Other People’s Stories: Learning about Urban Schools from Students and Teachers
Mr. Gregory Michie

The strength of such detailed, up-close works of particular classrooms of teachers is not in making broad claims or generalizations. What they do, instead, is highlight the unique, zoom in on individual experience and all its complexity and unpredictability, help us understand small corners of the world in ways other forms of research cannot.

Mr. Michie used examples from his experiences in teaching, writing about teaching, and teacher education to show why we need more up-close, detailed views of urban classrooms and to hear the voices of the teachers and students directly, many of whom are from minority backgrounds. He gave special attention to the issue of white researchers attempting to tell “other people’s stories.”

Historically, narratives about urban schools and teaching against the grain of a broken educational system have usually come from the perspectives of white people. Many have not depicted the complexity of urban schools and have ignored the perspectives of teachers of color. But even white teachers who have tried their best to give an accurate picture have still been representing the issues from their perspective as white, which means in most cases “telling other people’s stories.”

Rather than try to find a way out of this dilemma of perspective, white researchers need to stay engaged in the complications of their position and continually acknowledge that their understanding is limited by who they are, where they are from, and what they have known and not known.

Mr. Michie learned from his earlier writing that it is important for him as a white male researcher to point to his “location” not only in the introduction, but also in the context of the narratives he presents. However, this also necessitates being careful that in pointing to his location it does not become the primary focus and result in the loss of the participants’ voices.

Mr. Michie also said that bringing the voices of teachers to center stage is not just a methodological issue but also a political one. We must hear accounts that contest the accepted story lines about city schools and families living in poverty. These accounts must be presented in both scholarly and non-scholarly venues. Hopefully, this visibility will help make everyone in our society more accountable for the quality of education in urban schools.