Inside City Schools : Investigating Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms

This is one of the first books to synthesize and coordinate the work of a national team of teacher researchers who, together, address the difficult issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom. With courage and honesty, experienced English and social studies teachers from four multicultural settings―Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco―grapple with the issues of how best to meet the literacy learning needs of an increasingly diverse school population. They deal with a variety of real issues of teaching within a culturally responsive framework, such as:

• Confronting issues of race and ethnicity in literature, within classrooms and in a larger community
• Helping students deal with neighborhood violence and conditions of poverty
• Designing a multicultural curriculum
• Creating an emotionally safe classroom
• Fostering peer relations among faculty members

Sarah Warshauer Freedman is a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. Elizabeth Radin Simons, codirector of M-CLASS, is the English teacher coordinator of the Puente High School program. Julie Shalhope Kalnin, a former high school English teacher, is a doctoral candidate in language, literacy, and culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Alex Casareno is an assistant professor of education at the University of Portland.