Teaching in an Inner City School

The author spent a year as a volunteer/researcher in the early 1970s at Devonshire School, located in an inner-city Montreal working-class immigrant neighbourhood at the corner of Bagg and Clark streets. The students at the elementary school, run by the then Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, were mostly (seventy percent) children of immigrant parents -- primarily Greek and Chinese. Most came from homes where neither English nor French were spoken. The author examined the problems posed for teachers where the school had particular organizational features which created and sustained these problems. The author focuses on the teachers' problems in interpreting the pupils' behaviour and assessing their capabilities, and the teachers' problems in organizing practical actions to effectively control their classes for the purpose of getting something taught.

Master's Thesis

McGill University

Montreal

1973

[vi]-71p.

en