ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the professional lives of graduates of an urban diversity teacher education program designed to prepare teachers to integrate issues of equity, diversity, and social justice into all aspects of their curriculum and pedagogy. Pedagogies that seek to develop a critical perspective toward social difference, that is, critical multiculturalism, antiracism, feminism, antiableism, antihomophobia, anticlassism, and other forms of antioppressive education, have not been fully embraced by pre-service and in-service teachers. In fact, the research literature points to a vibrant continuum of resistance from teacher candidacy to certified practitioners in classrooms. Urban Diversity graduates were strategic in giving voice and representation to minority group parents and the inner-city, ethno-racial communities from which they come. Dissatisfaction with dominant group, middle-class “centricity” of their schools’ learning materials and the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of the “other” has often driven parents into conflict and unproductive relationships with the school.
