ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the “constructions of urbaness” in relation to curriculum making. It focuses on the educational histories of African Americans as a case, to illustrate how the academic discourse of urbanicity, race and curriculum changed over time. Industrial education was taken up in direct conjunction to the discourse that Shaler and other writers discussed during this time about the Negro Problem. Industrial education was the curricular model advanced to meet growing labor demands from industrialization. In 1966, anthropologist Oscar Lewis published a paper that suggested that generational poverty was the result of specific cultural adaptations that emerged in and were transferred generationally by groups who lived in poverty. Urban social science and educational scholarship across the 1980s and 1990s – what scholars refer to as the post-Civil Rights Era – continued to inquire into poverty and disadvantage related to African Americans.
