White Canadian teacher candidates are brought into direct dialogue with urban high school students through a yearlong immersion in a high school with a "demonized" image in the broader community. Interviews with students reveal experiences of school as "my safe space" and the predominance of a student culture not characterized by "resistance", but by a positive experience of school as an autonomous "relational space". We argue that attention to student voices through extended immersion in urban high schools enables teacher candidates to experience schools as uniquely situated spaces and disrupts the tendency to essentialize urban students and their schools.