“City Kids, City Teachers has the potential to create genuine change in the learning, teaching, and administration of urban public schools.” —Library Journal In more than twenty-five provocative selections, an all-star cast of educators and writers explores the surprising realities of city classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Contributors including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, June Jordan, Lewis H. Lapham, Audre Lorde, and Deborah Meier move from the poetic to the practical, celebrating the value of city kids and their teachers. Useful both as a guide and a call to action for anyone who teaches or has taught in the city, it is essential reading for those contemplating teaching in an urban setting and for every parent with children in a city school today. “Hopeful, helpful discussions of culturally relevant teaching . . . moving illustrations of what urban teaching is all about.” —Publishers Weekly “A refreshing and eclectic collection.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “With its upbeat mix of ready-to-share city kids’ memoirs and classroom strategies, this book is an inspiring resource for veteran teachers, parents, community members, and students.” —Educational Leadership “You’ll feel sad, angry, hopeful, agitated, and inspired.” —NEA Today

Urban teens of color are often portrayed as welfare mothers, drop outs, drug addicts, and both victims and perpetrators of the many kinds of violence which can characterize life in urban areas. Although urban youth often live in contexts which include poverty, unemployment, and discrimination, they also live with the everydayness of school, friends, sex, television, music, and other elements of teenage lives. Inner City Kids explores how a group of African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Haitian adolescents make meaning of and respond to living in an inner-city community. The book focuses on areas of particular concern to the youth, such as violence, educational opportunities, and a decaying and demoralizing urban environment characterized by trash, pollution, and abandoned houses. McIntyre's work with these teens draws upon participatory action research, which seeks to codevelop programs with study participants rather than for them.

Cities, Counties, Kids, and Families outlines a model for developing strategic policy for responding to children and family issues in local governments. It also discusses fifteen strategic roles that local government can play-most of which do not require direct funding, but depends upon the scarce resource of leadership. The book describes policy and analytical tools used by cities and counties, and makes a case for using these tools more strategically. It calls for strategic policy to respond to the four critical forces affecting children and family policy: families; race and culture; communities and neighborhoods; and regionalism. Finally, the book reviews policy in four critical areas affecting local governments: education and school readiness; substance abuse; youth development; and family support programs. It concludes with predictions of issues that will affect cities and counties in the future.

Healing the Inner City Child presents a diverse collection of creative arts therapies approaches to meeting the specific mental health needs of inner city children, who are disproportionately likely to experience violence, crime and family pressures and are at risk of depression and behavioural disorders as a result. The contributors draw on their professional experience in school and community settings to describe a wide variety of suitable therapeutic interventions, including music, play and art therapy as well as psychodrama and dance/movement approaches, that enable children to deal with experiences of trauma, loss, abuse, and other risk factors that may affect their ability to reach their full academic and personal potentials. The contributors examine current research and psychoeducational trends and build a compelling case for the use of creative arts therapies with inner city populations. A must-read for creative arts therapists, psychologists, social workers and educators, this book offers a comprehensive overview of arts-based interventions for anyone working to improve the lives of children growing up in inner city areas.

The city, born to be a place of meeting and exchange, has for several decades taken as a default model the strong citizen, man, adult and worker, thereby transforming it into a hostile space for the weakest: the elderly, the disabled, the poor and the children. The automobile, the toy of choice for the privileged citizen, is also taken to be the principal 'citizen' of the city, thus endangering the health, aesthetics and mobility of the rest of us. This book proposes a new philosophy of city governance that takes children as the default citizens, with the confidence that a city sensitive to the needs of childhood will be healthier for everybody. This work recovers elements of the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child that recognize the full citizenship of children to suggest two principle axioms for optimal city design: the participation of children in city governance and the restitution of their autonomy, which allows them to stay with their friends and play freely. Boys and girls, in this way, represent all those excluded from decisions and power. This book is primarily written for politicians and city managers so that they can take on board the ideas within. Yet it is also important for teachers and parents so that they can respect the rights provided in the convention. City of Children should be made available to students on teacher-training courses, and also to the children who are the book’s true protagonists. At present, more than two hundred cities in Spain, Italy, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Costa Rica have joined this project. This book is a translation of “La città dei bambini” and was translated as part of the Bridging Language and Scholarship initiative. The English edition by Vernon Press follows previous editions of this important work in Italian and the four languages of the Spanish nation (Galego, Basque, Catalan and Castilian), French and Portuguese to make available for the first time this important work to a broader international audience.

Urban authorities and organizations are responsible for providing the basic services that affect the lives of urban children. Cities for Children is intended to help them understand and respond to the rights and requirements of children and adolescents. It looks at the responsibilities that authorities face, and discusses practical measures for meeting their obligations in the context of limited resources and multiple demands. While the book emphasizes the challenges faced by local government, it also contains information that would be useful to any groups working to make urban areas better places for children. Cities for Children begins by introducing the concept, history and content of children's rights and the obligations they create for local authorities. The volume then goes on to look at a variety of contentious issues such as housing, community participation, working children, community health, education and juvenile justice. The final section of the book discusses the challenge of establishing systems of governance that can promote the economic security, social justice and environmental care essential for the realization of children's rights. It follows through the practical implications for the structure, policies and practices of local authorities. Written by the top experts in the field of children's issues, and including a resource section which lists publications and organizations that can provide further information and support, this volume is a must for all involved in planning for, and the protection of, children within the urban environment.

More than half of the global and around eighty per cent of the western population grow up in cities. Here, Horschelmann and van Blerk provide a vivid picture of children and youths in the city, how they make sense of it and how they appropriate it through their social actions. Considering the causes and forms of social inequalities in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and geographical location, this book discusses specific issues such as poverty, homelessness and work. Each chapter draws on examples and cases from both the developed and developing world, and throughout the chapters, it: contrasts experiences of growing up in the city focuses on urban youth culture, consumption and globalization considers contemporary movements towards the role of children and youths in planning processes. Horschelmann and van Blerk argue that youths must be recognised as urban social agents in their own right. Their informative book, though dealing with complex theoretical arguments, relates key ideas to this topical subject in a clear and coherent manner, making this book an excellent resource for students of human geography, urban studies and childhood studies.

This collection explores the significance of New York City in children’s literature, stressing literary, political, and societal influences on writing for young people from the twentieth century to the present day. Contextualized in light of contemporary critical and cultural theory, the chapters examine the varying ways in which children’s literature has engaged with New York City as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as an ‘idea’, such as the fantasy of the city as a place of opportunity, or other associations. The collection visits not only dominant themes, motifs, and tropes, but also the different narrative methods employed to tell readers about the history, function, physical structure, and conceptualization of New York City, acknowledging the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as literature can give imaginative ‘reality’ to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text. This book critically engages with most of the major forms and genres for children/young adults that dialogue with New York City, and considers such authors as Margaret Wise Brown, Felice Holman, E. L. Konigsburg, Maurice Sendak, J. D. Salinger, John Donovan, Shaun Tan, Elizabeth Enright, and Patti Smith.

Why does the way we think about urban children and urban nature matter? This volume explores how dichotomies between nature/culture, rural/urban, and child/adult have structured our understandings about the place of children and nature in the city. By placing children and youth at the center of re-theorising the city as a socio-natural space, the book illustrates how children and youth's relations to and with nature can change adultist perspectives and help create more ecologically and socially just cities. As a key contribution to children's studies, the book engages and enlivens debates in urban political ecology and urban theory, which have not yet treated age as an important axis of difference. With examples from ten localities, the chapters in this volume ask how we can subvert both romanticized and modernist conceptualizations of nature and childhood that conflate innocence and purity with children and nature; the volume asks what happens when we re-invent urban natures with children's needs and perspectives in mind.

This work explores the urban experiences of street children in sao paulo, brazil through the mathematical epistemic regimes at the core of their survival strategies. We also draw attention to the situation of street children across time, space, culture, and history. Our goal is to recognize, understand, and validate forms of mathematics constructed and used outside of the established institutions of mathematical production. We base our analysis on "the mathematical imagination", which draws together social constructionism and ethnomathematics. Theoretically, we draw heavily on the durkheimian tradition in sociology and anthropology. We focus on a form of practice that links the formal and the informal in order to realize the full power of mathematical knowledge as a social thing (in durkheim's sense), a product of the collective consciousness that expresses collective realities and a category of knowledge present in every culture. This is as true for mathematics at the margins as it is for professional mathematics. Our work contributes to an emerging political manifesto of the marginal that demonstrates the social realities and social power of their mathematics. This book should be of interest to social scientists, students of mathematics and ethnomathematics, and everyone interested in the situation of marginalized children.