The racial diversity of children in US public schools continues to increase while most teachers and school leaders are White. In addition, systemic racism, whitewashing of curricula, microaggressions, and deficit mindsets persist within schools across the country. These pervasive injustices that plague the student experiences of children of the…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how public middle school administrators described the special education training they received to engage in social justice leadership to support, lead, and enable successful outcomes of special education programs in their school. The theoretical foundation utilized was the social…

In spring 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic collided with a national reckoning on racial injustice and ruptured our country's core. The effects of this collision necessitated something other than business as usual in school leadership: it called for the kind of courageous leadership rooted in equity and justice we describe in this paper. In this…

In middle grades education, advisory programs are structured, intentional, and supportive environments that assign 10 to 20 students to an adult advisor (most often a teacher) who serves as a mentor, advocate, and guide throughout their middle school years. Advisory programs promote community and personalized support in middle schools. In addition…

Both a practitioner's guide and a school reform model, the new edition of this popular book shares exemplary arts-integration practices across the K-8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, each chapter carefully describes how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn to assist…

Caring for student affect when teaching social justice mathematics (SJM) is important because discussions of social inequities may elicit emotional responses from students. This article extends previous conceptualizations of SJM, which typically encompass dual goals of teaching dominant and critical mathematics, by theorizing a third set of…

This paper aims to investigate how and to what extent 'critical' global citizenship is reflected in middle school English textbooks in Korea. Framed within Freire's concept of critical literacy, the study is concerned with analyzing the written texts in two English textbooks, with a focus on the issue of representations. Using critical content…

This research was a descriptive study in which the researcher explored the beginning phases of Ethnic Studies implementation in a Kindergarten through Eighth grade (K-8) school district in Northern California. Using a social justice lens, and through a review of Ethnic Studies, Collective Efficacy, Critical Consciousness, and School Culture…

This quantitative comparison study was conducted to determine if there is a significant difference in multicultural and social justice competencies (MSJCC) between urban and rural school counselors in Pennsylvania. The purpose of the study was to discover how school counselors in different geographical areas assess their work within a…

Ms. Sampson, a White eighth-grade teacher in a predominately White suburban school district in the southern United States, decided to include several books in her lesson plan. Selected books were from the school's library and had been previously approved by stakeholders as instructional resources for the district. One parent, a school board…

Middle level scholars and educators have begun to examine dominant narratives and conceptual traditions around middle level history and philosophy with careful attention to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) (Harrison et al., 2018). Across these critical shifts in focus for middle grades education, myriad questions have arisen about…

Recent racial injustice has prompted school counselors to reexamine how their practices contribute to injustice. Many school counselors seek to engage in antiracism and advocacy. Multitiered systems of support (MTSS) strategies include data utilization, systemic collaboration, and multilevel practices within a school building. This article…

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and manages public charter schools, primarily in traditionally underserved communities. As part of a 2016 grant awarded to Uncommon from the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program to support replication and expansion of its school model, we conducted a…

Drawing upon a long-term partnership between a university and a Title I middle school, we outline relational principles that guided our justiceoriented approach to collaborative research. We conceptualize relational principles as intentional strategies for equitable relationship cultivation and infrastructure development, grounded in the values…

The notion of belonging is an often-referenced but under-theorized concept in studies of school organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the politics of belonging in schools and accompanying implications for how schools are organized and led. This research employs an autophotographic methodology. Student participants took photographs…