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CROSSING OVER TO CANAAN: THE JOURNEY OF NEW TEACHERS IN DIVERSE CLASSROOMS
by Gloria Ladson-Billings.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. 172 pp. $24.95.
Over the next decade, the United States will need 2.2 million new public school teachers, due to recent changes in class-size policies, increased student immigration, teacher retirements, and attrition. As the teacher shortage intensifies, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners are increasingly asking themselves: In what ways should we prepare teachers to be effective, particularly to work in urban communities that serve a population that includes predominately students of color?
Gloria Ladson-Billings addresses this question in her latest book, Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms. She uses the biblical metaphor of Canaan, the promised land, as the vision of teacher education that provides the "sojourners" - a "new iteration of novice teachers" (p. 150) embarking on the journey of transforming themselves and their pedagogy - with the necessary knowledge and support to effectively educate racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in urban classrooms.
Relying on biblical images, Ladson-Billings looks ahead to the next millennium of teacher education, observes that teacher education "continues to languish in the practices of a bygone era" (p. 3), and proposes programs that pose "theoretical propositions about pedagogy" (p. 27) that will help novice teachers become reflective and improve their teaching. While Ladson-Billings insists that the book is not a "blueprint for building a teacher education program" (p. 31), she encourages readers to question the preparation of teachers and to "think differently" about preparing teachers to work with diverse groups of students. Further, she suggests that novice teachers have something to teach those who educate them, and that by listening carefully to their voices, teacher educators will gain new insight into novice teachers' experiences - insight that might lead to "Canaan."
The book includes contextual information, autobiography, ethnography, narrative commentary about the state of teacher education in the United States, and suggestions for reaching the land of Canaan through culturally relevant pedagogy (a theory of pedagogy from her seminal work, The Dreamkeepers). The text resounds with Ladson-Billings' three identities, which she describes as the voices of a "teacher, a teacher educator, and a researcher" (p. xii). We are given a rich description of Ladson-Billings' personal...