New Vision of the Urban Learner: From Theory to Practice (Video)

Research for Better Schools, Inc. (1993)

The New Vision video highlights a decisionmaking framework to help educators implement a new view of urban students. It provides a clear direction for educational change or restructuring, and makes educators aware of ideas that can change their focus from at-risk learners to urban learner success.

The video has three central purposes:

1. to review current research that supports a new vision of the urban learner
2. to explain key ideas and themes in the decisionmaking framework
3. to suggest how the ideas in the framework can be incorporated in plans to restructure urban schools and classrooms.

A New Vision presents urban learners as capable, motivated, resilient learners able to build on their cultural strengths. It rejects current perceptions of urban students as at-risk, lacking abilities, unmotivated, and culturally deprived. The goal of schooling that underlies the New Vision is the development of autonomous individuals able to participate fully in making decisions about their future and that of society.

Intelligence: Multidimensional and Modifiable. Essential to understanding the New Vision is a change in assumptions about the nature of human intelligence. In the past, many educators believed that intelligence is an ability fixed at birth. Recent research indicates that intelligence is, in fact, multidimensional (e.g., Howard Gardner's Seven intelligences: verbal-linguistical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, body-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal) and modifiable. Thus, under appropriate conditions, the ability of urban learners, like all students, can be developed in many ways throughout life.

The video comes with a guide which is written specifically for school-based educational planning teams. Administrators, teachers, parents, community members and others in key decisionmaking positions may want to incorporate new information about the urban learner in educational improvement plans and to identify new resources for change. The guide also is useful for other groups interested in educational reform efforts that could directly impact urban learners.

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