The urban education typology put forth by Milner (Urban Educ 47(3):556-561, 2012) offered a conceptual demarcation of three different, yet interconnected types of urban school districts (i.e., urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic). Nearly one decade after Milner's seminal urban education typology, few empirical or conceptual…

The Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture is a non-profit organization that has been developing place-based education models since it was established in 1970. Situated in an urban environment, the Chicago Center operates at the intersection of higher education and place-based education with a pedagogical approach that centers and elevates…

Building on Critical Race Theory, Black Critical Theory in education (BlackCrit), and Black Male Studies (BMS), the author theorizes what he terms "Black PlayCrit" and, by extension, "Black PlayCrit Literacies." Black PlayCrit brings attention to the specificity of Blackness and anti-Black misandric violence in the play…

The book suggests that culturally responsive and sustaining education should be the guiding principle in our schools, and that community partnerships be developed in a similar light. Although many of the chapters focus on specific content or places, a transdisciplinary problem and project-based experiential critical pedagogy is an ultimate goal.…

This article focuses on some languaging that occurred during a race event within a literacy lesson involving a racially White, female adult and a racially Black, male child. I analyze an excerpt from this race event, illustrating an approach to race analysis which might be useful to the field of urban education. I ask, "What is the racial…

In advancing the struggle for social justice in education, we often advance an anti-racist praxis in our classrooms. However, students, teachers, and others trying to make sense of our praxis--oftentimes well-intentioned in their queries--will ask "why are we always talking about race?" and "why do we only present one perspective…

The preparation of urban educators has gained widespread attention across education policy, research, and practice. As US urban cities have become more diverse, the teacher workforce has not kept up, and the racial/ethnic demographics of students and teachers are disproportionately incongruent. In order to eradicate an education landscape that…

I argue in this article that a close examination of preservice teachers' Black history knowledge is needed to possibly improve curricular and instructional approaches of Black education. Seven preservice teachers were studied and asked to write Black history narratives to ascertain how they interpreted Black history. I analyzed these responses…

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon's work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and…

This special issue brings together a mix of early-career, mid, and senior scholars to critically examine current realities of, and boldly imagine future possibilities for, STEM education in the lives of racially minoritized children in the United States. Given the implicit and sometimes explicit aspirations of STEM education to be a counteracting…

This project examines the supervisory roles and clinical experiences in a School of Education program that offers multiple pathways to licensure, including the Transition to Teaching (T2T) alternative route to certification program. Through our reflective supervisory and instructional experiences within this program, we explore the unique…

This critical case study analyzes Michigan's implementation of Public Act 4 (PA4), also known as the "emergency management" (EM) takeover law. PA4 grants the state control of school districts with dire budgetary problems. As most U.S. school districts are citywide, PA4 gives the state direct control over all the (previously locally…

This study explores the impact of attending optional professional learning events on the critical consciousness development of Ready to Learn (RtL) mentors over the course of one program year. Ready to Learn is an out of school time math tutoring and mentoring program that seeks to address opportunity gaps in math learning for middle school…

Approaches to teaching critical language awareness are gaining traction in urban schools with culturally and linguistically complex student populations; however, what teachers need to know to enact these pedagogies is not well understood. Using a lens of pedagogical content knowledge for critical language teaching, this study examines what happens…

This paper examines, through the lens of critical race theory (CRT), beliefs often asserted by self-described, open-minded white educators about their students of color. While these teachers may perceive themselves as liberal and inclusive, their interactions with students of color are shrouded by white privilege which can be disenfranchising to…