Partners United for Research Pathways Oriented to Social Justice in Education is a partnership between a university research training program and a Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools® site in north Florida. It addresses the lack of demographic diversity among doctoral students in education. Emphasis is on researcher positionality and building…

Using data from a participatory ethnography of an urban high school slated for closure, this article examines the impact of comprehensive transformation on the university-school partnership's goal to change from a culture of underachievement and negativity toward a culture of collaboration and excellence. We explore these question/s: How do…

Leading school turnaround has been conceptualized as a school-level issue focused on immediate change. There has been little consideration about how district leaders change systems to sustain school turnaround successes. This case study research conducted through the lens of Change Theory explores the leadership struggles of one mid-sized urban…

The Atlanta Schools Critical Education Network for Distinction (ASCEND) is an ongoing interdisciplinary coalition supporting the critical consciousness of social justice educators. ASCEND partners include: (1) activist faculty from two university departments: Middle and Secondary Education and African American Studies; (2) a justice-oriented…

The effects of professional teacher dispositions on student development have been widely documented. Yet there is limited discussion of the impact of socially just dispositions. The present study critically examines the relationship between justice-oriented mind-sets in preservice teachers and their perceptions of teaching in urban schools. Using…

In this article, I employ sociocultural theory to analyze the learning to teach process of two novice teachers enrolled in one Urban Teacher Residency (UTR). Findings show that Genesis and Jackie were differentially drawing on programmatic, disciplinary, relational, experiential, and dispositional resources as they learned to teach in an urban…

This study describes an information/digital literacy project that was conducted with kindergarten and second-grade students and teachers at a university-assisted school. The study centered on the I-LEARN model--a learning model that blends research and theory from information science and instructional systems design--and investigated how the model…

Urban community leaders describe their perceptions of critical issues in education and offer recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture (CGC). This qualitative study employed a maximum entropy analysis. Results demonstrate critical issues with increasing educational attainment including complexity of the urban school system,…

The lead author documents the promises and pitfalls of doing critical participatory action research (PAR) as a graduate student within traditional institutions. This autoethnographic essay captures the vulnerabilities of the first author as she reflects on the human work that draws her to PAR, details the tensions that surfaced in the daily…

Using a cross-case analysis of online, on-campus and online university teacher preparation courses, this study critically examines the constraints and affordances of online teacher education in preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) urban schools. The results of the study indicate that while there was no significant…

Annually, thousands of U.S. students fail high school introductory biology. The language demands of biology are large, and science teachers are often unprepared to support students' language needs. Here, we describe a 4-week summer high school introductory biology course executed in a large West Coast city. Our aim was to help 33 students recover…

The purpose of this study is to reflect on the evolution of a partnership between a university and urban charter high school serving a predominately African American population. Because of the author's embeddedness both as the researcher and participant member, this research assumes the paradigm of autoethnography. Reflections on key components of…

Decades of federal economic policies that have concentrated poverty into isolated communities have devastated urban education, and expose youth and families to high stress and trauma. Disproportionately negative outcomes for students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged can be understood as manifestations of negative racial school…

A wide range of research has examined trust building within corporations, businesses, and schools, and between and within organizations, but little research has been conducted that examines trust formation between university researchers and classroom-based teachers. Using a qualitative methodological approach, the authors examined the development…

This article utilizes interview data to explore how notions of risk operate in a school-university partnership program. Our analysis traces the divergence between conceptualizations of "at-risk" in scholarship, its use in policy, and students' responses to this terminology. Although students targeted in such programs are often…