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…

Community organizing efforts employ different types of research as they seek to address community issues. This chapter details the evolving use of research in a youth organizing effort in San Bernardino, CA that has addressed issues in schools, the educational system, and the broader community. We examine the youth organizers' use of organizing…

Purpose: This research was intended to identify some of the factors that impact student veterans' well-being, based on their unmet needs. Research by the USC School of Social Work Center for innovation and Research on Veterans & Military Families USC-CIR (2015) found that many service members separate from the military ill-equipped to begin…

In Western cultures, subjectivity has often been seen as the "black sheep" of educational research because of its heavy emphasis on objectivity. Consequently many research initiatives in education share the assumption that objective reasoning should play a central role. However, mentoring teachers' practice improvement research often…

In 2013, California became one of the first states to adopt the rigorous Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, the current state of science instruction does not support the conceptual shifts of the NGSS, which call for consistent science instruction K-12, increased inquiry, subject integration, as well as science instruction that…

We present a concept-mapping activity, developed within a youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR) after-school program, to demonstrate how the activity contributed to young people's conceptualization of social structures as interconnected. We analyze fieldnotes from the Change 4 Good yPAR program, which includes primarily Latina/o 4th and 5th…

This article examines the participatory impact of a storytelling project on a small group of Latinx English learners in a sixth grade classroom. The storytelling project unexpectedly emerged as a positive ripple effect from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiative to foster civic empowerment among middle school students in an English…

The creation of ePortfolios as a capstone project for school counselors-in-training has many benefits for the students, instructors, and program. However, there can be tension due to misalignments in goals and lived experiences of the ePortfolio even when the students find ePortfolios useful. This paper explores this tension between instructor…

This study employed a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of a school-based youth participatory action research program on the education outcomes of participating high school students. The program was a year-long elective course in six high schools in the same California district whose student population is predominantly low-income…

This article draws on a multi-year, participatory action case study of ALIANZA, a Califonia-based Latinx im/migrant parent group. Grounded in Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit), this article focuses specifically on the development of political agency among ALIANZA members, highlighting organizational strategies aimed at school reform while…

The purpose of this dissertation was to document, analyze, understand, and describe how the environmental virtue ethics of undergraduate students were impacted after participating in a service-learning project designed to establish a new university garden. This service-learning project occurred during the fall semester of 2011, on the campus of…

This qualitative study examined the complexities of mutually engaging across differing positionalities (students and students, students and teacher) while intentionally working in spaces of distress (e.g. push and pull between oppression and liberation). The findings demonstrated the ways in which building a beloved community while situated within…

Despite the growing descriptions of effective teacher community--and lessons about the conditions needed for them to survive--more research has been done on exemplars of strong professional community than on efforts to produce professional community where it doesn't already exist. Building professional community is important to school improvement…

Guided by a critical race praxis for educational research lens, the authors worked individually alongside their students in a K-12 or higher education classroom, embracing spaces of tension derived from the push and pull between oppression and liberation. The authors explain how these tensions troubled the ways in which humanizing practices are…

This study explored the ways in which our classroom community (students and teacher) engaged with humanizing pedagogy in a seventh grade science classroom, toward the full development of our classroom community, and the dismantling of inequitable practices and unjust policies that we recognized in our science classroom, school and/or community…