This article presents a small scale, qualitative study of nine majority alternate-route teachers and the perceptions they hold about themselves as urban educators and their urban students' academic abilities. Data for this study was collected through self-reflective, written interviews and meta-reflective responses to two published teacher…

Teachers' lives have been the focus of much recent research on teaching, and we now have rich, detailed understandings of how teachers develop a 'teaching self,' in the context of concrete details of biography, school settings, relationships and educational systems within which teachers work. What we lack is a sense of the teacher in a place--a…

A qualitative study examined the effectiveness of the combination of autobiography, biography, and cross-cultural analyses in the context of preservice teacher education. Subjects were 21 preservice teachers at a rural Midwestern public university in which only 9% of the 11,000 students were from minority backgrounds. Subjects, for a class…