Environmental education that incorporates civic ecology can contribute to social-ecological resilience through programs designed to advance youth civic leadership and environmental stewardship. This research used an interpretive qualitative approach to study the environmental education activities of a Watershed Avengers at the Ocean Discovery…

Background: Extant literature contends that it can be difficult for White preservice teachers to develop culturally relevant curriculum for the diverse students whom they will encounter in classrooms. Though there is a significant body of research about culturally responsive pedagogy, teacher education programs have struggled with how to best…

An ethnographic study of youth creating media was conducted to examine new literacies at an urban high school in northern California. The school primarily served students from low-income, non-dominant racial and ethnic backgrounds. This article reports on a 9th-grade social studies multimedia project about migration and immigration--called…

This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion "in…

In this paper we articulate an alternative approach to look at video games and learning to become a creator and contributor in the digital culture. Previous discussions have focused mostly on playing games and learning. Here, we discuss game making approaches and their benefits for illuminating game preferences and learning both software design…

Based on work in media studies, new literacy studies, applied linguistics, the arts and empirical research on the experiences of urban youths' informal media arts practices, we articulate a new vision for media education in the digital age that encompasses new genres, convergence, media mixes and participation. We first outline the history of how…

This ethnographic study of high school students' classroom practices and perceptions about participation reveals the extent to which students' perceptions determine their understandings of practice, even when these understandings conflict with researcher observations and the bulk of the literature on gender and participation. This study shows,…

This article looks closely at one instantiation of a poetry-centered practice as supported by June Jordan's Poetry for the People, specifically in the context of an inaugural poetry contest. It builds on an earlier empirical study, which investigated the partnership between Poetry for the People and one East Bay Area high school and the rich…