If they’ll listen to us about life, we’ll listen to them about school: seeing city students’ ideas about ‘quality’ teachers

Abstract

High school dropout rates in many major urban settings in the United States have remained above 50% for more than three decades. This dropout crisis should now be considered evidence of an endemic lack of appreciation for formal education in city locales. United States federal policy initiatives have concentrated the nation on notions of teacher ‘quality’, but have failed to consider diverse urban youths’ perspectives in these definitions. Grounded in critical pedagogy and action research frameworks, the project on which this paper reports worked with a group of city students, utilising visual sociology methods to explore these youths’ perceptions of what they considered effective or ‘quality’ teachers. Students’ photographs and reflections provided details about some of the causes of the strained relationships with school represented by these graduation rate statistics; what teacher roles and instructional methods might be most successful in countering these trends; and examples of research techniques that move beyond limited language‐focused data through which such practices might be revealed.

Keywords:

• Urban
• High schools
• Visual sociology

Notes

1. All student names are pseudonyms.