This article presents a case study of a fourth-grade teacher, Kathy Topaz (all names are pseudonyms), her seventeen students, and the ways that they talked about and rehearsed essay-writing through speech across the school year in an inclusive fourth grade class. With increased focus on informational writing and opinion writing in curriculum and…

The narrative of gendered White savior in urban classrooms is ubiquitous not only in film (Smith, 1995, LaGravenese, 2007), but also in popular and academic literature. White female teachers are at the front of the majority of increasingly privatized U.S. classrooms (Pickower, 2009, Cochran-Smith, 2004). This article ethnographically critiques the…

The academic performance and engagement of youth from under-represented ethnic groups (African American, Latino, and Indigenous) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) show statistically large gaps in comparison with their White and Asian peers. Some of these differences can be attributed to the direct impact of economic…

This article draws from a qualitative case study of 22 teachers of African American males who participated in a screening event of the documentary Beyond the Bricks as part of a community engagement project in three cities: New Orleans, New York, and Oakland Through the lenses of critical race theory and the Matrix Achievement Paradigms typology,…

The nation's focus on the literacy skills of students--especially boys--has produced many notions of reform. School districts reorganized and changed curricula to meet the needs of struggling readers and writers. In New York City, where this author was teaching, "Balanced Literacy" (a reading and writing workshop) had been implemented in…