Purpose: This paper highlights the fluidity with which youth make decisions about engaging with digital technologies including online social media. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that literacy curriculum that centers digital technologies can have for students from immigrant communities through tracing the…

School gardens have been an active part of United States schools since 1890, when the first school garden was established in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Since the turn of the 20th century school gardens have greatly expanded to include inner city schools in some of the largest metropolitan areas of the country. Since the early 1990s, school gardens…

The Atlanta Urban Debate League was established in 1985 as an after school program focused on providing debate outreach to high school students in the Atlanta public schools. Still in operation today, volunteers work with current students in public middle and high schools in Atlanta, supporting students as they practice reading, writing, speaking…

The present case study investigated the impact of a short-term summer literacy approach on writing performance and self-perception of writing for young adolescents of low-income families residing in urban housing projects. The approach offered intensive literacy engagement to offset summer achievement loss; assisted ethnic-minority, low…

Many American citizens have remained outside of the political process and therefore have not been able to effectively advocate for the full rights, privileges and responsibilities that American citizenship makes possible. For youth from historically marginalized populations who are growing up in lower-income urban areas, the issue becomes…

This paper examines the evolving participation of instructors and learners in an after-school web page-design course intended to improve technology practices. Defined here as technology fluency, these practices emerge through a highly fluctuating dance among social interactions with others and with the technology. In this digital divide…

This case study examines José, a bilingual Latino fifth-grader, and his complex and dynamic engagements in "travesuras" (mischievous behaviors). José's "travesuras" served to disassociate him from being labeled a "schoolboy." This disassociation was evident in how José: (1) renounced "school-like" work and…

Julius Bennett was once a disinterested student destined to become a dropout. Then he enrolled in Amistad Academy, an academically focused charter middle school intent on narrowing the achievement gap between urban and suburban kids located in New Haven, Connecticut. Now Julius is making plans for college. In this article the author details the…

This article describes a qualitative research study that explored how a middle school case-study class read and responded to "culturally conscious" African American children's books (Sims, 1982, p. 49). First, I relied on literary analyses conducted mainly by Sims (1982) and Harris (1995) to identify African American textual features contained in…