Youth voices, experiences, and perspectives are sometimes overlooked because debates regarding "best practices" in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment often distract educators from centering youth. Also, while the theory and practice of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies have been increasingly well received by educators and…

Background/Context: Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for Black boys' learning across single-sex and coeducational environments. Limited attention to these relationships by school professionals is rooted in deficit-oriented conceptions of boyhood and Black masculinity. The popular message of deficiency and pathology is clear:…

K-12 teachers who write about their daily work on blogs and other social media platforms share local knowledge and wisdom from the immediate view of the classroom. These first-hand retellings of everyday classroom life offer a unique critique of educational policy from the teachers' perspective. Reporting on the analysis of 14 public-facing blogs…

In this article, two applied linguistics researchers who conducted qualitative studies in educational contexts in Italy and Jamaica reflexively interrogate identity tensions among their ascribed, felt and evolving insider/outsider identities and positions. The juxtaposition of selected discursively analyzed research vignettes reflects similarities…

Informed by theorizing positioning and agency, this article presents a case study by examining a science teacher's positioning acts and her agency development in a middle school in New York City. An analysis of this teacher's teaching narratives reveals that when she positioned her emergent multilingual students as "whole people," who…

Culturally-responsive pedagogies require moving beyond blanket assumptions about learners to focus deeply on local meaning-makings. This narrative analysis case study examines the ways a 20-year-old African American man challenges the negative educational identity with which he is forced to contend as he navigates a large and complex urban public…

The current study aimed to explore how cultural contexts influence the attitudes of mothers raising children with disabilities. Semi-structured in-depth interviews of seven immigrant Korean mothers regarding their personal experiences within the complexities of the special education system in the United States were analysed to identify factors…

Lisa Jean Moore describes a class assignment for her Social and Cultural Change course in which she was required to accommodate the material limitations of teaching within a highly regulated and restricted environment. This assignment, carried out in a women's prison, could be adapted for traditional college settings and travel abroad programs,…

Black male teachers make up less than 2% of the U.S. public school labor force. A prevalent discourse among educational stakeholders has suggested that Black male teachers are the key to helping students in urban schools develop skills to succeed in school by acting as role models. This assertion presents Black male teachers as a panacea to…

Speaking out against decades of injustice and challenging deficit perceptions of young learners and their families, "It's Not About Grit" pulls back the veil, revealing the social systems that marginalize and stigmatize mostly poor, urban students of color and their communities. At the same time, author Steven Goodman, founding executive…

In light of the historical failure of boys of color in US schools, this article sheds light onto the ways in which normative discourses of literacy and learning shape the experiences of immigrant boys and how they are perceived and defined as un/successful students. Findings indicate that although these boys--deemed to be "at-risk" or…

Although many students at Barnard College, Columbia University select the elite, women's liberal arts college because of its feminist legacy, students often report that their understanding of gender and sexuality evolves during their time on campus as they become more knowledgeable of feminist discourse and queer theory. As a result, courses open…

This dissertation examines a teacher's language ideologies, their impact on curriculum modifications and bilingual Latinx middle schoolers' storytelling, to understand how a bilingual pedagogy builds on their cultural and linguistic resources. This qualitative study was conducted in a sixth grade writing workshop class in New York City as the…

The process of digital storytelling allows basic writers to take a personal narrative and translate it into a multimodal and multidimensional experience, motivating a diverse group of writers with different learning styles to engage more creatively and meaningfully in the writing process. Digital storytelling has the capacity to contextualize…

A story about literacy in three generations of an American family, who lived in South Queens County in New York city, is presented. The way in which literacy of author's family was different from that of others is explained.