In the first part of this article, Julia Matsudaira, a former youth program specialist with the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) and former codirector of Camp Anytown, describes the NCCJ programs that have been dedicated to developing youth leadership through social justice awareness and advocacy for more than fifty years.…

Advocates of racial preferences from the Harvard Civil Rights Project have criticized an initiative designed to provide race-neutral admissions to universities in Florida. George La Noue rejects their criticism, which, he says, confuses the definitions of affirmative action, establishes nonexistent criteria, and ignores crucial elements that…

"Homophobia Prevention" is a two-week social studies mini-unit. The purpose of this mini-unit is to raise awareness and understanding levels surrounding heterosexism and heterosexual privilege. Additional student goals for the mini-unit include forming connections between heterosexism and other forms of oppression, as well as identifying…

2005 marks the beginning of the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), but awareness of this event is practically nonexistent in the New York City public high school where the author teaches English. A concerted effort to teach for--or even about--sustainability in mathematics, science, business and humanities classes is more…

This article challenges the reader to think of homophobia as a negative social force affecting all members of an urban school community. The author argues that homophobia can only be undone if it is attacked at the intersection of race, class, and gender. A description of an anti-homophobia plan for an urban high school follows a brief discussion…

The view that values play a crucial role in how principals conceptualise and interpret school leadership is not new. However, very little of the research underpinning this view has been conducted in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative case study research into how principals in Jamaica conceptualise school leadership, this paper explores…

This article features Safe Haven Project, a comprehensive school-based education and victim services program that focuses on anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) bias in diverse neighborhoods of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In its effort to help schools articulate and practice a vision of a more…

This article will explore how symbolic and institutional violence shaped students' understandings of themselves within the educational context, and will argue that the creation of critical educational spaces can enable students and teachers to explore and transgress the internal and external influences and violence that shape the learning…

The purpose of this project was to gain a better understanding of dimensions of trust and inter-relationships between those dimensions during the adolescent years. Drawing from survey data collected at the beginning and end of a semester in eighty middle- and high-school social studies classes, relationships were assessed between: social trust,…

If, as James Anderson stated, a nation committed to democracy and equality has every reason to be ashamed on "Brown v. Board of Education's" 50th anniversary, why the commemoration and celebration? By revising Anderson's challenge to examine the complex role of "Brown" in the nation's memory and history, this chapter…

Implicated in contributing to the problems youth today face in trying to claim an education, an informed active participation in the social order, dominant discourses of desire in education foreclose formal, critical analysis of social structures that construct, police, entreat, and deny desire. Looking at the ways in which desire is encoded in…

This article pursues two main lines of inquiry: How might postcolonial theory, feminist and postcolonial translation studies sharpen our critical understandings of the micro- and geopolitics of English language learning? What kinds of pedagogical practice might such new developments ground in order to foster our learners' critical ways of knowing…

Two seminal reports on the state of education advantage and disadvantage in so called "rich nations" were released in 2002 by the international agencies OECD (2002a) and UNICEF (2002). These complex reports are brought to the attention of those at the very centre of the education debate, the general public, through the public media. What…

Due to the dearth of qualified professional teachers, policymakers and professional development programs need to focus on improving the quality of high school mathematics teaching in order to diffuse this crisis. In the middle of this crisis, the demand for new teachers is predicted to rise significantly in the next ten years. Based on the…

Relatively little is known about the unique challenges facing queer youth programs such as Project 10 and Gay-Straight Alliances, housed in urban high schools where the majority of students are poor, non-White, and/or non-native English speakers. This article begins a conversation about two important issues that the author believes have an impact…