The winner of the 2018 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools-- the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers (EMK) in Boston-- seeks to empower underrepresented students to succeed in college and high-wage careers. With an emphasis on healthcare-related career exposure and experiential learning, the school places a deliberate focus on preparing…

Dynamic and responsive methods enable teachers to assess students' writing skills precisely and equitably, and to empower students of diverse skill levels to develop their writing. Assessing writing with equity-minded precision requires paying close attention to students' performances as writers, identifying challenges in those performances, and…

This research examines the perspectives graduates from a virtual school who are identified as students with disabilities. This research explores this phenomenon through the lens of critical theory, disability theory, school choice theory, critical pedagogy theory and Maslow's theory of a hierarchy of needs. The current research related to online…

This study, conducted in a Business/Technology course in a large public high school in Southeastern USA, Fall Semester, 2014, supports the use of Service-Learning in the schools for empowering students to serve the public good. Ninety-two students created classroom "DREAM TEAMS" for researching and seeking solutions for selected…

When the author began teaching in Paraguay, he ran into a series of classroom challenges familiar to English teachers around the world: a classroom overflowing with students, a large range of English abilities, and insufficient textbooks and traditional teaching resources. The activity described in this article is a one-size-fits-all activity that…

Background: Obesity continues to afflict adolescents in underserved communities. It is difficult to understand how adolescents perceive empowerment over their health and the health of their communities. The purpose of our study was to describe the impact of the Healthy Heart Ambassador program on adolescents' perceived empowerment through the…

This case study reveals how a faith-based initiative offering structured teacher training in media literacy. The program is centered in Catholic Social Teaching, encouraging the use of critical media literacy in the classroom to aid the learning of social justice issues. The critical literacy of Paulo Freire serves as theoretical framework to help…

We explore the dynamics of nurturing, caring, and enabling in a social justice school and how a problematic context of educational enabling can develop when notions of nurturing are not balanced with consistent disciplinary consequences. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight school staff, teachers, and a student at a social justice urban…

A diverse, urban district's Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), committed to transforming instructional tasks through integration of technology, created spaces for collaboration, voice, and choice for the PLI teachers and students. The teachers and students used various web-based technologies for collaboration with their peers, had more…

This article examines the power of composing images as students construct identities and shape their own worlds. It illustrates student empowerment through agency, intellectual engagement, and community investment and suggests that composing with images forms a bridge back to alphabetic-centric composing.

In this article, the authors describe how self-directed learning allows students to design their own research projects and rubrics, differentiated for their cognitive readiness, learning preferences, interests, and affect. The authors found that students viewed their self-directed learning as challenging but fun because it is relevant and doable,…

By participating within the educational setting in making decisions about their lives that reach beyond choice-making, students with disabilities who acquire the skills of self-determination may express interests and goals through their own authentic voice. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to describe the experiences and…

The Shaw High School marching band has emerged as a collective site of individual and group pride and empowerment in the stories gathered through the community-based "Voicing & Action Project", which the Social Justice Institute debuted in East Cleveland. At first glance, a high school marching band might not have much in common with…

This goal of this study was to develop a measure that captures the three dimensions of youth purpose proposed by Damon, Menon, and Cotton-Bronk (2003). We tested a theoretical model that links youth purpose (comprised of intention, engagement, and prosocial reasoning) with achievement motivation, agency, and civic engagement for a sample of high…

This qualitative study explores the perspectives of 52 high school students on the meaning of caring in the school setting. Seven focus groups were utilized to collect data. Five groups were racially homogeneous and mixed-gender; one group comprised males of various races; and one group comprised females of various races. In the focus groups,…