Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / George Sirrakos Jr. and Christopher Emdin -- Media as Cultural Discourse and Youth Emancipation / Arash Daneshzadeh -- Necropolitics and Education / Venus E. Evans-Winters -- What the Resistance to High-Stakes Testing Can Teach Us about Urban Classrooms / Wayne Au -- Why You So Angry? / Treva B. Lindsey -- Beyond a Deficit Perspective / George Sirrakos Jr. -- Destroying the Spectacle in Urban Education / Christopher Emdin -- Beyond Beats, Rhymes, and Beyoncé / Gloria Ladson-Billings -- Sexuality Education and the School District of Philadelphia / Patricia Walsh Coates -- Ecocritical Urban Education / Mark Wolfmeyer -- Afterword / Shirley R. Steinberg -- About the Authors / George Sirrakos Jr. and Christopher Emdin.

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Borrowing from the ideas of John Dewey, schools and classrooms are a reflection of the world; therefore, in order to make sense of the urban classroom, we need to make sense of the world. In this book, the editors have compiled a collection of nine critical essays, or chapters, each examining a particular contemporary national and/or international event. The essays each undertake an explicit approach to naming oppression and addressing it in the context of urban schooling. Each essay has a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to help readers see the world unveiled, through a more critical lens, and to problematize long held beliefs about urban classrooms, with regard to race, gender, social class, equity, and access. Second, as each author draws parallels between an event and urban classrooms, a better understanding of the microstructures that exist in urban classrooms emerges.