teacher to be transparent about aspects of their work that students do not usually know about. The teacher has to present the students with the larger contexts/information that shape how and why they teach the way they do so that the students can model how to work with the existing structures/resources and still be effective. I argue that the resilience required for being neoindigenous in contemporary America equips young people for being able to navigate the challenges of urban teaching.