Preparing Teachers for Urban Classrooms

Jacqueline Jordan Irvine is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Urban Education at Emory University. For more than 20 years, her research on the cultural context of teaching and learning and the development of urban teachers has lent new insights   to   educators on teaching in the nation's urban school districts.
Jordan Irvine is the founder and director of the Center for Urban Learning/Teaching and Urban Research in Education and Schools, or CULTURES, which the U.S. Department of Education has recognized as a model of best practices in teacher professional development.
Jordan Irvine also is co-director of The Southern Consortium for Educational Research in Urban Schools. Her book, Black Students and School Failure received the 1991 "Outstanding Book Award" from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education and the "Academic Book of the Year" award from the American Association of College and University Research Librarians.
Her edited volumes include Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools and Critical Knowledge for Diverse Learners. Irvine earned her doctorate from Georgia State University.
Black Issues In Higher Education Senior Writer Michele N-K Collison caught up with Jordan Irvine earlier this month as she gave a lecture at her undergraduate alma mater, Howard University. The following is excerpted from that conversation.

QCan you talk a little about your research for those who are not familiar with you?

AI am a teacher-educator. … My mission is to do research around issues of urban education and, more specifically, I am concerned about issues with teaching African American children, for obvious reasons. Those are the children that tend to do poorest on standardized tests. Those are the children who are labeled as [having] disciplinary problems.
We all know that teaching is about telling, facilitating and delivering knowledge of your field. My work is about identifying what I call different themes of good practice.  For example, African American teachers in the tradition of African American culture talk about teaching as a calling. So, they tend to have a more personal attachment to the students that they teach. What I've been trying to do is identify these attributes that make a good teacher of African American children.
Part of the problem is the number of African Americans that are going into teaching is pitifully small —  they're going into other fields.