The author contends the most prominent challenges and conditions facing middle level education now and in the near future point to three imperatives for the field: middle level education must be relevant, resilient, and robust. After conceptualizing the field of middle level education as an interdisciplinary, applied field of study concerned with…

Parent engagement in middle school has the potential to yield positive effects on the academic success of students and contribute to a growth in a feeling of self-worth. Parents want the best for their children and based on their own experiences, they do what they can to support their children in school and beyond. This study examined the stories…

In this article, the authors share an account of an eighth-grade personal narrative unit designed to support students in composing accounts of life during the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The article provides an overview of the four phases that comprised this nine-lesson unit and the materials and resources used. Students' voices, perspectives,…

This study examines how students' identities are co-constructed through educational experiences. We analyzed narratives of fifth and seventh grade students from two private alternative schools in the Czech Republic. The findings reveal that students identified with friends, had positive relationships with teachers and the school, and experienced…

Traditional notions of learning, teaching, schooling, and leading, contribute to the inequity and injustice found in schools. In this study, autoethnography was used as a process and product to explore one leader's journey opening and leading a new "alternative" school as the school's principal. These experiences create the backdrop of a…

Teaching is considered a profession in which emotions have a prominent role and it is commonly mentioned in the literature that emotions should be taken into consideration in research related to teacher identity. However, there are limited studies in the accessible literature that investigate beginning teachers' teacher identity development from…

Content expert Maegen Rose details her journey to becoming a school librarian, her struggles in working in an independent school, and how her identity as a Black educator affects her instruction and engagement with her students.

This case study was completed in Fall 2021 with elementary and middle grades pre-service teaching candidates. The goal of the study was to engage candidates in storytelling and reflection of their science identity. Science identity is important as science discourse is historically not diverse. Candidates completed a narrative podcasting assignment…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

Culturally sustaining pedagogies have encouraged scholars to reimagine and rebuild justice-oriented classrooms across context and disciplines and provide opportunities for students to reclaim their ways of knowing and doing in schools. In this study, we seek to contextualize culturally sustaining teaching practices in integrated science and…

Any activity that involves making choices entails the risk of failure, and the more personally meaningful the choices are, the more deeply felt the failure will be. Drawing on my experiences in supervising the self-chosen, long-term projects of my eighth-grade students, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to prevent young people from…

We explored ways in which racial, academic, and science identities intermingle in contested classroom and school spaces where students' personal histories meet institutional histories. Building on identity studies in science education, we aimed at developing nuanced understandings of Black youth's negotiation among these three identities, which…

Stories of children moving in and out of refugee camps are not uncommon yet are often overshadowed by the dominant narratives of oppression, political failure, and war -- the stories "told of" rather than "told by" refugees. Dominant narratives on refugees largely shape perceptions about children and youth in displacement as…

Study after study has demonstrated that postsecondary success involves a range of factors from neighborhood context to family history to individual aspiration (Kim & Rifelj, 2021). Kauffman Scholars Incorporated (KSI), a post-secondary scholarship program based in Kansas City, understands these factors and has tailored its programming…

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…