Children's Testimony and the Necessity of Critical Witness in Urban Classrooms

摘要

This article focuses on the everyday ways that children's perspectives on and experiences within urban schools are chronicled and interpreted. Drawing on illustrations from two students' experiences across a school year in one classroom, the author argues that students in urban schools are everyday documentarians, sharing their relationships to school in ways—both subtle and overt, and that reveal both challenges and resilience—that provide insights into the specific, individual ways that educators can better support them. At the same time, those everyday testimonies require critical approaches to witnessing urban students' lives that reveal and open for critique both the assumptions that are embedded within class-privileged interpretations of students' lives and the broader social narratives that feed them. The article concludes with a discussion of critical witnessing as both a conceptual and practical tool for supporting urban educators in efforts to be the witnesses students deserve in high-poverty urban classrooms.