This chapter recounts the story of how I came to design a Research Apprenticeship Course at UCLA--what we call the RAC. I lay out the origin story of the RAC dating back to early collaborations with Arturo Madrid of the Tomas Rivera Policy Research Center and the Ford Foundation Family of Fellows in the mid to late 1980s. These collaborations…

Drawing on a multiyear local research project on the affordable housing crisis, this article outlines a pedagogical approach we call Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors--undergraduate students, university researchers, and community organizations--drawing on and…

This document provides ideas for collaboration between English, Math, and credit ESL faculty and institutional research, planning, and effectiveness (IRPE) professionals in the California Community Colleges to examine local impacts of AB 705. The ideas from this document were generated and collated from regional workshops and events hosted by the…

This article, relying on a series of epiphanies throughout my journey as a researcher and scholar-activist, shares my relationship with criticality and how it has guided my research and teaching agendas. I share how critical theories have informed my main research areas and the questions and issues I have raised in my own work. The article also…

Teacher/practitioner research, with its emphasis on the intimate relationship between knowledge and teaching, can be a methodological basis for developing rich conceptions of literacy and alternative practices. Teacher researchers theorize from the thick of things, from actual educational contexts that they shape daily. This informs new practices…

The Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2015 (Pub. L. 113-235) provides $75 million for the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI). This Initiative, originally launched and funded at the same amount in FY 2014, is overseen by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) within the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of…

Gerald Brunetti served as President of the California Council on the Education of Teachers (Cal Council or CCET) from 1992 to 1994. This article describes the author's involvement with the CCET beginning in 1979, and covers the details of accomplishments throughout his presidency, such as the development of "CCNews," mail balloting, and…

Research Findings: Three former teaching colleagues at the University of California's Harold E. Jones Child Study Center discuss an interpretative approach to child observation and assessment and how this approach was developed (1970s-2005) within this lab school's early childhood education setting. With teaching practice shaped and driven by a…

Running one of the nation's largest school districts typically comes with prestige and pay that draw would-be educational superstars, but also pressure and political complexity that cause them to burn out far faster than leaders of the majority of districts. A study published in the December issue of the American Educational Research Journal finds…

At a time when policymakers are demanding budget cuts and more innovative approaches to schooling, pressure is building for loosening up constraints on class sizes. After dropping for decades, average class sizes in American schools may be growing again as schools cope with budget shortfalls. Although some educators see the rising numbers as a…

The recent high-profile data-confidentiality fights in Arizona and Los Angeles have researchers worried that access to educators may become a difficult path. In the course of a decadelong federal lawsuit over English-language-learner programs in Arizona, lawyers for state schools chief Tom Horne subpoenaed the raw data from three studies…

As public servants who work most closely with children, teachers have first-hand knowledge of the needs of the changing demographics of urban public schools in the United States. Teachers who engage in research, and researchers who are former teachers, enjoy unique positions in conducting investigations and sharing and implementing findings.…

This glossary was developed from existing research and feedback from faculty and researchers from the California community colleges in response to Resolution S08 2.02 that asked the Academic Senate for California Community College to address the confusion in the field by researching and developing a glossary of common terms for student learning…

Innovations in search and retrieval have provided librarians with some of their most exciting challenges as a profession. Yet even as new tools flood the academic library commons, direct, person-to-person information counseling is still needed, some would say more than ever. Consequently, it can be very useful to study how users conduct new…

The author reports on a review of state policies by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, which raises questions about the validity of the use of home-language surveys as a step to identify students eligible for special help in learning English. While it's ubiquitous in schools across the country, the practice of educators'…