In this intensely powerful and personal new text, Michelle Fine widens the methodological imagination for students, educators, scholars, and researchers interested in crafting research with communities. Fine shares her struggles over the course of 30 years to translate research into policy and practice that can enhance the human condition and…

This article invites a conversation about how critical participatory research transforms the production of knowledge, enables a complex chronicling of counter stories, and nurtures the contestation of dominant narratives with the very people who have been misrepresented as Others. Through a series of research stories fomented in prison,…

Information about the MIT Media Lab PLATFORM, a Summit of Innovators, is presented. This Summit was comprised of engineers, computer scientists, coders, activists, designers, and technology wizards, a gathering of people of color who have been remarkably successful, provocative, and creative against the odds. The event enabled the author and other…

Nearly twenty years after the publication of Michelle Fine's essay "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire," the question of how sexuality education influences the development and health of adolescents remains just as relevant as it was in 1988. In this article, Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland examine the…

Presents a case study of a New York City high school with a high dropout rate. Focuses on teaching quality, students' attitudes and stresses, and school structure and practice. Argues that school reforms must be developed along with efforts to improve the overall life conditions of students. (KH)

In education, it is necessary to look at students who are marginalized, and excluded, who is centered or privileged, and how, through academic discourse, silences are created, sustained, and legitimized. The three papers in this collection explore the politics of silencing and voice in education. "It's More Covert Today': The Importance of…

Public obsession with issues of measurement, early intervention, promotion, suspension, education, age of exit, and alternative education dominates discourse on what can be done about high school dropouts. Additional controversial issues of societal structural interdependence are examined for their importance in education reform for minority and…

The deeply fractured nature of U.S. society is examined, focusing on poor and working class people in cities. Based on data from 154 poor and working class young adults aged 23 to 35, the study reveals the ways in which this urban generation has suffered from social change. The following chapters are included: (1) "Voices of Hope and Despair:…

Research on dropouts at an urban, comprehensive New York City high school found a complex politics of "discharge" and low awareness on the part of students and parents of legal entitlement to education, which allowed 66 percent of a ninth grade cohort to dropout without comment or concern. (JB)

Parents are being invited to step in to help improve public education, but they enter with neither resources nor power. Real parental involvement requires commitment to organizing parents and restructuring schools, as well as inventing rich versions of diverse educational democracies of difference. Schools must function like meaningful…

Critiques the assumptions about the nature and meaning of disability advanced in social-psychological writing, suggests the origins of these assumptions, and proposes a return to a Lewinian/minority-group analysis of the situation of people with disabilities. Introduces the other articles in this issue. (Author/ BJV)

A 2-year study of small Chicago schools found that small schools, especially small high schools, help students succeed. The study focused on about 150 small schools founded in Chicago during 1990-97 and their progress through 1999. Elementary schools had fewer than 350 students; high schools fewer than 400 students. Quantitative analyses covered…

The impact of college on women in a maximum-security prison was examined in a 3-year study of current and former inmates of New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (BHCF). The data sources were as follows: (1) a review of program records; (2) one-on-one interviews of 65 inmates conducted by 15 inmates; (3) focus groups with 43 women in BHCF…