Preservice Educators' Perceptions of Teaching in an Urban Middle School Setting: A Lesson from the Amistad.

Abstract

(Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Klein, 1999), and they need positive field experiences in diverse urban schools (McIntyre, Byrd, & Foxx, 1996; Reed, 1998). Preparing preservice educators for middle school teaching also poses numerous challenges. Preservice teachers prefer high school to middle school (Sage, 198990), viewing the middle school adolescent as an “uncivilized beast or as a disembodied hormonal surge” (Finders, 1988-99, p. 256) as well as “inherently unruly, unteachable, or perplexing” (Midgely, Feldhauer, & Eccles, 1988, p. 206). Preservice teachers also perceive middle schoolers’ high energy levels in a negative light, and control is often the focus of the conversations about teaching in the middle grades (Finders, 1998-99; Sage, 1989-90). Because preservice teachers’ attitudes seem operationalized before student teaching begins, personal contact and first hand experiences help to influence positive attitudes toward middle school students and lead toward a greater understanding of the characteristics of middle level students and middle level teaching (Sage, 1989-90; Stahler, 1995). The literature strongly suggests that preservice teachers hold numerous assumptions about both urban and middle school settings. This article describes a field experience activity, set in a culturally diverse urban middle school, that examined the culturally charged historical event, the Amistad uprising. In this article we explore what the experience revealed about pre-service teachers’ understandings (and perhaps misunderstandings) of diverse populations of urban middle school students.