URBAN EDUCATION / MARCH 2001Howard / PEDAGOGY FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS POWERFUL PEDAGOGY FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS A Case of Four Teachers

gest that teacher effectiveness with this student population has been limited. How-ever, amidst these widespread academic failures, characterizations of effective teachers of African American students have emerged in an attempt to reverse these disturbing trends. This article examines the findings from a qualitative case study of four elementary school teachers in urban settings. The findings reveal teaching practices consistent with various norms espoused by African American students in a manner that could be termed “culturally relevant. ” In this article, three of the major pedagogical themes are discussed: holistic instructional strategies, cultur-ally consistent communicative competencies, and skill-building strategies to pro-mote academic success. Effectively teaching African American students continues to be one of the most pressing issues facing educators. Despite the pleth-ora of school restructuring and educational reforms, the dispropor-tionate underachievement of African American students is a con-sistent occurrence in U.S. schools (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], 1994, 1996, 1998). Research on exemplary teaching strategies for African American students has been the focus of increasing scholarship over the past decade (Foster, 1989, 1992; King, 1991; Ladson-Billings & Henry, 1991; Lee, 1995). This research has emerged from the idea that identify-ing, describing, and analyzing successful teaching strategies for educating African American students can play an important role i