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This study examines how pre-service teachers think about disconnections between what they believe about teaching, what they learn in their university coursework, and what they observe of behaviour management practices in public school classrooms. Based on the reflective writings of teacher education students at an urban Midwestern university in the United States, this narrative research leads to a deeper understanding of how teacher educators can support and challenge future teachers in their ability to think critically and thoughtfully in developing their identities as future educators.

This article examines the ways in which discourse and social context lead to identity construction in relationships between Black and White students in a large (Grades 6-8) urban middle school. Looking at issues of cross-cultural communication through focus group discussions among Grade 8 students at this school provides an opportunity for the emergence of three dominant themes in the social lives of these students including cafeteria seating preferences along racial lines and how this dynamic influences cultural understandings, academic tracking practices and their effects on relationships among the young people in this study, and the positioning of students by commonly accepted stereotypes. Ways to achieve greater understanding across racial boundaries are discussed and implications are drawn for promoting critical counter-discourses that oppose deterministic and onedimensional representations between adolescents.