Introduction

This chapter intends to engage the issues of urban schools through teacher education, teaching for diversity, and social justice. The chapter also intends for teacher educators, teachers, and cultural workers who are in partnership with these teacher educators and teachers. It focuses on two issues: teacher education institutions and the challenges they encounter in preparing teachers for urban settings, and the challenges of practitioners in providing relevant curriculum and pedagogy in urban schools and communities. In contemporary schooling, formal and informal curriculum, pedagogical approaches, and institution-based learning continue to be restrictive. Regarding the curriculum, America’s gradual recognition and acknowledgment of its growing cultural diversity and its diminishing tendency to embrace the “melting-pot ideology” have given rise to multicultural education within some schools and the teacher education curriculum.