Urban Residents’ Place-Based Funds of Knowledge: An Untapped Resource in Urban Teacher Residencies

Abstract

Teachers who attended urban schools as students are uniquely positioned to understand both the structural context that urban schools operate within and the many funds of knowledge that urban students bring to school. The purpose of this study is to examine the funds of knowledge that individuals who have been students in urban schools and now wish to teach in a particular city in the northeastern United States bring to an urban teacher residency program. In this article, we describe these urban residents’ funds of knowledge, and argue that residents describe an emerging place-based pedagogical content knowledge.

Keywords

urban teacher residencies urban social diversity teacher education urban education

As I consider all of the different aspects of my life, all the groups and affiliations to which I am a part, I would say that I identify most strongly as being a [native of this city]. Born and bred in this city, it has shaped much of who I am as a person.

—Urban Resident (Autobiographical Analysis)

Introduction

A large body of literature documents demographic disparities between teachers and students in urban public schools. In particular, this research notes that compared with their students, teachers in urban public schools are much more likely to be White, female, middle-class, and from suburban school systems (cf. Frankenberg, Taylor, & Merseth, 2009; Watson, 2012). As a result, teacher educators and researchers have expressed concern that many preservice teachers in urban teacher preparation programs “are not familiar with the unique assets children in the city bring to the classroom” or the structural inequities that affect urban students and schools (Bales & Saffold, 2011, p. 5). In addition, many teacher educators across the United States also do not necessarily have an in-depth knowledge or lived experience of the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of urban education (Obidah & Howard, 2005), making it difficult for these teacher educators to prepare preservice teachers to teach in urban settings.

Instead, many teacher education programs use “urban” as a synonym for “culturally diverse,” or as a euphemism for deficit-based and often racialized characterizations of students, regardless of where those students live or attend school (Frankenberg et al., 2009; Watson, 2012; Weiner, 2000). Although urban places are often culturally diverse, reducing urban to only represent students from minoritized racial backgrounds means that even teacher education programs that purport to prepare teachers for urban schools may focus only on individual or singular student characteristics, such as students from a single racial group, as opposed to urban as a dynamic melange of multiple cultures, races, histories, and languages that are continuously interacting and, therefore, transforming all within unique contextual, political, bureaucratic, and organizational settings and structures (Donnell, 2007; Oakes, Franke, Quartz, & Rogers, 2002; Weiner, 2000, 2002). Teacher education programs that ignore the many unique aspects of teaching and learning in cities have the potential to perpetuate structural inequities because “applying the same rules to unequal groups often can generate unequal results” (McCullough & Ryan, 2010, p. 156).

However, teachers who attended urban schools as students are uniquely positioned to understand both the structural context that urban schools operate within and the many funds of knowledge that urban students bring to school. These teachers, who were urban students themselves, are also more likely to teach in urban systems, including their home districts, than in suburban or rural school systems (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005). These teachers represent an untapped potential resource within urban teacher education, but there is limited research on the funds of knowledge that individuals who were themselves students in urban schools bring to teacher education programs or to teaching.

The purpose of this study is to examine the funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), or “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge” (p. 133) that individuals who have been students in urban schools and now wish to teach in a particular city in the northeastern United States bring to an urban teacher residency program. We do not mean to suggest that people who grow up in cities never internalize dominant, negative discourses about teaching and learning in urban schools, or that only those who grew up in cities can or should teach in cities. However, we argue that these individuals also bring a wealth of knowledge about urban places that can be useful for teacher education programs. This study draws upon the idea of “resource pedagogies” (Paris, 2012), which aim to build upon and honor the many resources that traditionally marginalized groups, such as urban students, bring to school rather than deficit-based or subtractive (Valenzuela, 1999) pedagogies that aim to eliminate or substitute those resources to make urban students conform to the suburban norm (cf. Watson, 2012).

In this study, we draw upon the distinct but related notions of funds of knowledge and capital to describe what urban residents bring to teacher education programs. The idea of funds of knowledge arose from ethnographic, anthropological studies that sought to gain a better understanding of what Mexican American families knew rather than assuming that differences in knowledge represent deficiencies (e.g., Moll et al., 1992). Funds of knowledge arise from households and communities, and are often transmitted to young people in ways that differ from how knowledge is typically transmitted by schools (e.g., Kiyama, 2010). The knowledge that is transmitted may also be different from what is valued by and taught in schools (e.g., Kiyama, 2010; Moll et al., 1992). Ideas of social and cultural capital arise from sociology and are similar to funds of knowledge, but with the key distinction that capital has value to members of the dominant culture, while funds of knowledge are not necessarily recognized or valued by schools and other official institutions (Kiyama, 2010). However, the distinction between funds of knowledge as non-dominant, and capital as dominant, is not always clearly delineated; some researchers also argue that there can be non-dominant forms of capital, which arise from non-dominant groups (e.g., Poyatos Matas & Bridges, 2008, 2009).

Our study takes place within an urban residency model of teacher education that is supported by a federally funded grant. As a result, we refer to the participants in this study as “urban residents” drawing upon multiple meanings of the word “resident”: one who lives in a particular place for a long time, and one who is a member of a teacher residency program. The purpose of this residency model is to recruit, prepare, and retain highly qualified teachers who have the deep contextual knowledge necessary to teach in a particular urban district. The residency program is structured to blend theory and practice, including intense course work coupled with a yearlong placement in a school within the district. After receiving certification, residents are required to teach for 3 years within the district.

Conceptualizing Urban

Urban teacher residencies have been created with the understanding that teacher education should be context specific because urban schools face distinct institutional challenges (Matsko & Hammerness, 2014; Oakes et al., 2002; Weiner, 2000; Williamson, Apedoe, & Thomas, 2016), and can provide unique avenues of support through community and social support networks (Gadsden & Dixon-Roman, 2017; Oakes et al., 2002). However, the term “urban” is highly contested and often poorly defined (cf. Gadsden & Dixon-Roman, 2017; Milner, 2012; Weiner, 2000). In this section, we describe some common uses of the word “urban” in U.S. education, and explain what we mean when we use this term. Although we recognize that “urban” is not generally employed as a neutral term and, in fact, is often used negatively (Gadsden & Dixon-Roman, 2017), we argue that the word “urban,” like cities themselves, encompasses great diversity, including many assets that can benefit teaching and learning, in addition to the more commonly identified challenges.

In U.S. education, urban as a descriptor is most frequently used to refer to people and groups of people, particularly when those people belong to minoritized racial groups (Watson, Charner-Laird, Kirkpatrick, Szczeslul, & Gordon, 2006), sometimes regardless of whether those people actually live in cities or not (Milner, 2012). Related to deficit-based discourses surrounding students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, urban is also often used as a euphemism specifically to represent “the dangerous, the bad neighborhoods” (Steinberg, 2010, p. xi). As a result, living in an urban environment is often considered to be inherently risky for urban inhabitants (O’Connor, Mueller, & Neal, 2014), implying that teaching in an urban setting should have the goal of trying to separate or protect students from their supposedly problematic families, cultures, and communities (Hollingworth & Archer, 2010). This understanding of “urban” obscures the cultural and social capital that does exist in urban communities, the funds of knowledge that urban students bring to school with them, and the ways in which teachers can and do leverage the human and other resources found in cities.

Definitions of urban are also spatially and structurally grounded, referring to places with a high-density of people and built structures, such as cities (Gadsden & Dixon-Roman, 2017). Similarly, the U.S. Census Bureau (Federal Register, 2010) notes that “urban areas” are defined primarily by population size and density. Discussions of urban education are less likely to look at the affordances that having many people and institutions close together can offer schools, such as opportunities to collaborate with a variety of community-based organizations to enhance teaching and learning.

In defining “urban,” for the purpose of this study, we start simply with “in, relating to, or characteristic of a city” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017). In conceptualizing a “city,” we draw heavily from Jane Jacobs’s (1992) description of cities as examples of “organized complexity” (p. 433). She emphasizes “the immense numbers of parts that make up a city, and the immense diversity of those parts,” noting both that “[d]iversity is natural to big cities” (p. 143) and that “big cities are natural generators of diversity” (p. 145). She thinks of diversity not only as racial diversity but as diversity across types of businesses, uses of land, people, and all other aspects of city life.

We also draw upon sociology of place (Gieryn, 2000) and argue that a city has (a) a unique and bounded geographic location; (b) material form that is worked by people and that mediates social processes, such as racial segregation or socioeconomic mobility; and (c) investment with meaning and value. The term “urban” is a way of categorizing a particular type of place, that tends to take particular forms (e.g., large size, dense built environment), and mediate particular types of social processes (e.g., ethnic enclaves, racial segregation), and investing it with the meanings and values that we have described in this section. This conceptualization of urban recognizes cities as socially and discursively constructed “texts” (Daniel, 2010) that do not have inherent, unitary meaning. These definitions take into account not only the material or “real” aspects of cities, such as officially designated boundaries, population density, or tall buildings, but also the “imagined,” which includes frequently contradictory ideas about diversity, sophistication, and pathology (Leonardo & Hunter, 2007) that are associated with cities as well.

Although discussions of “urban” in education and teacher education frequently focus exclusively on student characteristics, such as race and socioeconomic status, navigating urban in teacher education involves attending to sociological, perceptual, ideological, political, ecological (Gruenewald, 2003), and affective (Perumal, 2015) aspects of place. Teaching in urban schools requires racial, cultural, sociopolitical (Howard & Milner, 2014), and bureaucratic knowledge (Oakes et al., 2002), in addition to pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). All of these understandings and skills must be addressed within urban teacher education as well. To do so, teacher education programs can draw upon the funds of knowledge of urban residents as a resource.

Method

In this qualitative case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), we examined the funds of knowledge that 25 urban residents bring to an urban teaching residency program. Although urban educational systems have frequently been colonized by reforms calling for standardized curricula that are “elitist, lack relevance to local realities and are often at variance with indigenous knowledge systems, values and beliefs” (Crossley & Tikly, 2004, p. 149), we argue that locally produced urban knowledges can and should be used in schools as well.

Specifically, we sought to answer the following research questions:

Research Question 1: What funds of knowledge do residents who attended urban schools bring to a place-conscious urban teacher residency program?

Research Question 2: How do these urban residents articulate how they plan to leverage their funds of knowledge to promote learning among urban students?

Our Positionalities

All four of the authors in this study identify as urban ourselves. We have experience as both students and teachers in great cities (Jacobs, 1992) across the world including the Northeastern U.S. city where this study takes place, Chicago, Dublin, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ankara. We believe that our personal and diverse experiences with urban settings necessarily mediate our interpretations of the data. In particular, our experiences with urban education have led us to believe that urban places and inhabitants have many assets and strengths that can be drawn upon in education, and that are frequently overlooked by much existing research.

Specifically, the first author attended public school from kindergarten through 12th grade in the district that this study takes place within, then worked as a paraprofessional and teacher in this district’s public schools. She is now an assistant professor in the same city, and worked in the program being studied as a graduate research assistant, course instructor, and resident supervisor. The second author created and directs the program in question. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Singapore, two dense and diverse world cities. A first generation immigrant, she has spent the last 30 years living and working in the city where the study takes place. With the exception of middle school, she has taught all K-12 grades, working with minoritized students and students with disabilities. The third author resided in the district in which the study takes place for 3 years and was employed with the program as the Partnership Coordinator. She worked for 13 years as a special education and English as an additional language teacher in Dublin, Ireland, where she is now an assistant professor. Prior to this, she completed a teacher education program in a northeast city and was a student from first to eighth grade in a public school in Chicago. The fourth author attended public school from kindergarten through doctoral education in Ankara, Turkey. She completed her doctoral education in curriculum and instruction program at a large public university in the same city, where she also worked for 8 years as a research assistant. Currently, she is working as an assistant professor at a large private university in the same city.

As a result, we speak with a voice that is inclusive of our own knowledges (Goodwin, 2010) of urban school systems, and which articulates the “existence of multiplicities of lived experiences, identities, and histories” (Goodwin, 2010, p. 3126) of those who live, teach, and learn in cities. Specifically, we began this study with the knowledge that cities and urban residents, like all places and people, not only face many problems but also offer great wealth of opportunities for teaching and learning, and that a better understanding of these resources offers a more complete picture of urban education than can be presented in prevalent deficit-based characterizations of urban.

Context

Our study takes place in a federally funded, urban teacher residency program designed to recruit and prepare teachers to teach in public schools in a large, Northeastern U.S. city. The 14-month graduate program leads to a master’s degree and certification in the fields of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Teaching Students With Disabilities (TSWD). The program is structured to blend theory and practice through a combination of intense course work and a yearlong placement in a local public school. After receiving certification, the residents are required to teach for 3 years within the City school district. Residents also have access to an induction program during their first 2 years of teaching that is supported by program staff, induction mentors, and their colleagues.

The city where the residency program resides is large and diverse. According to city government and school district websites, more than a third of city residents were born abroad, with more than half of city residents speaking a language other than English at home. Children in this public school system speak over 175 languages, and the district offers a variety of bilingual programs in languages such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Haitian-Creole, Korean, Polish, Yiddish, and Spanish. The city has a variety of community-based organizations as well, including many cultural and religious institutions, museums, theaters, parks and nature centers, and numerous non-profit and non-government agencies. City schools exist within a complex bureaucratic structure whereby they are organized into networks and districts which do not necessarily overlap and which provide different resources, such as professional development, or set different policies for schools.

Participants

We used criterion sampling to identify urban residents as participants for the study. Of 82 residents who participated in four cohorts of the residency program, 25 “urban residents” self-identified as having grown up and attended schools in cities in their admissions essays or course assignments. We chose to include all urban residents in this study rather than just the 17 residents who had attended schools in the program city because urban residents from a variety of cities all explicitly articulated a connection with the program city, which, at some point, they planned to use as teachers.

As indicated in Table 1, 20% of the participants identified as male and 80% of them identified as female, which is similar to the United States’s overall teacher gender distribution. The recruitment strategy of this residency program also targeted specific groups considering their racial and cultural diversity. As a result, 80% of urban residents identified as individuals of color (i.e., as Black or African American; Hispanic or Latina/o; and/or Asian American) and 20% of them identified as White; like urban students, urban residents in this program were much more racially diverse than the general population of teachers in the United States.

Table 1.

Participant Information.

Gender		Race/ethnicity		City
Female	Male	Person of color	White	Originally from residency city	Originally from other U.S. city	Originally from European city
20	5	20	5	17	7	1

Data Sources

This case study draws upon three qualitative data sources: admissions essays, autobiographical analyses, and Culturally Relevant Teaching and Social Justice Education (CRTSJE) essays (available for three of the four cohorts). Across these written documents, residents described their interest in a place-conscious urban teacher residency program, their thoughts on issues that urban schools confront, and their reflections on their personal history regarding urban schools, which afforded them certain knowledge to bring to the residency program. In addition, residents also expressed their beliefs about the role of place in educating urban public school students.

We did not have CRTSJE essays from the first cohort, which included seven urban residents. In addition, two other documents were missing from participants who did not complete all program requirements. However, we had at least two documents from each participant, allowing us to get a sense of how each resident engaged with place across multiple data sources. Because the purpose of this study was to gain a sense of the diverse ways participants thought about place rather than to compare participants or groups, missing data are also unlikely to bias results. Altogether, our data consisted of 66 total documents for the 25 urban residents, or two to three documents per resident.

Admissions essays

As part of the application process, prospective residents were asked to write a personal statement explaining why they were applying to the urban teacher residency program. The prospective residents were then asked to respond to two additional essay prompts which had the applicants identify and describe critical issues surrounding urban schools, reflect on their own experiences with urban schools, and discuss their potential contribution in relation to the issue(s) in urban education they had highlighted. We included the admissions essays because they asked residents to articulate their beliefs and assumptions around the role of place in urban education before entering the program. These articulations suggested the underpinnings of their perspectives, and the funds of knowledge that they bring to the urban residency.

Autobiographical analysis paper

The autobiographical analysis paper, completed midway through the residency program, also asked residents to reflect on their past experiences, including their experiences as students in urban schools. We utilized the autobiographical analysis paper as a data source to uncover how the residents described their own lived experiences and assumptions regarding the role of place in urban education.

CRTSJE essays

As emerging teachers in urban schools, residents are asked to demonstrate their understandings of culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and social justice education in the CRTSJE essays by reflecting on the key principles of those two conceptual frameworks. Residents are also invited to reflect on their personal experiences that speak to these principles in a negative or positive way. We selected the CRTSJE essays because they describe how residents plan to leverage their place-based funds of knowledge to promote learning among urban students.

Data Analysis

Data analysis was performed by a research team consisting of four researchers who have all experienced teaching and learning in urban schools. We coded data inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Marshall & Rossman, 2012), looking for examples of residents writing about cities and/or city schools. We then grouped codes into larger categories such as “navigating bureaucracies.”

Each data source was coded by at least two researchers, and we met weekly to discuss new themes that we found, as well as new codes that we were generating. We also looked for tensions within themes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007), ways in which residents’ articulations of what it meant to be from and teach in a particular city differed within each document, across documents, and across residents. For example, residents occasionally expressed contradictory ideas across and within documents about urban students, both drawing upon dominant deficit-based ideas about urban communities and rejecting those ideas, sometimes in the same piece of writing.

All researchers coded the three data sources using the Dedoose software program, version 7.0.16.

Findings

Urban residents described ways that they planned to draw upon the multicultural capital they had acquired as students in diverse urban schools, and their understandings of how to navigate large urban bureaucracies to benefit their current and future students in this particular city’s schools. Specifically, we saw examples of residents writing about multicultural capital in 60 of the 66 documents we analyzed; each resident addressed some aspect of multicultural capital in at least one document. We saw evidence of urban residents’ understandings of how to navigate urban structures in 57 of the 66 documents; each resident addressed navigating urban structures in at least one document. In this section, we describe these funds of knowledge and argue that residents describe an emerging place-based PCK.

Multicultural Capital

The urban residents in our study exhibited an implicit awareness of various aspects of multicultural capital (Poyatos Matas & Bridges, 2008, 2009), which includes human, cultural, physical, social, and natural capital. These non-dominant forms of capital (Coleman, 1988) represent a fund of knowledge that urban residents brought to this urban teacher residency program. Specifically, residents described ways in which they planned to draw upon the communities where they taught; the role of culture in education; the benefits of diversity across language, ethnicity, religion, and immigration status; tapping students’ multicultural funds of knowledge; residents’ own positionalities as insiders and/or outsiders in various settings; the role of privilege in education; and an awareness of biases and stereotypes related to different multicultural groups. These codes were all grouped together as examples of multicultural capital.

All residents spoke about their own multicultural backgrounds in response to explicit course assignments. In these assignments, the urban residents each sought to understand, embrace, and incorporate their students’ multicultural knowledge and understandings in the classroom in at least one assignment; 19 of the 25 residents addressed multicultural capital in each piece of their work. In this way, urban residents disrupted deficit-based notions of diversity as a problem that needs to be solved in urban classrooms, and spoke of ways in which they planned to leverage the diversity found in urban schools to promote and enhance student learning. For example, residents spoke positively of the benefits they received from attending urban schools with diverse student populations, including “putting oneself in someone else’s shoes or looking through a lens other than one’s own” and being “open to different points of view.”

As residents spoke about their experiences and schooling in urban settings, they expressed how their backgrounds allowed them to be culturally sensitive and empathetic to students in their preservice classrooms, leading to better relationships with students. One resident described how her experiences permitted her to connect with students, writing, “Commonalities, not necessarily based on race, but shared experiences allowed me to reach the students” (Abigail, Same City as Residency). In this case, the resident spoke of using cultural capital and knowledge of place to mediate human capital. Her knowledge and skills were infused with and enhanced by her cultural insight and experience.

Many residents acknowledged that the social and cultural capital they had previously acquired was individual and unique. Ten of the 25 participants in this study described looking for ways to understand the diverse ways in which different people experienced particular cities and urban education. For example, one noted that “even though I am from [the same city as my students], I need to acknowledge that I cannot identify with all of my students’ experiences outside of school.” Beyond the recognition that they had different experiences from their students, the urban residents displayed an openness in understanding their students’ cultural capital:

I will also be a learner in this process as I get to know each of my student’s backgrounds including, but not limited to, their ethnicity, immigration experiences, language, traditions, etc. I want to be able to have uncomfortable discussions that really make my students think critically about their role within the fight against normalcy and injustice; things that cannot be found in their textbooks. (Mia, Same City as Residency)

Mia expressed her understanding that each of her student’s backgrounds is of consequence. She speaks of promoting the development of multicultural capital within the critical classroom dialogues she wishes to facilitate, and she voices an assets-based view of her students’ capital. Maintaining assets-based beliefs toward urban students is crucial; teachers’ beliefs about their students directly affect the learning opportunities that teachers make available (Kyles & Olafson, 2008; Lavigne, 2013; Nadelson et al., 2012; Villegas, 2007).

Most residents described using their funds of knowledge to enrich the curriculum of their classrooms, including specific instances where they fostered and developed stories from students’ lives and communities, which promotes critical thinking about multiple perspectives and contributes to residents’ praxis (Freire, 2000) and students’ academic achievement (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014). For example, the majority (72%) of urban residents wrote about drawing upon their students’ funds of knowledge. The resident below spoke of the use of the natural capital of the students’ experiences to develop the cultural capital of the classroom by partnering with community resources:

I asked students to write about what matters to them most, the people or ideas in their lives that you lived for. Their work was profound, personal and political. At the end of the semester, they compiled their writings into an autobiographical portfolio that, as a part of the program, would be archived in the [A City Museum]. Aside from myself who valued and celebrated their voices, there was an authentic audience. (James, Same City as Residency)

Besides the students’ own lived experiences, this resident used multicultural, community-based resources such as after-school programs and public spaces. Other residents used festivals, community hubs, and religious centers in developing curriculum and supporting students. In addition to the pedagogical knowledge and supports the residents accessed through developing relationships and participating in local city experiences, the use of multicultural community-based resources assisted them in understanding the ways to implement critical and meaningful approaches to developing multicultural capital through creating spaces where students can engage with each other, supporting students’ identity and providing authentic social and political issues for students to critically examine.

Residents also indicated that they were prepared to incorporate the cultural capital they acquired in their urban backgrounds within their classrooms by creating a multicultural awareness and decolonizing resources (physical capital). For example, one resident wrote, “a practice I will develop is bombarding students with images and information on the countless successful representatives from underrepresented populations, starting with myself” (Abigail, Same City as Residency). Here the resident’s self-identification of her own positionality coupled with an awareness of the larger context of underrepresented populations provides the opportunity for creating enriched learning experiences that intentionally mean to shape learning environments into more equitable ones (Ladson-Billings, 2004).

In addition, nine residents described how they would use the multilingual social capital of their students to empower linguistic knowledge. For example, one resident described engaging multilingual students as translators, noting that “this is especially helpful if the student’s native language is one I do not speak.” Instead of maintaining a monolingual classroom and by expressing a desire to embrace students’ linguistic heritage and challenge assumptions about linguistic dominance, this resident drew upon both cultural and social capital to view linguistic diversity as an asset rather than as a barrier. By identifying and connecting the many resources that cities and urban students offer, including their multicultural capital, residents spoke about reinhabiting cities and urban education for the benefit of urban students. This finding aligns with the notion that there is a “strong relationship among personal life experiences, beliefs, and how one teaches” (Kyles & Olafson, 2008, p. 501): personal life experiences as an urban student can positively influence urban teachers’ beliefs and practices.

Navigating Bureaucratic and Political Structures

Urban residents also described using their place-based funds of knowledge to navigate, and help students navigate, the larger bureaucratic and political structures that urban education happens within rather than simply thinking about cultural diversity as the only important characteristic of urban education. Researchers have argued that urban educators must learn to be comfortable with “working the system” (Donnell, 2007) that they find themselves educating within. To work the system, urban teachers must understand and navigate unique bureaucratic structures, community and social support networks, and the urban political economy (Oakes et al., 2002), in addition to being able to leverage the assets of culturally diverse students and having PCK (Howard & Milner, 2014). The urban residents in this study demonstrated an awareness of the importance of navigating urban structures, and each offered at least one way to do so.

The majority of urban residents (17 of 25) identified as coming from the specific city where the residency was housed and, as a result, were able to name specific bureaucratic or political structures within that city. However, the remaining residents also planned to draw upon histories of, for example, community activism in their home cities, as teachers in the city where they now resided. Those residents spoke about the strategies they had learned that they planned to apply to navigating bureaucracies in a new city.

For example, Abraham (Same City as Residency) expressed his awareness of the particular bureaucratic and political structures that many urban students and schools are embedded within, acknowledging that many schools were not able to acquire adequate resources, such as art supplies, from the city department of education. However, Abraham described how he could use his understanding of the city where he had grown up, and was currently learning to teach in, to make sure that his students had what they needed. Because of his funds of place-specific knowledge, he was able to name specific organizations that he could utilize as a teacher, arguing that “I see our City as a resource, one that can help even if others fall short. With programs such as [X], where an educator has access to a warehouse full of art supplies and materials for free, or [Y] where students take part in a free writers’ workshop.” This resident articulated his ability to understand and navigate the city’s bureaucratic structure, which did not distribute resources equitably among city schools (Eskenazi, Eddins, & Beam, 2003), by looking outside of the department of education to find other sources of educational opportunity for his students.

Similarly, Melanie (Same City as Residency) described how having a child who had received special educations services had taught her about navigating the bureaucratic structures around special education services. In her admissions essay, she noted that she had

pursued some training from various agencies, such as [a state agency], on how to support and advocate for those with disabilities. Most important of all, I help my [child] navigate the public school system, elicit support from the teachers and therapists, and remain successful academically.

Melanie expressed her understanding that students receiving special education services in this particular urban public school system would not necessarily be given access to services and resources that they are entitled to; parents and teachers must continuously advocate for students by seeking out those resources. Because of the experience she had navigating this city’s special education bureaucracy, she felt confident that she had the specific bureaucratic knowledge to help her students receive important services so that they could remain academically successful as well.

Another resident, who hailed from a different city, described how his understanding of federal bureaucratic structures would transfer to his new home and, already in his admissions essay, demonstrated that he understood the importance of understanding the new bureaucratic and political context where he would be teaching to find out how best to help his students. Writing specifically about students who were undocumented immigrants, he argued,

Teachers must be informed on the federal immigration system and immigrant experience, and they must listen to their students to learn how to be resourceful advocates . . . [State] public universities allow all students, regardless of immigration status, to pay in-state tuition rates, and teachers can assist their students in securing the tuition discount and applying for college admission and scholarships. (Gus, Other City)

Here, Gus goes beyond talking about immigration as an abstract concept to discuss in the curriculum, and notes that teachers must help their students navigate specific bureaucratic structures such as the state public university system, regardless of their immigration status. Again, Gus demonstrates awareness that information about college and paying for college might not be made as readily available in urban schools (Knight & Marciano, 2013), and demonstrates not just his willingness, but his knowledge and ability to find and provide that information.

These and other urban residents named specific institutional and bureaucratic structures that they understood from years of lived experience with those structures. Residents planned to use their funds of knowledge about urban political and bureaucratic structures to find resources for their students that might not otherwise be forthcoming, including both material resources and also intangible resources such as an understanding of how to navigate the college-going process in the particular city and state the residency was located within.

An Emerging Place-Based PCK

Thirty years ago, Shulman (1986) argued that trying to distinguish between “content knowledge” and “pedagogical knowledge” was futile, and that a teacher’s content knowledge is important primarily in how it relates to “the dimension of subject matter knowledge for teaching” (p. 9). As a result, he argued that teachers must possess “pedagogical content knowledge” which included not only content knowledge but also knowledge of “the most useful forms of representation” (p. 9) of that knowledge to learners, especially in relation to the particular preconceptions that one’s students are likely to bring that will impact learning. Similarly, teachers’ place-based funds of knowledge are most relevant to educational research and practice to the extent that those funds of knowledge affect teaching and learning. Urban residents described ways in which their place-based funds of knowledge impacted the ways in which they thought about representing their content area and the preconceptions they expected their future students to bring to school.

For example, Abigail (Same City as Residency) drew upon her place-based funds of knowledge to describe how she would teach social studies content to her future students. She wrote that a

student proclaims the negative effect she feels from learning about the same Black people in the same dreadful situations of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, providing access to a plethora of prominent culturally relevant figures will convey to racial minorities that their probability of achieving is not limited to merely a handful of successful individuals . . . One way to accomplish this is by utilizing my free access to many [city] museums to educate myself on the prominent figures of my prospective students that are often left out of textbooks. This professional development is necessary, if I am to effectively teach populations who have historically been told they were unteachable.

This resident argues that it is not enough to include only token references to a few Black individuals in the context of a few historical moments; instead, her students need to see how Black people, and other individuals of color, have contributed to every aspect of U.S. society. Abigail draws upon place-based resources, such as museums, to develop herself professionally to present social studies content differently to her students. She argues that students will connect to and understand historical material better not just when they see themselves represented in the material but when they hear counter narratives that position them differently and negate the pathological refrains they have heard about themselves throughout too much of their schooling. Although many teachers might draw upon local cultural institutions, such as museums, to improve their teaching, this resident demonstrates a personal, place-based understanding of her students’ experiences with the barriers of racism in this city’s schools and curricula. As a result, she also demonstrates her ability to traverse urban political and bureaucratic structures both by identifying specific urban institutions and acknowledging that she will need to take responsibility for using those institutions to develop a more relevant, place-based pedagogy for her students that engages in counter-hegemonic and anti-racist practices to dismantle those barriers of racism.

Another resident planned to draw upon her place-based funds of knowledge to teach English to emerging multilingual students. Hannah (Same City as Residency) argued,

Having some things in common with the children in high needs communities who need English as a second language services gives me a natural connection that will reflect in their achievement and success. Now that I recently completed my degree, I have an opportunity to do something worthwhile. I am passionate and eager to get out there and make a difference in these children’s lives. I know that there will be many challenges; however, having lived in some of the shoes of the children has prepared me far more than what anyone could have ever taught me.

Hannah does not just identify the shared experiences of acquiring an additional language as being helpful to her for understanding how to teach; she notes the importance of coming from a similar community to her future students, and argues that this shared experience of place was the best preparation for teaching. Here, she argues that teaching English requires an understanding of students that her background has provided her. Again, this resident goes beyond identifying a shared common experience with students such as, for example, not understanding the language as a visitor to a particular country, but draws upon her understanding of what it means to have English as an additional language in your home city, and of services in particular communities in the city where she attended school to develop her pedagogical practices.

Similarly, Lily (Same City as Residency) identifies coming from the same place as her students as an important factor in her pedagogical knowledge. She also notes the tension between her desire to communicate with her students in a way that she believes will be most effective for their learning, and her colleagues who come from different places and may likely hold different beliefs about proper communication styles in the classroom. She argues,

Most of the teachers who teach in [this city’s] schools have very little prior exposure to the culture of [this city]. During my residency, this has become a hindrance for me in working collaboratively with the faculty. I speak Ebonics fluently, although less regularly than when I was a child. Ebonics remains the dominant colloquial dialect of English in [this city]. When speaking to students, I grapple between speaking with them on common ground using Ebonics and maintaining the professional barrier established by the use of Standard American English. I do not want to disengage from the professional culture of faculty but I believe students could benefit from hearing a professional relating to their style of communication.

Here, Lily claims that students will benefit from communicating in the “common ground” of a shared dialect. Her understanding of her students, and the mode of communication they might prefer, stems directly from growing up in the same city as her students. She contrasts this awareness with the beliefs of her colleagues, whom she feels do not necessarily understand city culture. Those colleagues are not as responsive to students’ communication styles, and maintain the use of only one dialect. Significantly, Lily knows how to code-switch between two dialects, which is a skill that she can help her students master as well.

Residents draw upon their understanding of content knowledge, such as history or English Language Arts, their students, and the place where they are working to articulate a place-based PCK. Although researchers and educators working in environmental sciences have argued for the importance of understanding the role of place in developing PCK (Chinn, 2012), place plays a significant role in students’ understanding across curricular subjects. This place-based PCK went beyond drawing upon a general understanding of issues such as racism or language-based privilege and included an awareness of how young people in this particular city might encounter these problems and how teachers could best connect with these students-in-place and address these problems.

Discussion and Conclusion

These findings suggest that preservice teachers who self-identify as having been students in urban schools bring particular place-based funds of knowledge to this urban teacher residency program. Urban residents described ways in which they could act as resources for their students, and ways in which they planned to draw upon community resources and funds of knowledge to enhance student learning. Specifically, urban residents in our study reframed cultural diversity as an educational asset that can enhance student learning, and described the many resources that are available in cities for those who know how to find them. In this way, urban residents demonstrated an emerging place-based PCK.

Although some could argue that place-based PCK is “just good teaching,” as some have argued about teaching for social justice (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009) or culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), we argue as well that these urban residents’ descriptions go beyond “merely” teaching well and describe teaching in ways that use place-based resources and address the role of place in students’ lives. In addition, just as Ladson-Billings argued that this “good teaching” did not occur often enough in the classrooms of African American children, we argue that “good teaching” does not occur often enough in urban classrooms. A place-based PCK, like other assets-based pedagogies, will only be enacted if teachers believe that their urban students can be successful (cf. Villegas, 2007). This section describes some of the implications of this study for urban teacher preparation programs.

One implication of this study is that urban teacher education programs should deliberately recruit urban residents to leverage their funds of knowledge to help all preservice teachers better understand the role of place in urban education and develop place-based PCK. Our program uses a variety of strategies to recruit urban residents, and to increase their numbers in our program. One way in which our program has deliberately recruited urban residents is through strategic outreach and advertising. For example, we reach out to the career centers of local city colleges that enroll mostly city students to ensure that local urban residents know about our program. We also advertise through the local city department of education website for those who are specifically interested in teaching in this city. Because urban residents, like all teachers, are more likely to want to work in settings similar to their home districts, individuals who want to teach in this city are more likely to be urban residents. In selecting residents, we look at applicants’ commitment to and knowledge of the residency city. As described in this article, urban residents frequently demonstrate both. In addition, our program offers specific academic supports, such as a writing class. Such targeted supports allow us to admit residents who demonstrate strengths in many important areas, such as place-based funds of knowledge, but who may need some additional academic help to be successful in a rigorous masters’ level program. Teacher education programs can call upon urban residents’ funds of knowledge to facilitate all teachers’ understanding and use of the unique cultural and contextual resources and ways of knowing available to them in an urban context.

One way to draw upon urban preservice teachers’ place-based funds of knowledge is to bring place more explicitly into the preservice teacher education curriculum. Teacher education programs should work to explicitly unpack assumptions around places such as “urban” and “rural” just as they unpack assumptions and biases around race, gender, and dis/ability. In addition, urban residents bring unique and specific knowledge about diverse cultures and navigating bureaucratic structures that can benefit their peers as they become urban teachers.

We do not mean to suggest that it is urban residents’ responsibility to teach their peers and professors about cities, or that urban residents will naturally be better teachers of urban students, any more than we would argue that teachers of color should bear the responsibility for teaching students of color, or that all teachers of color will automatically be successful teaching students of color. Indeed, we saw evidence of some of our urban residents holding or referencing some of the same deficit-based stereotypes about urban students that circulate more widely in discourses of urban education. Specifically, six residents demonstrated examples of deficit-based thinking across six documents. For example, one resident wrote,

Students in inner-city areas are often overexposed to a culture that glorifies promiscuity, fame and wealth over a completed education. Teachers must not assume that students have a positive example at home and become that example. . .These areas offer many disadvantages to students, such as poor health care, broken families, single-parent families, drug and alcohol abuse and violence.

The majority of these examples (four of six) were found in admissions essays, which specifically asked students to address problems in urban education. However, the fact that residents pointed to stereotypes about students and their communities as examples of problems within urban education is troubling. Surprisingly, one urban resident even wrote that “students like myself had no intrinsic motivation to read at home. . .,” lumping herself in with the stereotype that urban students are unmotivated and lacking in family support. These same residents also showed many other examples of assets-based thinking as well, suggesting that challenging these stereotypes is a slow and complex process, and that several urban residents were able to hold multiple and contradictory ideas about urban students, communities, and schools.

Instead, we argue that the lived experiences of all preservice teachers can and should be used and critically examined in teacher education to enhance all students’ understandings of the lived experiences of others without essentializing those experiences. Having a diverse group of urban residents sharing their experiences with urban places in urban teacher residency programs can begin to disrupt unitary and deficit-based ideas about what it means to be an urban student, or to teach and learn in urban schools. Urban residents can become, in essence, place-based resources for urban teacher preparation programs. This leveraging of urban preservice teachers’ funds of knowledge is particularly important because the literature indicates that most teacher educators do not have experience in urban schools themselves.

Although the focus of this study was on residents who identified as coming from cities themselves, we do not mean to suggest that only those who come from cities can teach, or bear the primarily responsibility for teaching, city children. Urban teacher residency programs can prepare preservice teachers from suburban and rural settings to work in urban settings not only through attending to the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of many urban schools but also by preparing preservice teachers to negotiate the bureaucratic and political structures that are unique to large, complex districts found in cities. Again, preservice programs can draw upon the funds of knowledge of urban preservice teachers to help preservice teachers from suburban and rural schools decolonize and re-inhabit urban education.

Finally, we acknowledge that cities in general, and urban education in particular, have had some hard times. However, we agree with Jacobs (1992) that “Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems” (p. 447). The particular types of problems that cities have faced over the course of the 20th century, including regional and national policies that have promoted racial and economic segregation through housing and transportation policies, and that have promoted suburban development at the expense of urban development (Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom, 2004), have led to cities’ associations with minoritized racial groups and poverty. In addition, great cities’ sizes and complexity do pose unique bureaucratic challenges. However, culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2014) pedagogies have demonstrated the power and possibilities of looking at racial groups who have traditionally been viewed negatively through an asset-based lens. Similarly, researchers have documented the diverse funds of knowledge that students from lower socioeconomic status households bring to school (cf. Heath, 1990; Lareau, 2011). These researchers acknowledge that racism and poverty pose unique challenges to students that must be addressed to improve their education, yet refuse to see deficits in the young people themselves. Similarly, urban teacher education programs can acknowledge and work to dismantle the structural inequities that urban schools face while also acknowledging and celebrating the many assets that the young people who study within these schools bring with them each day, and the riches contained within large urban centers. Urban teacher education, and urban teachers, should not focus only on the problems associated with teaching and learning in cities. Instead, they should aim to develop a place-based PCK that draws upon the many unique assets of city inhabitants, such as multicultural capital and an understanding of how to navigate complex bureaucratic and political structures to engage in what is not “just” good teaching for urban students.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

Laura Vernikoff is now affiliated with Touro College, New York, NY, USA and Coleen Horn is now affiliated with Marino Institute of Education, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Urban Teacher Residency Program is supported by the U.S. Office of Innovation and Improvement: Teacher Quality Partnership under Grant #U3365090039.

Author Biographies

Laura Vernikoff is an assistant professor of Special Education (grades 7-12) at Touro College in New York City. Her research focuses on inclusive, culturally relevant education for adolescents with and without disabilities in urban schools.

A. Lin Goodwin is professor of Education and Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on teacher/teacher educator identities and development; multicultural understandings and curriculum enactments; Asian/Asian American teachers and students in U.S. schools; and on international analyses/comparisons of teacher education practice and policy. She is the immediate past Vice President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA)—Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education.

Colleen Horn is a lecturer in Education at Marino Institute of Education (MIE), an associated college of the University of Dublin, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Her interests include Teacher Education, Disabilities Studies and Heritage Language Learning.

Sibel Akin is an assistant professor at TED University. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Curriculum and Instruction Program at Middle East Technical University. She was a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University during her doctoral studies. Her research interests lie at the nexus of quality pre-service and in-service teacher education, elementary teacher education,teacher recruitment, induction, and retention.

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