Curriculum and Students in Classrooms

Curriculum and Students in Classrooms: Everyday Urban Education in an Era of Standardization is a timely and thought-provoking work that attends to often-neglected aspects of schooling: the everyday interactions between curriculum, teachers, and students. Walter S. Gershon addresses the bridge between the curriculum and the students, the teachers, and their everyday pedagogical decisions. In doing so, this book explores the students' perspectives of their teachers, the language arts curriculum at an urban elementary school, and how the particular combination of curriculum and teaching work in tandem to narrow students’ academic and social possibilities and reproduce racial, class, and gender inequities as normal. Recommended for scholars of education and curriculum studies.

Curriculum and Students in Classrooms is an innovative exploration that draws clear connections between curriculum and the lived experiences of elementary students. Herein lies a key to the multiple access locks that impede understanding what students need. This well-documented examination of curriculum in the context of U.S. schools is a useful text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the field., In this remarkable book, Walter Gershon delves incisively into a particular nexus of curriculum, culture, and classroom roles— employing ethnography to depict educational experience as it flows with and against social, institutional, and pedagogical demands. Offering subtle readings of situated actors and events in a complexly diverse elementary school, the book interrogates narrow conceptions of educational success, challenges damaging views of sociocultural difference, and illuminates the profound meaning that resides in the underlife of institutional education., Curriculum Studies in specific and educational research in general needs more ethnographies, notably in these uncertain times for public education.  This book is a masterful example of what careful, contextual analysis can offer those who seek to better understand how broad social forces and narrow public policy impact the lived experiences of students, educators, and communities.  Indeed—with a focus on the entanglements of race, identity, curriculum, and ideology—Gershon offers this work as an insight into how ‘what we now do as “good schooling” is perhaps something else.’ As the role of education in society is increasingly in question, a timelier book cannot be imagined.

Walter S. Gershon is associate professor in the School of Teaching, Learning & Curriculum Studies and LGBTQ affiliate faculty at Kent State University.