Equity & Excellence in Education, 39: 81–90, 2006Copyright c! University of Massachusetts Amherst School of EducationISSN 1066-5684 print /1547-3457 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10665680500478890

Toward Social Justice in Urban Education: A Modelof Collaborative Cultural Inquiry in Urban Schools

Peter C. Murrell, Jr.

The increasing racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity among the populations attending urban schools poses a significantchallenge to providing quality public education. Similarly, few would dispute that, in order to meet this challengeeffectively, teachers must acquire the cultural competency for creating productive and inclusive learning environments,building academic capability among all students, and forging solid relationships with students’ families and communi-ties. Though this view has become an ”official doctrine” among teacher educators, developing cultural competence inactual contexts consisting of urban schools and classrooms has proven a difficult challenge. This article explains a designfor this work called Circles of Co-Practice as a system of practice and inquiry to develop cultural competency in partner-ship activity. The system design and application to the work of urban school-university-neighborhood collaborativesto improve urban education is illustrated with two case instances.

Few would dispute that the increasing racial, cul-tural, and ethnic diversity among the school pop-ulations attending urban public schools poses a

significant challenge to providing quality education forall children (Sleeter, 2001a, 2001b). There also is littledisagreement among teacher educators that successfulurban teachers must develop cultural competency—theability to work successfully and to build academic capa-bility among all students in cultural, social, and linguis-tic settings unlike their own (Leigh, 1998; McAllister &Irvine, 2000). In the educational, health, and social wel-fare literatures, cultural competence refers to a profes-sional’s ability to function and communicate effectivelyin cross-cultural situations (Cross, Bazron, Dennis, &Isaacs, 1989; Davis, 1997; Sue, 1998). In teacher education,the notion of cultural competence (derived from multi-cultural education) additionally implies broader knowl-edge of social justice in practice and cultural context.Social justice here means a disposition toward recogniz-ing and eradicating all forms of oppression and differ-ential treatment extant in the practices and policies ofinstitutions, as well as a fealty to participatory democ-racy as the means of this action. This knowledge of struc-tural inequality in the social, historical, and political con-texts of schooling is what enables teacher candidatesfrom culturally mainstream backgrounds to create social

Address correspondence to Peter C. Murrell, Jr., School of Educa-tion, Center for Innovation in Urban Education, 50 Nightingale Hall,360 Huntington Ave., Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.E-mail: p.murrell@neu.edu

learning environments among diverse student popula-tions of children and youth (e.g., Henz, 2000; Murrell,2002, in press; Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi,2000).

Over the past several years the Center for Innovationin Urban Education (CIUE) has addressed this need forcomprehensive urban teacher competency by research-ing the partnership work of schools of education thatare dedicated to improving the urban schools proximalto their universities. The core issue in our consultativeinquiry concerned the development of cultural compe-tency of individual teachers as well as how cultural com-petence is developed through systems of practice, wherethese systems include the participation of university clin-ical faculty, field-based instructors, school mentors, andpracticing teachers. The focus question was: How dowe create new systems of instructional and professionalpractice such that schools of education (SOEs) might si-multaneously serve and learn from the most distressed,low-performing, and high-need city schools?

Through the Center for Innovation in Urban Edu-cation’s field research, we found a shared view of theintractability of the problems facing urban schools andschool systems. In the structured conversations we con-ducted with members of the professional networks ofuniversity, community, and school personnel in urbansettings, we encountered many urban teachers who wereexperiencing the same struggles and issues of practice ofthree decades ago. These struggles were emblematic ofthe systemic and social-structural issues reminiscent of

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our eons-ago college reading Herbert Kohl’s 36 Children(Kohl, 1990), and Jonathan Kozol’s (1970) Death at an EarlyAge: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Chil-dren in the Boston Public Schools. When we asked the moreexperienced teachers what have been the major innova-tions in advancing theory and practice that have actual-ized advantageous outcomes for urban schools in theirarea, the common sentiment reported was a variant ofthe aphorism “the more things change, the more theystay the same.’’ The clear patterns of social injustice inAmerican schooling have a daily demoralizing impacton the effect work of urban teachers.

One memorable meeting with an intrepid youngwhite male is emblematic of this shared view. TeachingU.S. History in one of the most under-resourced highschools in Chicago, this young man explained that he en-tered teaching because he wanted to make a difference.He told us that he decided to teach in the same severelyunder-resourced high school where he did his studentteaching the year before. The story of his first year wasone filled with disillusionment, disappointment, and iso-lation. He spoke of how the anomie, hopelessness, andlack of commitment in the social environment as con-ditions that snuff out the initiative of young teachers.On the verge of tears, he spoke of how he was not ableto plan for the next day of teaching most evenings be-cause of frustration and exhaustion of the teaching day.He suffered in quiet desperation, struggling to maintaincoherence in his teaching practice while receiving littleencouragement or support. He spoke of how he vowedto leave teaching at the end of each week, and wonderswhy he keeps coming back on Monday mornings.

This kind of experience among urban teachers con-stitutes a timeless, pervasive and all-to-familiar narra-tive, one that has changed little over the past threedecades. This common experience of futility suggests areality of urban practice that seems not to factor into theway the issues of urban education are addressed eitherin the research literature or policy literature. The dis-courses of urban schooling in this era of accountabilityare dominated by a binary conception of achievementwhere there are just two kinds of schools: performing(those that meet their annual yearly progress criteria)and those that are underperforming. The contexts underwhich, and with which, urban teachers must struggle arerarely considered in the same conversations and deliber-ations on school performance. This reality put togetherwith the “successful urban schools’’phenomenon definesthe challenge of our work as urban teacher-educator-researchers, as it has become the imprimatur of whatconstitutes quality in urban schooling.

The “successful urban school’’ phenomenon refers tothose urban schools that get recognized as the “best’’ ur-ban schools based upon such things as improved atten-dance statistics, the relative absence of discipline prob-lems, a low teacher turn over, and a majority of the 8th

grade or 10th grade classes meeting or exceeding na-tional achievement test averages. But the sense of “best’’is relative to the norm of schools in the district, and nottypically “best’’ in the sense that everyone would want tosend their children there. For example, an urban schoolmay earn “best practices’’ status when there is a dra-matic interruption in the decline of their achievementtest scores. In every urban school district there are al-ways a handful of schools that are recognized in thismanner because they show some modicum of improve-ment in their statewide achievement test performancein a landscape of schools that are under-performing ac-cording to that measure. The implicit “gold standard’’for the high-performing urban school has now become(under the No Child Left Behind Act, 2002) the accom-plishment of having brought about improvement in itsschool-wide achievement test scores. This is a virulent,but hidden form of social injustice.

In short, the types of schools that are valorized as “suc-cessful urban schools’’ are typically not recognized assuch by the quality of their teachers or the richness ofthe instruction, but rather by changes in aggregate testscores. This tendency has the unfortunate effect of ex-tolling standards of school performance that most peoplethink are good enough for urban schools but not worthyas standards of schooling for their own children. This isnot to say that urban schools that demonstrate significanttest score gains do not deserve credit. But it is clear thereare other important measures of good practice that arenot being applied to urban education, and that test-basedbenchmarks of good schooling would not be consideredso in more affluent contexts. When aggregated test per-formance becomes the default indicator of “acceptable’’or even “good’’ school performance, we consign a hugeproportion of the children attending those schools to ed-ucation that is neither “acceptable’’ nor “good.’’ Whathappens to the majority of children in a school wherethe upper limit of aspirations for them is merely “av-erage?’’ In many cases, those deemed “successful urbanschools’’ are those in which few teachers would chooseto work, much less send their own children to. These areschools from which few students go to college, or evenearn a high school diploma. These are schools where toomany children learn well their limitations and to recog-nize their small futures.

The mismatch between the test-based emblem of“the successful urban school’’ and the actual experi-ences of teachers and students is representative of many,perhaps most, central city urban public schools—inBoston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and LosAngeles—where the experience of teaching is too oftenone of despair, hopelessness, and despondency. Manycentral city teachers we spoke with suffer quietly underregimes of mediocre and uninspired systems of prac-tice. Too often, what is considered “good teaching’’ inthese contexts is merely a matter of teachers “getting the

A CULTURAL INQUIRY MODEL FOR URBAN SCHOOLS 83

students to do their work’’ under an uncomfortabledetente with their students. In exchange for not beingdriven too hard in the daily routine of completing an end-less litany of seatwork assignments and worksheets, stu-dents will “allow’’ the teacher “control’’ of the class, de-spite the fact that, secretly, many would prefer a teacherwho pushed them to achieve. Nobody expects muchfrom urban schools, even the “successful’’ ones.

It is this climate of despondency, low teacher morale,student apathy, and generally low scholastic expecta-tions that places the development and training of teach-ers at the center of this social justice dilemma. Thisdilemma is one that SOEs must seriously consider asthey begin to partner with the highest need and low-est performing urban schools. How will this entry takeplace such that SOEs do not merely become participantsin a system that continues to relegate public school-goers to small futures and adds to the social injustice?A first step is adopting a critical awareness and analysisof the potential impacts—both positive and negative—for the community and school that partners with a uni-versity. There is an implicit emergency research agendahere—university people entering into partnership withhigh-need, low-performing urban schools must know (orquickly find out) what accomplished practice in thesecontexts looks like. Adding to this emergency is that thewillingness and capacity for working with school peo-ple in a professional learning community often dependson whether collaboration offers any real results in termsof improved teaching, teaching conditions, and studentperformance gains.

This emergency creates a need for new cultural com-petence conceptualized as an ability that goes furtherthan cross-cultural communicative skills of white main-stream teachers working with communities of color byencompassing the broader set of knowledge regardinginstitutions, policy, and the sociology of urban educa-tion. The dramatic underachievement of children andyouth in big city public schools systems is not merelydue to the lack of the multicultural competency of in-dividual teachers. For example, African American andLatino students are disproportionately suspended, heldback from matriculation and grade level completion,placed in special education programs, and underrepre-sented in programs for the gifted and talented (NationalResearch Council, 2002). African American students aretwo to three times as likely to be suspended or expelled asother students (Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2000).Dropout rates, low levels of academic skills, and schoolfailure are higher for children and youth of color thantheir white, culturally mainstream, European Americancounterparts. These are systemic failures, linked to, andwith implications for, improved practice of urban teach-ers. These systemic issues call for culturally-groundedknowledge for effective urban teaching, based on aworking understanding of the systemic structural in-

equality extant in urban environments. Clearly, meetingthe challenges to successful urban teaching is not simplya matter of working more effectively with children ofcolor and poor children. It requires a critical understand-ing of how to effect change in the broader social, political,and historical context in which unequal schooling is con-structed (Kozol, 2005). Cultural competency is more thanthe interactional and communicative skills of the individ-ual teacher; it is also the teacher’s capacity to interprethis or her practice as part of larger social and politicalsystems and the related social justice issues that impactthe school experiences of urban students. In addition tobeing able to structure academically, culturally, and so-cially enabling classroom environments, there are otherabilities: productive collaboration, critical consumptionof policy, and promoting the capacities of others withwhom one works.

Although preparing preservice teachers to developmulticultural competency has become something of anofficial doctrine among teacher educators as the ap-proach to elevate the quality of teaching in diverseand urban settings (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 1997; Irvine,1997; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Melnick & Zeichner, 1997;Sleeter, 2001a, 2001b; Vavrus, 1994, 2002; Zeichner, 1996),it has been difficult to actualize in teaching practice—especially in urban contexts. Young people enteringthe profession of teaching are poorly equipped to dealwith issues of race, culture, and identity (Sleeter, 2001a,2001b). According to the National Education Associ-ation, 20% of new teachers leave the profession afterthree years, and in urban settings as much as 50% leave(American Federation of Teachers, 2000). Even so, thestatistics do not begin to speak of the lack of care, thelow morale, and the written-off status that black andLatino students experience in urban public schools. Theprospect of a school of education partnering with a high-need, low-performance school has ethical and moralimplications.

For SOEs to engage in collaborative partnership withthe highest-need urban schools in ways that do not sub-stantially improve the conditions of teaching and learn-ing in those schools is ethically and morally problematic.Unless the collaboration with the university contributesto the improvement of school or pupil performance, it isquestionable whether the added bureaucratic and time-resource strain should be permitted to further beleaguerthe school. This is the ethical dilemma posed to an urban-focused SOE intending partnership with urban schools.Is it ethical to engage a partnership with an urban schoolwithout clear and likely prospects for improving schoolperformance and achievement gains for students? We atthe Center for Innovation in Urban Education think not,and consider this an important ethical matter.

As the community of urban teacher educators andresearchers, we can either continue to work with thoseurban schools that are already over-endowed with

84 PETER C. MURRELL, JR.

“partners’’and grants, or we can seriously consider whatit takes to work with those school communities that suf-fer in quiet desperation and ignominy. In our work atCIUE, we have chosen the latter path and have been grap-pling with social and cultural challenges of schooling asthey really exist in urban school settings. But this commit-ment entails another set of dilemmas and challenges—ones that neither school nor university partners are reallyprepared to address. A major challenge for the univer-sity partner is how to enter into partnership in ways thatoffer more immediate benefits to school performance,classroom practice, and student achievement. A majorchallenge for the school partners is whether they willbe willing to critically and fundamentally examine theirteaching and professional practices in the school in lightof the social justice interests of university personnel. Theremainder of this article describes the framework of thetype of professional learning community designed to ad-dress the full array of challenges to urban education bydescribing instances of the model in use—one in Bostonand the other in Chicago.

GENERAL THEORETICALFRAMEWORK---COLLABORATIVEASSESSMENT OF TEACHERS’ PRACTICE

The interest in improving school performance throughthe development of professional learning communitieshas increased over the last decade (Marks, Louis, &Printy, 2000; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). Virtually ev-ery school reform model includes a component that fo-cuses on building collaborative leadership within schoolcommunities. As noted above, the knowledge base forhow this should take place in urban schools is difficultto come by. It is hard to run a school, improve the teachingpractice of new faculty, engage in teacher training, andthen “research’’ it as a community development enter-prise all at the same time. The first example of the frame-work illustrates the attempt to carry out this approachto teacher development—where novice and experiencedteachers participate in an ecologically designed activitysetting for simultaneous inquiry into practice and field-based teacher preparation. The unique feature of thisimmersion model of teacher development at Northeast-ern University is the dedication to create public spacesfor democratic decision-making in the mode of delibera-tive democratic process (Fung, 2003; Polletta, 2002). Thefollowing features characterized this new professionallearning community:

1. Situating learning practice for urban schools in urban schoolsby creating new professional learning communities, whereparticipants in multileveled roles (e.g., field instructors,supervisors, mentor teachers, curriculum specialists, andnovice teachers) collaborate on instructional innovation inthe classroom settings;

2. Focus on the development of teachers through a consistentand systematic appraisal of practice in the new professionallearning community;

3. Focus on the development of practice through the systematicappraisal of the achievement gains and proficiency develop-ment of students served;

4. Focus on developing the socially just human systems anddemocratic social practices (especially deliberative demo-cratic practices) that makes the professional learning com-munity work.

In this framework, the units of analysis always derivefrom the linkages between the appraisal of teacher qual-ity and student achievement. More specifically, collabo-rative work in this framework always looks to identifyways of assessing teaching practice as a function of ac-tual improvements in students’ academic performance.The reformulation of assessment in field-based teacherpreparation is not just about classroom skills; also at issueis whether teaching practice is really impactful. Perfor-mance assessment of teaching viewed in this light stillhas not fully embraced the idea of assessment in assess-ing teacher performance in terms of the gains in achieve-ment outcomes results for pupils across multiple mea-sures, and not just those gains that are measured by tests.The deliberative work of groups is continuously framedby the question: How can we appraise instructional andprofessional practice in terms of student achievementgains? This is particularly important, given the continu-ing climate of standards-based high stakes standardizedtests of student achievement and the unbalanced prior-ity they are given as a measure of successful education.Working groups (called circles of co-practice) attend tothe appraisal of teacher quality in ways that fully con-sider how students develop scholastically, socially, andintellectually in school.

In the socio-historical approach that informs our the-oretical framework, learning practices of pupils are coex-istent with the teaching practices of teachers. The qual-ity of teaching practices is determined by the qualityof learning practices among students—whether instruc-tion results in their capacity to reason more power-fully, write more persuasively, and research more deeply.This relationship between learning practices and teach-ing practices is at the core of our framework for theassessment of instructional practice. This dialogic rela-tionship is a way of appraising the quality of teachingpractice in terms of student achievement. We thereforefocus our work on the ability of teachers to create anenvironment for the context that will maximize learn-ing and development. In sociocultural terms, the con-sequence of instructional practice is the joint develop-ment of teacher practice (pedagogy) and learner practice(learning achievement proficiency) occurring in settingsof activity. We develop this idea as a system for the wayurban university schools of education work toward the

A CULTURAL INQUIRY MODEL FOR URBAN SCHOOLS 85

development of accomplished practice for teachers inconjunction with gains made by pupils and their teach-ers, particularly in diverse urban settings. The circle ofco-practice is a concept of the professional learning com-munity that informs the center’s work. Based in schools,it is designed to address school performance and stu-dent achievement in conjunction with the current ar-rangements of social and professional relationships inthe school that might be appropriated as a system for theinduction of new teachers, interns, and student teachers.This will encourage reflection on practices that are or-ganic with the pre-existing practices in school settings.This circle of co-practice arrangement includes what an-thropologists call a participation structure for parentsand other community stakeholders.

CIRCLE OF CO-PRACTICE AS THE NEWPROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITY

Almost everyone in education is familiar with theidea of a “learning community.’’ It is, however, morethan just a charming vision and engaging metaphor forclassroom life or rich professional interaction. It repre-sents a system of organizing practice where the mem-bers of working groups are diverse in their professionalroles, knowledge, and interests, and come together in ajoint enterprise—such as when you bring together teach-ers, parents, teacher educators, and college faculty. Whatwould a “learning community’’ be like if it were specifi-cally designed to promote the achievement and academicdevelopment of real learners in real school communi-ties? That is the aim of the circles of co-practice design:to offer a model for a professional learning communitythat develops teacher practice as a process of improv-ing instruction. Let us turn now to two settings—onebased at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston, andthe other based at the University of Illinois—Chicago(UIC) in Chicago—that illustrate this framework.

A major component of the NU practice-based teacherpreparation is that the center of the program activityis in an urban community school. Too often teachercandidates feel disconnected from what they learn intheir teacher preparation courses and what they need toknow as teachers. The cliche of student teaching is thatubiquitous lament that the “real world’’ experience ofactually being in the classroom vastly outweighs whatis learned in classroom coursework. The decision tosituate professional learning on-site is, therefore, morethan symbolic. When teacher candidates are learningabout literacy theories, it is helpful for them to be ina classroom where the walls are covered with studentcompositions and an assortment of children’s literature.The field instructors, a practicing teacher paired witha university professor, make use of the classroom andthe school to examine literacy through grade levelsand across the curriculum. Teacher candidates see

how an urban school organizes literacy instruction inits classrooms and in school-wide events, rituals, andactivities with families and the community.

Another component of this field-based design is thatteachers in the school are engaged in teaching at the uni-versity. Teachers from the community school are hired toteach classes, such as special education inclusion, liter-acy, pre-K curriculum class, and student teaching sem-inar. One exemplary teacher, who has been a cooperat-ing teacher and instructor with our program, supervisesstudent teachers on-site in the partnering urban elemen-tary school. The university contributes to her teachersalary and provides a graduate intern for her class. Thissite also hosts teacher preparation students at all lev-els of teacher readiness. All coursework in the teachingprograms at the university require fieldwork. Teachercandidates are assigned 20–30 hours each semester toobserve a classroom teacher and to work with individ-ual or small groups of students through their literacyand math/science methods classes. Specific tasks are as-signed, and teacher candidates write and reflect on thetheory and practice with real students.

If you look into a classroom in the NU school-basedprogram, you will see a teacher of record; an intern orstudent, teaching; and one or two early field students, ob-serving or working with individual students. The prin-cipal may walk into the classroom in the role of instruc-tional leader of the school, as a field-consultant, or asa field instructor. Parents are welcomed, and the schoolfrequently hosts other principals, community members,and others who want to learn about a community of prac-tice. Teachers use their planning and development timeto analyze student work and jointly plan curriculum.Is this disruptive to the students attending the school?Not at all. Based upon the sociocultural-historical activ-ity theory framework (e.g., Cole, Engestrom, & Vasquez,1997), we know that the most powerful and lasting formsof learning occur in a shared, vibrant, and engaging activ-ity. Learners and teachers feel part of a larger communitythat recognizes that many people are committed to thesuccess of everyone. Learners are not dependent on oneperson, and they recognize that there are many peoplewho have something to offer the enterprise of learningand growth. Teacher candidates also recognize that theyare not dependent on a single mentor teacher or cooper-ating teacher, and they are participants in the communityof teachers in the school.

The model we are describing here began in a highlysuccessful urban community school. The school culturehas been well established by an exemplary principal anda strong stable faculty. The challenge now is to movethis arrangement of practice to work in high-need, low-performing schools. In addition to working to developexemplary building leadership and faculty, we thinkthis will entail three additional principles or design fea-tures: (1) expanding the work of clinical field work to

86 PETER C. MURRELL, JR.

incorporate a focus on improving practice, not just onvalidating the student teacher or intern; (2) focusingon assessing teaching practice in terms of demonstra-ble gains in student achievement and scholastic develop-ment; and (3) finding the right mix of people in the newcircle of practice to build a network of new professionallearning communities within a school. We think thismodel is ready to replicate in high-need urban schools.The next example of co-practice is a project of inquiry intourban practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

As has been argued, the reflective and delibera-tive appraisal of teaching practice needed to elevateteaching and learning in high-need urban schools mustnecessarily extend beyond clinical supervision as it istraditionally done. The supervision arrangement needsto generate more “pedagogical mileage’’ out of the jointobservation of the teacher candidate as is done in theclinical triad mode of field experience (Murrell, 2001).It also has been argued above and elsewhere (Murrell,1998, 2002) that it is necessary for the inquiry into prac-tice to extend beyond those participants in the clinicaltriad (i.e., teacher candidate, university supervisor,and cooperating/mentor teacher) if there is going to beimprovement in instructional and professional practicein the school setting. The School of Education at theUniversity of Illinois—Chicago has created a system fordoing just that in a collaboration with the Chicago PublicSchools (Berne & Mosak, 2004; Chou, 2003). The modelconcept is depicted in Figure 1 and is predicated on the

Figure 1Circles of Achievement Practice—COAP.

above-mentioned principles of teacher assessment thatmold our approach—the community teacher (Murrell,2001).

The model illustrates the principles of the approach(Berne & Mosak, 2004). First is the socio-culturally in-formed principle that improving teaching is not just amatter of changing the activity of the individual teacher.Therefore, rather than focusing on the teacher candidateper se, the focus is on the activity setting as the unit ofanalysis. This is shown in the diagram in that the min-istrations of the field instructor and consultants are notfocused solely on either the beginning teacher (BT) orthe teacher candidate (TC) but on the practice. Criticalattention is focused on the instructional activity settingwhen the field instructor (FI) and the field consultants(FC) are observing a teacher candidate (TC) in a clini-cal observation. The subsequent debriefing with the TCfocuses critical attention on the professional activity set-ting by involving each participant on the key issue of howto elevate the quality of teaching and learning (Berne &Mosak, 2004).

The second principle of teacher assessment in this ap-proach is that all appraisals of teaching performance arebased upon demonstrable gains in student achievementand scholastic development. This is the idea that theefficacy of teaching practice can never legitimately bedetermined independently of student performance out-comes. The concept depicted in the figure is a circle ofpractice that enables the collaboration of clinical faculty

A CULTURAL INQUIRY MODEL FOR URBAN SCHOOLS 87

and school faculty in the task of stewarding the devel-opment of teacher candidates and beginning teachers inthe clinical triad. The model advocated here is an ex-panded circle of practice, a team that includes not onlyteachers and education professors, but also liberal artsand sciences faculty and others legitimately involved inthe systematic inquiry that undergirds improvement ofinstructional practice, professional practice, and studentdevelopment.

We have long known the limitation of the clinicaltriad—it is not the arrangement through which inquiryinto practice beyond that of the individual candidate cantake place. But finding a productive mix of people andprocedures has been elusive for a number of reasons.Not the least of these is the difficulty of constituting agroup for which additional participants (other than thosein the clinical triad) can participate with legitimate andcredible roles for engaging in serious inquiry into prac-tice. This design creates legitimate participatory rolesfor arts and sciences faculty who would like to becomemore involved in school-partnership work but are notready to do clinical supervision and would like to buildtheir involvement gradually. Moreover, their initial par-ticipation as a Field Consultant allows them to developtheir research participation and contribution as theybecome more accustomed to working in urban schoolenvironments.

The model illustrates how the circle of practice isexpanded beyond the limited scope of reflection andobservation offered by the clinical triad. The circle ofco-practice design makes it possible for observers toappraise the “figure’’ of teacher performance as well asthe “ground’’ of the instructional setting and pupil re-sponse. As in the gestalt psychology notion of figure andground, there is a classic way in which the perception ofimages is mutually constituted by the background andforeground. In the “face and vase’’ image for example,the figure (object or image of the face) and the ground(background visual context) together produce an image.Depending which field you key in on, your perceptionwill be either the face-figure or the vase-figure. Anotherway that the “figure-ground’’ analogy applies is to thenature of clinical observation as the co-determination ofteaching practice and learning outcomes. The actions ofthe teacher, the reactions of the students, and the inter-actions among all participants would be more deeplyunderstood as the relation between activity and context.The “figure’’ is constituted by student and teacher behav-ior, and micro-level interaction is the “ground’’ createdby the situational context of activity and interaction. Inany case, the framework for a new circle of practice pro-vides not only a way for effectively observing the fig-ure and ground-aspects of teaching episodes but also away for the observers to assemble deep interpretationsof each into a single multi-perspective interpretation ofpractice in the teaching episode. We are developing here

a methodology that gets at the deep structure of teach-ing and learning, one that is looking at more than theoperational proficiency of a single teacher candidate orstudent teacher. The expansion of a clinical triad into acircle of practice (or observational team) would includeat least two other roles—both of these in the capacity of aField Consultant. One of these would be an Arts and Sci-ence faculty member with a legitimate role in advancinginstructional practice through his or her content matterexpertise and participation in the group’s instructionalinquiry. The other of these credible roles might be a cul-tural competence coach (Berne & Mosak, 2004). The FieldConsultant’s observational lens is different from that ofthe Field Instructor in that their observational and in-terpretative responsibility is the “field’’ or “ground’’ ofinstruction—the cultural, social, and material context ofthe setting. Though it might be tempting to use the term“clinical quadrad’’ with the inclusion of the FC role, weavoid doing that to underscore the idea that an effectivecircle of co-practice does not simply mean adding an-other set of eyes or arbitrarily creating an observer role.Rather, it means taking seriously the task of “deep sight,’’shared analysis and collaborative work in the appraisalof the quality of teaching practice.

It is the added role of the Field Consultant to the clin-ical triad that transforms it into a circle of co-practice,enabling the critical deep collaborative interrogation ofteaching and learning practices in ways that elevatesthe learning and development of children. The FC rolemay include more than one person. Over the course ofa semester the FC role may include any number of peo-ple selected and brought in as needed at the appropriatepoints in the development of the teacher candidate andaccording to the direction of the team-determined direc-tion of the “inquiry into practice.’’ Field Consultants alsomight be determined by interests of the school-site coun-cil or other leadership structure in the school to look atparticular curricular, developmental, or social issues.

Adding a Field Consultant enhances the role of theuniversity supervisor in charge of the field instruction.Rather than simply supervising the intern or studentteacher in a clinical setting, the FC is in the position toassume an expanded role that organizes the focus of theteam doing the observations of practice—something ofa “principle investigator’’ for the inquiry-into-practice ofthe team. This role is important to both the research-into-practice work of the team and to the assessment ofteaching. Traditional practice is dogged by the unfortu-nate tendency to view the teaching episode as the framefor evaluating quality teaching. The result often is a ten-dency to focus on the overtly observable choices andactions of the individual teacher in certain episodes—narrowing the domain of teacher practice to what canbe seen in a single sitting, instead of evaluating the im-pact on student learning progress over time. This circle ofco-practice is an arrangement more likely to circumvent

88 PETER C. MURRELL, JR.

Table 1Data from Abt Associates Survey

Exhibit 4

n Percent perceived as extremelyHow capable is this individual of (N = 237) capable or capable

Three most capableRecognizing students as individuals with

particular skills and abilities197 83.1%

Recognizing students as individuals withdiverse social and cultural experiences

192 81.0%

Knowing the content/subject for her or histeaching assignment in the school

186 78.5%

Three least capablePersuading students that their individual

and collective job is to learn150 63.3%

Structuring learning activities so studentscan construct their own understanding

149 62.9%

Helping student arrive at their ownunderstanding

148 62.5%

Rated by respondents on a scale of 1 (“Extremely capable”) to 5 (“Incapable”).

this limitation to teacher assessment by contextualizingpractice more broadly than a single lesson or teachingepisode.

This design creates legitimate participatory roles forarts and sciences faculty who would like to become moreinvolved in school partnership work but are not readyto do clinical supervision and would like to build theirinvolvement gradually. The involvement of faculty fromhumanities and social sciences interested in such themesas critical pedagogy, critical race theory, the sociologyof urban schooling, or democratic movements is of par-ticular interest because of another feature of the model:the development of participatory democratic models ofdecision-making and collaboration. An important fea-ture of this model is that of deliberatively and deliber-ately working on building democratic and socially justsocial and professional environments in schools. Thiswork ought to proceed with a focus on race and racismas powerful forms of structural inequality that persist inschools. Using recent works that expose the racializeddiscourse as embedded social practice (see for example,Bush, 2004; Lewis; 2003; Pollock, 2004; Van Ausdale &Feagin, 2001) the Field Consultant in the role of a culturalconsultant will lead building-level inquiry into racializedcultural practices in schools. This is our next step in theevolution of work across boundaries drawn by race inschools with a predominance of white teachers and apredominantly African American student body.

Before beginning this redesign, we drew on surveyresearch of how cooperating teachers performed in part-nership schools (Abt Associates, 2003), summarized inTable 1 below. We determined that the host teachers ofurban partnership schools give teacher candidates in thefield and interns high marks (averaging 80% agree orstrongly agree) for doing the usual “teacherly things’’ in

the traditional notions of teaching expertise, like recog-nizing students as individuals with particular skills andabilities and with diverse social and cultural experiences,and knowing the content/subject for her or his teachingassignment in the school. However, when it came to ex-pertise related to organizing learning communities andensuring achievement results of pupils, the host teachersgave teacher candidates in the field lower marks (aver-aging 63% agree or strongly agree) on abilities, such as“persuading students that their individual and collec-tive job is to learn,’’ “structuring learning activities sostudents can construct their own understanding,’’ and“helping students arrive at their own understanding.’’

CONCLUSION

This article proposed a design for organizing anew professional learning community, specifically forurban schools of education that seek to engage inethical, productive, and impactful work with high-need, low-performing urban schools. This framework,termed the circle of co-practice, is extending the frame-work of the community teacher (Murrell, 2001) to-ward realizing more democratically participatory mod-els of community-oriented school-university partner-ship (Murrell, 1998). Real urban school improvementis vested in democratically expanding the circle of thispractice-in-activity by organizing legitimate contributiveroles for liberal arts and sciences faculty, parents, andothers who might otherwise be peripheral to the work.

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Peter C. Murrell, Jr., is associate professor of Urban Educa-tion at Northeastern University where he also directs the Centerfor Innovation in Urban Education.