e-Journal of Student Research Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2009


The Philadelphia Urban Seminar:

An Authentic Educational Opportunity for Pre-service Teachers

Michelle Piercy

Shippensburg University

Department of Teacher Education Shippensburg University | / 1

e-Journal of Student Research Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2009

Donned in Shippensburg University tee’s and sweatshirts, a few of my fellow Philadelphia Urban Seminar classmates and I were exiting a Wal-Mart in Philadelphia one balmy May night when two African American females suddenly broke away from the entering throng on the opposite side of the vestibule and approached us. An obvious minority amid the sea of predominantly Latino and African American shoppers, our small group consisting entirely of White women instinctively moved closer together to form a tight clump. One of the approaching women, who upon closer examination appeared to be older than the other, pointed to our shirts and asked what we were doing in Philadelphia. Our fears allayed, we explained that we, along with hundreds of other teacher education majors from several other Pennsylvania colleges and universities, were participating in the Philadelphia Urban Seminar where we would gain first-hand, inner city classroom experience for a two week period. Upon learning of our purpose, the woman explained that she was the mother of her female shopping companion, a beautiful sixteen-year-old high school sophomore, and that the two had recently begun the search for a good university. The mother enthusiastically expressed her desire that her daughter attend and graduate from college and she also asked us about Shippensburg University. We were lavish in our praise for our school and reassured her that, among other things, Shippensburg was only a short, three hour drive from Philadelphia – not too close, but not too far, either.

I saw fiery determination in that mother’s eyes as she talked of her hopes and desires for her daughter to have opportunities that she herself had not experienced as a young adult. This authentic, spontaneous interchange revealed to me the universality of parental aspirations for one’s children, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. But I didn’t always feel this way.

The Philadelphia Urban Seminar provided me with invaluable lessons I may never have had without being immersed in an inner city public school whose students’ ethnicity, race and culture were different from my own and where I was a minority. Lessons came in the form of revealed subconscious stereotypes and sweeping generalizations that I had accumulated along the undergraduate trail to becoming a teacher. I also learned of the importance of developing cultural sensitivity for students whose first language is not English or whose ethnic and cultural experiences differ from the mainstream.

Participants in the Philadelphia Urban Seminar have opportunities to honestly examine their attitudes and feelings about inner city schools and students. For example, I brought to the Seminar some widely-held, stereotypical generalizations about inner city parents’ interest in and concern for their children’s academic success. That is, I believed that inner city public school parents were disengaged and disinterested in the scholastic welfare of their children because of their lower socio-economic status with its attendant poverty and lack of education. While the following Urban Seminar Journal reflections express genuine concern and interest in the well-being of the students with whom I worked in Philadelphia, they also reveal some of the stereotypes and generalizations I held about inner city children and their families – stereotypes and generalizations I did not even realize I owned until I later reread my Journal entries:

May 14 (first day in the classroom) – Riding back to LaSalle I felt frustrated that a teacher can expend so much of themselves and do so much good in the course of the school day but I fear that it’s all undone by the parents and homes to which the children return.

May 18 (fourth day in the classroom) – I ache for my students at my school. I worry that theirs is a truly bleak future because of their families’ circumstances. I fear they are trapped here, that they’ll not experience life beyond fatherlessness, poverty, abandonment, crime, abuse and other common human ills of their socio-economic experience.

May 22 (sixth day in the classroom) – [In response to several students’ inquiries about whether I would be staying in Philadelphia with their class through the end of the school year] It pains me that the dependability of my presence in [the students’] classroom will soon vanish from their lives. This is especially poignant because few of these children experience dependable adults or can count on circumstances remaining the same from day to day.

The authentic learning experiences I had throughout the Seminar contradicted ignorant attitudes and perspectives I harbored. For instance, I was introduced to the value of inner city parental school involvement and interested parents’ positive influence upon their school age children at, of all places, an ordinary classroom birthday party.

For my Philadelphia Urban Seminar school placement I was assigned to a third grade class at the Central East Region of the School District of Philadelphia. The class consisted of twenty-two children, ages nine through eleven, of which three were African American and the remainder Latino – one Dominican and the others Puerto Rican. The teacher, Mr. Bright*, a forty-something White male who lived in the suburbs, was married to a working professional and had two children, both of which attended private parochial schools.

After lunch and recess on my first day in Mr. Bright’s class, Mrs. Reyes (of Puerto Rican descent) provided the students with cake, soda, and balloons in celebration of her daughter’s birthday. What began as an ordinary classroom birthday party became for me a powerful tutorial in the positive impact of inner city parental academic encouragement. After the birthday song was sung in both English and Spanish, the cake eaten, the soda drunk, and a couple rousing rounds of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” (a class favorite I was later told) sung, Mrs. Reyes led the class in a discussion about the importance of listening to the teacher, doing their best every day at school, completing class and homework assignments, and not dropping out of school when they got older. A social worker by profession, Mrs. Reyes told the children that getting an education would help them later in life to get good jobs, have a stable home life, and be happy. She highlighted the diligent, daily effort Mr. Bright put forth each day on behalf of each of the students and said that all teachers deserve students’ and parents’ respect and support. The students seemed to really listen and I believe they did so for one reason – like most of them, Mrs. Reyes is Latino.

By advocating the importance of education to children of her culture and ethnicity, Mrs. Reyes served as an invaluable role model as well as an example of the interested inner city parent. Like the African American mother who took advantage of an opportunity to model to her daughter the importance of getting a post-secondary education, Mrs. Reyes also instilled in her child and all the students within the sound of her voice the value of choosing intelligence over ignorance, diligence over slothfulness. Both of these authentic experiences served to amend my erroneous attitudes toward inner city public school parents.

That teachers must seek to be culturally sensitive to students of diverse backgrounds is another lesson gleaned from the Seminar and one that has served me well during course-related assignments and observations beyond Philadelphia. Since participating in the Seminar, I have become more sensitized to the ways some instructional approaches ignore cultural variance among students in the classroom. Two post-Seminar experiences illustrate this well.

About six months after attending the Philadelphia Urban Seminar, I sat face-to-face with a darling, happy Latino kindergarten boy who spoke very little English and with whom I was expected to administer six different literacy assessments. The results of the assessments would be used in an assignment that would constitute the major portion of my course grade and, more importantly, would also be used by the boy’s kindergarten teacher for consideration in developing an appropriate literacy instruction plan. The nature of the literacy assessments did not permit me to administer the tests in Spanish or to accept the student’s answers in Spanish. It quickly became evident that the test instructions that I read verbatim in English, according to stringent assessment scripting, were incomprehensible to my assigned student and, not surprisingly, his responses reflected this. A vital objective of the assessments was to identify students’ emerging literacy strengths, of which my assigned student demonstrated several. But what the assessments inaccurately reflect are the known literacy tools the student already possesses but that I could not ascertain because the test was administered in a language that the child is just beginning to learn.

During another post-Seminar assignment, I observed a Title 1 reading support class in which students were expected to pair pictures of rhyming words. When one of the students, a Latino first-grader, was given a picture of a sled he was unable to identify the correct matching picture of a bed because his cultural experiences did not include sled riding. Both experiences reminded me of the necessary acquisition of a deeper level of cultural sensitivity toward minority students, especially those whose primary language is something other than English and whose cultural prior knowledge differs greatly from that of the student body majority.

Philadelphia Urban Seminar’s encounters, opportunities and realizations rank among the most valuable and authentic experiences thus far in my undergraduate studies. I never could have anticipated or imagined the numerous and varied authentic learning experiences I would have during the Seminar. No typical classroom could have simulated the spontaneous inner city parent encounters at Wal-Mart and during an ordinary classroom birthday party, or a dozen other teachable moments of which I was a participant, witness, or pupil. The educational encounters I had during the Philadelphia Urban Seminar broadened my narrow views of inner city public school education and challenged stereotypes and sweeping generalizations I formerly possessed. And the Seminar also helped me to become a more culturally sensitive pre-service educator; my capacity for critical analysis of instructional methods that ignore the learning needs of diverse students has been enlarged through this invaluable experience.

A common complaint I have heard among fellow undergraduate education majors is that they don’t have enough diverse and authentic classroom experiences. Often they complain that they want more real classroom experiences beyond what their courses, instructors and textbooks offer them. After participating in the Seminar I now say to these pre-service teachers, “Attend the Philadelphia Urban Seminar – you will have real school experiences and you will return home a better individual, teacher and member of society than you were before you went!”

Note: Michelle Piercy is a senior in Shippensburg University.

Names of teachers and students in the article have been changed to respect privacy.

Department of Teacher Education Shippensburg University | / 1