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Constructing Ideas About Equity From the Standpoint of the Particular: Exploring the Work of One Urban Teacher Network by Thea Abu El-Haj — 2003This article examines the work of one urban teacher network (TLC) and analyzes the
ideas about educational equity and inequality that evolve from its professional
development practices. Drawing on archival and ethnographic materials that span
24 years, the author explores how TLC’s oral inquiry processes grounded in a
phenomenological approach make visible two different, but interrelated, ethical
obligations that undergird practitioners’ work to build equitable educational practices
within contexts saturated with inequality. Seeking to build equitable educational
practices for all children, TLC’s work begins with the particular, often a single child.
Beginning its analysis from what feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith has called ‘‘the
everyday world as problematic’’, TLC’s work envisions social change that is deeply
situated and attends to the multiplicity, complexity, and uncertainty that characterize
human learning. Thus, the grounded knowledge that TLC practitioners collectively
develop constitutes a kind of critical social theory that can speak back to and inform
those universalist policy approaches to equity that stress uniform and standardized
education. As educational reform efforts across the country appear to be turning
increasingly to top-down initiatives that direct the work of teachers, it is ever more
urgent to consider this grounded epistemological standpoint on equity.To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Thea Abu El-Haj
Alice Paul Center, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail Author
THEA RENDA ABU EL-HAJ is a research fellow at the Alice Paul Center
for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Pennsylvania. Her
research focuses on urban education; critical analyses of race, gender, class
and disability in schooling; conceptualizations of social justice in educational
practice; and the use of collaborative, ethnographic research to support
educational reform. Her most recent publication is ‘‘Contesting the Politics
of Culture, Rewriting the Boundaries of Inclusion: Working for Social
Justice With Muslim and Arab Communities’’ in Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, 33(3). She is currently completing a book manuscript titled
Searching for Justice With Difference in Mind: The Journeys of Two Schools.
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