The goal of this article is to enhance understanding and appreciation of the current and potential role of trustees in urban community colleges. In working to make sure students are successful, trustees face numerous challenges in implementing high-impact policies and practices that center student success. This article establishes a node…

Teacher wellbeing has gained increasing attention in recent decades, intricately related to the problems of teacher retention, attrition and shortages. In some respects, the emerging debates have been fundamentally disconnected from the everyday lives of teachers, schools and school communities. Teacher wellbeing is repeatedly foregrounded as a…

Environmental education (EE) is a concern in modern society. Plant blindness and nature-deficit disorder highlight how important nature contact and plant consciousness is for urban populations. Considering rapid urbanisation, these phenomena are of increasing concern in China. Integrating EE curricula in Chinese cities is necessary to help younger…

Teaching the scientific, historical, and social facets of global climate change, its causes, and inequitable impacts presents a challenge to most K-12 teachers. In this article we describe the design and implementation of a yearlong professional learning program created to support urban, public K-12 teachers in the creation and enactment of…

Urban community colleges have been studied primarily from a case study perspective, often highlighted by doctoral students conducting research at their institutions. Little of this scholarship, however, has been translated into the base of literature, as less than 5% of the citations in the largest search engines are focused on urban community…

Drawing on ethnographic data of an urban school, this paper contrasts how two White female teachers take up the idea of 'teaching for social justice.' Fourth-grade teacher Maestra Rachel enacts a superficial understanding focused solely on curricular topics, while third-grade teacher Maestra Jennifer roots her teaching in an understanding of how…

School leaders juggle the often-inconsistent goals of maintaining support of middle- and upper-income families for public education and, at the same time, implementing policies to strengthen equity for low-income students. Author Iris C. Rotberg describes how these tradeoffs play out in different communities, the role of concentrated poverty and…

In the midst of the pandemic, this school district made a significant investment with recovery dollars to expand enrichment opportunities in art, music, and physical education for students in their K-8 schools. The hypothesis was increasing the quality and quantity of these opportunities, the school district would increase student engagement, lead…

The current case demonstrates the complexities of utilizing Youth Court as a restorative practice in an urban high school, by focusing on the complexities it presents for one student in particular. In this case, there are reasons why Youth Court clearly is not working at this particular school site as intended. However, more importantly for…

School-based Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) clubs have well-documented benefits for sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth and their allies. However, little is known about what constitutes usual practice in these clubs, nor is much known about the adult advisors who serve as important safe adult relationships for SGM youth in schools. As…

What is the role of teachers in constructing loving dialogic space that is liminal in nature? How can curricular boundary objects catalyze new dialogic spaces connecting people in different social locations? Illuminating these questions, Ms. Thompson opened new doors for elementary students in an urban Reformed Christian school community, inviting…

The?"Urban STEM Collaboratory" is a five-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that addresses challenges to student success in STEM disciplines through a multi-institutional collaboration via?the?University of Memphis (UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University-Purdue University…

Many children bring rich multimodal literacy practices into their classrooms, with experience weaving between paper and digital texts. In order to support children's multimodal meaning making, teachers need first to understand the multimodal practices that children bring into the classroom in order to then develop instruction that builds on, and…

This article discusses classroom conditions that support the co-creation of dialogic space--where our different ideas and perspectives are in conversation with others such that we might take in what other people are saying and be open to it affecting our thinking. Drawing on ethnographic case study data, we provide context to illustrate ways this…

This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by 'key' public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey's work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China's…