In middle-grades settings, students are cultivating critical consciousness to apply general knowledge of equity to their local context(s) (Nojan, 2020). As educators work to foster environments that allow middle-grade students to cultivate critical consciousness, expectations have shifted in the area of leading for equity. We have outlined a…

Background: Over the past several decades, understandings of civic knowledge and engagement have been enlarged in productive ways; the field has been transformed by contributions rooted in and showcasing critical, cultural, transnational, activist, and participatory approaches to the civic. Civic action research fits neatly amid these new…

U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical…

This project creates the first educational pipeline for the state of Texas. It incorporates middle school as a key transition point, differentiates between advanced degree achievement among Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, and fashions a secondary pipeline with a narrower age range. Findings indicate that the move from eighth grade to ninth is a…

Early adolescents go through developmental changes which are also mediated through social and structural forces that reproduce stratifying hierarchies around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Despite the intersection of early adolescent development with social and institutional forces, critical concepts such as race are often omitted in general…

Much of the extant literature regarding middle grades teachers centers on interventions to improve the quality or effectiveness of their teaching: studies that identify a particular instructional strategy, curricular support, or disposition, and conclude with recommendations that teachers improve their practice by adopting said thing. In contrast,…

As social media use has risen, teachers have also taken up the medium in specific ways. This study investigates the ways in which teachers are using Instagram, particularly at a moment in time during a global pandemic, when teachers are both more isolated and dealing with multiple modes of instruction, many that involve some new use of…

Public school administrators use restorative practices (RPs) as a discipline intervention to reduce student expulsions and suspensions. The problem addressed in this qualitative study was that despite the implementation of RPs in a school district in the Southwestern United States, student misconduct increased. The purpose of this basic…

This study investigated how Black middle school girls negotiated an after-school club, with a specific focus on ways of knowing and acting as "ladies." Drawing from Fordham's intersectional analyses of the histories and politics behind her conceptualization of "those loud black girls," we explore and critique the ways in which…

Discrimination is a common experience among racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) youth and often results in negative health and psychological outcomes. However, few studies provide adolescents with opportunities to directly share their discriminatory experiences, especially within the school context. Using a critical race theory framework and…

This study explored a place-based summer enrichment offering for gifted rural students through the lens of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2003). To ameliorate well-documented opportunity gaps for rural students, we established a residential camp on our university's campus where middle school students engaged in STEM and humanities…

African-American women continue to be underrepresented in science and engineering field despite years of interventions, including providing out-of-school time STEM experiences. Although some out-of-school time programs have shown impacts in participants' content knowledge and skill acquisition, impacts on science identity development have been…

This qualitative case study explores the literary/lived interpretations and experiences of middle school girls attending a book club located in an urban public school. We examine how the girls' responses to depictions of racism in the novels read reveal the ways in which they understand and/or experience racism in their own lives? We ground this…

Dominant discourses in U.S. History are typically engaged through a settler-colonial framework. Informed by the ubiquity of commercial presentations, cultural tropes, and caricatures--movies, consumer products, and names--the "presentation" of Native Americans tend to focus on incomplete representations that are cast in the past. This…

This small-scale field experiment tests whether an adapted values-affirmation intervention enhances youths' academic achievement and mitigates social identity threat while simultaneously raising capacity to promote social change via the development of "critical consciousness" (CC). CC is the critical analysis of inequitable social…