White Urban Teachers Stories of Fear, Violence, and Desire [Paperback]

One seldom thinks of teachers as people locked in existential isolation when their days are spent interacting with others. One unwittingly concludes that a person trained to solve problems and, in the course of time, gain experience managing the awesome role of teaching children knowledge and the ability to use your words, has the skill and articulation to deal with her own insecurities. And if that teacher is white, liberal, and committed to her students, uttering her doubts and insecurities on racialized occurrences within an urban school environment, tends only to mark her with a stigma that few can remove. So she learns to hold it in while laboring to teach her kids to soar. In this, she is living her own version of, what W.E.B. Dubois called, two warring ideals.This is an important book that calls the reader to acknowledge this paradox and consider ways to initiate on-going conversation that is both challenging but respectful. Indeed, it is a call to all who work in urban schools to understand that, as we expect teachers to nurture their students, we must likewise discover ways to nurture the teachers.Audrey Lensmire provides a powerfully engaging opportunity for readers to seriously consider the multiple and varied complexities of being a white teacher in urban classrooms. Anyone interested in resisting simplistic explanations, in favor of seriously examining the ongoing and shifting paradoxes and struggles that white teachers and students of colors experience, should read this important book.Lensmire's book is an ethnographic study of five urban white teachers using a single interview question: Tell me the story of your work as a white teacher. Through the lens of critical race theory and whiteness studies, the author analyzes the words of these teachers, seeking to avoid generalizations or comparisons. She urges the reader to see each teacher's story as an individual experience in order to explore very challenging questions related to race, class, lã5