This study represents a paradigm shift in an attempt to examine early adolescent self-concept while in a student leadership role. Positive Youth Development intertwined with Personal Construct Theory and Social Learning Theory framed the study. Students from a rural Wisconsin high school participated in a two-day leadership retreat. The…

English educators at all levels have endeavored to understand difference in their classrooms both in terms of the content that they teach and in terms of the social and cultural identities of students in their classrooms. However, although educators have come a long way in understanding identity as it is constituted by race and gender, much work…

This article demonstrates how literacy practices in an 11th grade, urban, English classroom in the United States worked to delineate and patrol gender borders between acceptable masculine and feminine social practices. Drawing upon Blackburn's (2005) and Thorne's (1993) studies of the gendered boundaries that are created and questioned in literacy…