This paper examines how in-service teachers enrolled in an MA in TESOL program demonstrated critical language awareness (CLA) as they designed and implemented ethnographic action research projects anchored in funds of knowledge. The action research project aimed to introduce teachers to school-based ethnographic research and to provide an…

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze how a group of middle-school debaters integrated their identities and epistemologies into the traditional literacy practice of debate to advocate for more expansive and inclusive forms of academic and civic discussion. The adult and youth co-researchers of the Debate Liberation League (DLL) detail their creation…

This study explores the challenges and successes that two public school teachers experienced while implementing youth participatory action research (YPAR) with their students in core academic classrooms. Most academic studies of YPAR have focused on university-based researchers implementing YPAR with youth outside school settings or in special…

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze how middle schoolers developed a critical awareness of language while participating in a curricular unit informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This unit was developed to understanding and taking action to protect a local bat population in the context of school reforms shaping teaching and learning…

Using a combination of counter-storytelling, testimonios, and Chicana feminist epistemology, I report on the findings of an ethnographic study that explores and analyzes the educational experiences of geographically isolated Latina high school students in a rural city in Wyoming. I demonstrate the labeling of these students by peers and teachers…

Tracing the nature of critical engagement and agency among youth in a participatory action research (PAR) collective, the study attends to the manner in which critical engagement and agency developed over time for the youth researchers. The focus of the project was to conduct a survey among ninth grade students concerning their early high school…

Online education is unique in part for the relatively high degrees of autonomy afforded learners. Self-direction and self-regulation, along with support, are essential for students to succeed. The site of this action research project was a new, small online public charter school for middle and high school students, Foothills Academy Connected…

Action research, particularly done by teachers, has had a contentious, decades-long history. As a form of social inquiry, action research has been designed to make it easier for members of social groups to create social change within their communities. Rather than conducting research that focuses on an outcome, action researchers focus on the…

I conducted a two-year case study of a cohort of two middle school mainstream teachers, one a mathematics and science teacher and the other a language arts teacher, and one elementary teacher involved in the LSciMAct ("Transforming Literacy, Math and Science Through Participatory Action Research") professional development project. The…