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The Urban Review

, Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 227–249 | Cite as

The Things they Carry: Ideology in an Urban Teacher Professional Community

  • Jorgelina Abbate-Vaughn
Article
First Online:

Abstract.

This article provides an opportunity to extend the discussion about teacher communities as part of complex school reform models, specifically centered on those communities whose membership is drawn on a semi-voluntary basis. Through a sixteen-month long ethnography, I document the activities of an urban teacher professional community (TPC) at a high school located in a large city in the Northeast, serving a majority of linguistically and culturally diverse students. Guided by Sharp and Green’s definition of teacher ideologies, the study focuses on how TPC members negotiated curriculum, teacher learning, and student discipline, carrying ideologies that impacted the outcomes of the community’s work, originally intended to increase teacher collaboration and foster quality teaching.

Keywords

urban teachers teacher beliefs ideology culturally diverse students high school 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Education- Curriculum and InstructionUniversity of Massachusetts-BostonBostonUSA

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