This article examines contextual factors that impact inclusive education in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, United States. Based on the analysis of teachers' narratives, the study concluded that teachers perceive inclusive special education as a student's right primarily grounded in the social justice context of education. While…

This article evaluates data from a case study involving five third-generation Mexican American teachers who work in an urban school district in Central Texas. The study analyzes their social capital and their culturally responsive connections with immigrant, first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican American students' in and out-of-school…

Purpose: School leaders become arbiters of educational opportunity by shaping how policies are implemented within their buildings. Yet the role that school leaders play in enacting policies designed to expand equity for historically marginalized groups of students such as English learners (ELs) has received little attention in the research…

Race shapes the policies and history of the United States. Current research shows that state-approved social studies content standards are written in a non-racial and colour-evasive whiteness language that reinforces racist policies and practices in education. This qualitative framework analysis study examines the language of social studies…

The purpose of this study was to examine Mexican and Mexican-American mothers' perspectives about the construction of two-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in the context of an urban area in South Texas and to analyze the factors that contribute to their decision about their children's participation in such programs. Our main…

The purpose of this study was to explore how social unrest in the United States, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic and the tragic deaths of Black people at the hands of police, have transformed the leadership and pedagogy of school leaders in three rural school districts in southwest Texas. The strategies used to collect data for this study…

The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to examine the implementation of Restorative Practices in selected elementary schools in southeast Texas. Restorative Practices will generally be defined as a social science that studies how to build social capital and achieve social discipline through participatory learning and decision…

Principals play a critical role in creating safe, inclusive, and equitable schools. Unfortunately, many schools maintain a legacy of exclusionary discipline and racial bias. In such contexts, principals can work collaboratively with school personnel and community members to interrogate existing policies, practices, and outcomes to inform…

Research literature suggests students need to engage in "actual" civic experiences; however, in most cases, teachers feel unwilling or unable to facilitate experiences beyond the formal classroom setting. In this project, we sought to understand the relationship between social studies teachers' civic ideology, pedagogical approaches, and…

This case study explores an urban elementary school principal's efforts to advance reflective and anti-oppressive practices to counter teachers' beliefs and behaviors toward their Black male students. Data collected and analyzed include five in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, observations of the school, classroom and professional…

Transformative, anti-oppressive curricula, as theorized by Banks (1989, 2014) and Kumashiro (2001, 2009), directly address present-day realities of racism, discrimination, and oppression. According to Banks (1989), a transformative curriculum includes "the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference, and content from various groups,…

In order to promote effective learning, individuals must feel fully appreciated within their own unique identities (i.e., ethnicities, language differences, socioeconomic status, gender, religions). Culturally competent educators employ practices that acknowledge and build on cultural diversity and that identify students themselves as resources…

This study contributes to the limited research on emergent bilinguals, perspective taking, and second language reading of informative text. The explicit integration of Freire's (1993) notion of conscientizacao, or consciousness-raising, with the constructs of empathy and embodiment (Gee, 2001; Hurtado, 1996) and with translanguaging (García, 2009)…

This qualitative case study is focused on one high-performing urban elementary school that worked to address inequities within the school and community for two decades partly through dual language education. This neighborhood public school has been one of the district's highest-performers for the prior 15 years, was one of the first schools in the…

Background/Context: Previous research has focused on the importance of a social justice leadership approach to improve schools that serve marginalized students, but less attention has been focused on potential dilemmas associated with social justice leadership and the ways in which principals prioritize when dilemmas or challenges arise.…