This article illustrates how narratives provided by Ian, a beginning science and mathematics teacher, and by some of his urban high school students contribute to Ian's process of identifying. Through the use of narrative inquiry, I demonstrate how the narratives use converse descriptions to portray Ian's identity in terms of the type of teacher…

In this article, the author describes the development and implementation of a partnership between York University, the Canadian Education Association, and three Canadian high schools, in which drama students were given the opportunity to reenact their personal stories in an effort to communicate the need for change in their schools. The themes of…

The primary research question in this study was whether adolescents' experiences of and responses to teasing were related to the content of a tease and to particular ethnicity. Caucasian (n = 27) and African American adolescents (n = 22) between 12 to 17 years of age were asked to write about an experience of being teased regarding an aspect of…

How is historical knowledge transmitted across generations? What is the role of schooling in that transmission? The authors address these questions by reporting on a thirty-month longitudinal study into how home, school, and larger society served as contexts for the development of historical consciousness among adolescents. Fifteen families drawn…

Superintendents often mourn the "good old days" when they were educators and did not need to worry about the managerial and political aspects of their districts. Linda Hanson shows how effective a superintendent can be in the role of educator as she and her reading staff help their school board understand the implications of a mandatory graduation…

In this study, I argue that American history textbooks present discrete, heroic, one-dimensional, and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students a complex, realistic, and rich understanding of people and events in American history. In making this argument, I examine the master narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school history…

Historical perspectives on science serve to humanize the sciences, increase student motivation, communicate academic content, and convey the nature of science. This paper briefly reviews pertinent literature regarding the history of science and narrates the author's experiences of incorporating historical perspectives in high school biology…

This article is a study of conflicting voices inside an alternative high school in Arizona. Voices of alternative schools are, quite often, not included in the discourse of curriculum reform even though the number of alternative schools is growing every year. Bakhtinian novelness of polyphony, chronotope, and carnival are incorporated into an…

In this article, a veteran teacher writes openly about a question that too often is left unspoken and unanswered: How does a teacher's whiteness get in the way of successful multicultural education? She relates some hard lessons she learned from an experience she had with Shonda, a gifted African American high school student regarding her…

In this article, the author talks about his experience in moving to Perspectives, a small charter school catering for grades 6-12 located near Chicago's Chinatown. He shares how he felt about transferring in the midst of his final year at elementary school. Compared to his old school, he learned some things that are different about Perspectives…

The author's ninth grade world history students communicated the connection they felt to three women whose stories they evaluated in class. The women represented ordinary people living during time periods being studied, and their personal stories demonstrated how the political, economic and cultural events had an impact on people in unique and…

The author of this article recounts his experience of teaching English literature at Plymouth High School. The course description was simple and straightforward--Semester 1: historical survey of English literature up to Wordsworth; Semester 2: historical survey from Wordsworth to the present. Evaluation will include tests, essays, and a research…

A schoolteacher recollects her second teaching job experience at a predominately African American high school. She learnt cultural differences in communication, social interaction, ways of responding, and linguistic style.

Numerous state impact studies show that school libraries improve student achievement and standardized test scores, yet that fact is insufficient to keep financially strapped districts from closing their libraries. Teacher-librarians must be proactive and gather data at the school-site level to demonstrate how valuable they are to students and…

A tenet that appears to be accepted throughout the world is that effective teachers establish and maintain control over their students. This is an assertion that I challenge and deconstruct. In fact, for many teachers their well-intentioned efforts to establish and maintain control over students lead to their demise as teachers and for many more…