After reading Scott Seider and Howard Gardner's essay "The Fragmented Generation" (2009) in a college freshman writing class, students responded by providing their own labels for their generation. This article includes excerpts from their essays. Following these excerpts is the instructor's theoretical justification for this kind of classroom…

When this author began to plan an introductory diversity issues course for the psychology department, she read extensively about teaching for social justice and found that instructors were often up against tremendous odds to convince students that they had absorbed biases from their culture. She read stories of negative evaluations, altercations…

The author reports on the growing debate among educators on whether the umbrella Asian Pacific Islander label conceals disparities among Asian American students or provides political power in numbers. Nationally, experts say that support services aimed at not only Southeast Asians, but all Asian Pacific Islander students, remain scarce in higher…

The purpose of the study was to explore the current perceptions of adults who were enrolled in the gifted program of the St. Louis Public Schools in the fall of 1959 or spring of 1960. At this time in history the Cold War was a reality and the U.S. enacted the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to find talented young people and give them the…

Educators are often at a loss in handling lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues in the classroom. tvOften this is attributable to a lack of training during the preservice program at the university level. This article suggests that special education teacher preparation programs are uniquely positioned to promote sexual diversity…

In questioning conventional qualitative research methods, St. Pierre asked, "What else might writing do except mean?" The author answers, it oppresses. Co-opting the race traitor figurative, she calls on qualitative researchers to become "ability traitors" who interrogate how a valuable coinage of their trade--the written word--is used to rank and…

Linguistic minority students have been both under-researched and underserved in the context of research on minority students' access to and retention in higher education. The labels ascribed to them have typically failed to capture the complexity of their identities. Additionally, much of the literature in higher education on minority students'…

This paper emerges from a case study of the system of statutory reviews in older people's care homes in the UK. Informed by a review of selected literature on gaining access, this paper provides a critical account of the process of negotiating access with gatekeepers (chiefly, care home managers). The negotiations were time-consuming and largely…

This article explores the benefits and challenges of operating an inclusive elementary and special education teacher preparation program within a disability studies framework. How does such a program balance issues of theory and practice? How does it provide students with a critical approach that essentially views disability as a social and…

This article examined changes in ethnic identity as a function of college type and residential status and whether differences due to college type could be explained by involvement in extracurricular activities and college ethnic composition. Although no changes in ethnic labeling or belonging were found, there was a normative decrease in ethnic…

This article focuses on the sense of what an "African" (American) identity could mean when viewed through the processes of migrations and fluid identities of contemporary African immigrant children as they interact with their African (Americans) peers in schools. The purpose of this article is to use data from a study of West African…

This dissertation examines the construction of the label Muslim as an emerging racial and political signifier. I explore how students who identify as Muslim understand their own racial and religious construction, as well as their own subjectivity within the American social, political and cultural landscape. This dissertation asks: (1) How do…

Color-blind racism develops when persons ignore color in people and see them simply as individuals. As persons of color in racialized societies such as the United States are unequally treated on account of their color, the issue becomes a matter of faith and religious experience as religious leaders and educators, who disregard color, overlook…

College and university students with disabilities, both visible and invisible, must deal with what sociologist Erving Goffman called information management; they must control and protect their stigmatized identity by considering who to tell what, how much to tell, and when to tell. A growing body of stigma-related educational research, as well as…

At what point does a paradigm become so prevalent that it loses its utility? Probably when attempts to simplify complex concepts become oversimplification. A case in point may be the use of the term "millennials". The designations "millennials" and "millennial generation" are frequently used, allegedly to paint a nuanced portrait of today's…