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 livein poverty, are of minority and immigrant backgrounds, and are otherwise marginalized within current educational discoursesand practices. In spite of the fact that over the last three decades policy makers, educators and communities across the globehave called for in-depth structural adjustments to urban education, these changes are rarely evidenced in the academic andpractitioner spheres. On the contrary, guided by normative assumptions that ignore the realties of students' lives, narrow outsidernotions 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 practiceand blind prospective change agents to students' strengths, and delimit the transformative potential of social justice praxiswithin urban environments. This volume brings together a range of scholars from Canada and the United States that present avariety of different lenses on issues of diversity, equity and social justice in urban schools. Their analyses highlight the richnessand complexity of urban education, and illustrate how multiple theoretical and practical configurations of differenceimpact students, their families and communities, and facilitate or hinder the creation of inclusionary learning environments.