School improvement depends, fundamentally, upon collective agency--a group capability to work productively together and solve problems. Unfortunately, many schools operate in contexts of adversity that can pose considerable challenges with developing collective agency. Schools serving high-poverty communities of color often face chronic resource…

Undocumented students graduate from high school at 98,000 per year nationally (27,000 annually in California). School counselors are certificated campus professionals tasked with social, emotional, college, and career interventions for all students and also provide advocacy between students and any barriers interfering with school safety, mental…

This qualitative historical single-case study examines how a practitioner-directed approach to professional development for teachers resulted in successful technology integration in a newly unified school district in California's Central Valley. The study details the process of creating and implementing a professional development plan for newly…

In today's education context, not all young people are able to complete their high school education. In fact, in 2016, the number of low-income young people ages 16 to 24 years who did not complete high school or were not enrolled in high school was 3.7 times higher than those of high-income families (McFarland et al., 2018). This may be due to…

In October 2021, California passed Assembly Bill No. 101, making it the first state in the nation to add ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. Ethnic studies programs provide students with a comprehensive understanding of diverse cultures, histories, and perspectives, while fostering inclusive learning environments and empowering…

Providing opportunities for youth who have been 'pushed out' of traditional schools to re-engage is an issue of social justice. The lack of equitable learning opportunities in the traditional science classroom is a contributing factor to youth being pushed out. Alternative education programs have the potential to support youth who have been…

We use an autoethnographic case study of a Latinx high school student from a rural, agricultural community in California to highlight how AI is learned outside classrooms and how her personal background influenced her social-justice-oriented applications of AI technologies. Applying the concept of learning pathways from the learning sciences, we…

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

In this study, we explore teachers' professional space as an alternative to, and/or expansion of earlier conceptualizations of teacher autonomy. Professional space is here understood both as an objective space with e.g., physical, juridical, economic features, and as the teachers' subjective negotiation of this objective space, where teachers are…

This paper provides a narrative account describing how a first-year teacher's empowering care in her mathematics classes in an inner-city high school in Southern California contributed to better student learning and helped raise district-wide test scores. The purpose of the article, chronicled from a practitioner's point of view, examines how…

As institutions strive to improve teaching and learning for all, educators must consider equitable instruction. This includes equitable distributions of authority and agency among students. The authors define distribution of authority as shared opportunities for decision-making in enacting mathematical tasks and agency as the power to carry out…

Though culturally relevant educational leadership has been practiced for more than 20 years, marginalized students from culturally diverse communities continue to be underserved. Additionally, other educational programs outside of traditional K-12 school environments are far less likely to have educational administrators who have any experience or…

Youth engagement is the meaningful and sustained involvement of young people in efforts to create positive social change. This approach requires youth-serving organizations to rebalance traditional power dynamics between adults and young people, allowing youths to take on decision-making responsibilities. Collective impact initiatives such as…

Shifting classrooms towards places where students' ideas are at the centre of the discussions has been challenging for teachers to put into practice (Hiebert & Wearne, 2003). This study explores the attempts I made as a researcher-teacher to promote equitable student-driven whole class discussions in a racially and socioeconomically diverse…

Educators are often unaware of assets Mexican Indigenous children possess that originate from their cultural practices. Using Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Indigenous Heritage Saberes, our studies focus on three unique Indigenous learning communities that provide opportunities of empowerment for these students. We examine the experiences of…