There has been a dramatic increase in the number of multilingual and multicultural students in U.S. schools. Because of high-stakes testing and English-only mandates, instructional practices and curricula in most urban school districts neglect the cultural and linguistic interests of their diverse student populations. In this interpretive study,…

This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of "linguistic landscapes." We collaborated with a group of Humanities teachers to design and implement the "Word on the Street" project, in which Grade 10 students took on the role of researchers to explore the linguistic, visual and spatial texts of their…

The role of the school leader (principal) in supporting educational reform is explored through a case study of one high school implementing the Three Block Model of UDL (Katz, 2012a) in an effort to meet the needs of a diverse student population. This case study is a part of a much larger study exploring outcomes for students and teachers of…

Multilingual students, multidialectal students, and students learning English as an additional language constitute a substantial and growing demographic in the United States. But these groups of students tend to receive unequal access to and inadequate instruction in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM), with their…

High school dropout rates in many major urban settings in the United States have remained above 50% for more than three decades. This dropout crisis should now be considered evidence of an endemic lack of appreciation for formal education in city locales. United States federal policy initiatives have concentrated the nation on notions of teacher…