This book asks serious aesthetic and cultural questions about art and teaching. In this context the authors explore the power of art to shape both our emotions and our intellect. With these ideas in mind the authors explore a course the team taught on « High and Low Art: Good and Bad Taste. As the course began the « Sensation controversy at the Brooklyn Museum broke out. The authors trace both how the controversy shaped their course and its implications for the larger concerns with art, culture, and education in the twenty-first century.

Maintaining that urban teaching and learning is characterized by numerous contradictions, this book proposes that there is a wide range of social, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical knowledge that urban educators must possess in order to engage in effective and transformative practice. It is necessary for teachers in urban schools to be scholar-practitioners, as opposed to bureaucrats who only follow rather than analyze, understand, and create. Ten major sections cover the myriad issues of urban education as it exists today: context of urban education, race and ethnicity, social justice, teaching and pedagogy, power and urban education, language issues, cultural issues of urban schools as seen in the media, research in city schools, aesthetics and the proximity of cultural institutions, and education policy. Sixty one essays written by specialists in teacher education; public policy; sociology; psychology; applied linguistics; forestry; urban studies; school administration; cultural studies; evaluation; and linguistics, provide a blueprint for scholars, teachers, parents, urban politicians, school administrators, policy professionals, and others seeking to understand the situation of urban schools across America today.