The task of guiding the development of scholar-practitioners as leaders for social justice is inherently challenging. The dissertation journey, unlike any other journey practitioner-based doctoral students face in urban school settings, provides a steep learning curve as they transition from practitioner to scholar-practitioner. This journey…

This essay examines the author's experiences with becoming a teacher-researcher-leader across many years within two contrasting urban public school contexts. The article works against a traditional "myth" that views teaching as de-professionalized, low-skill and instead argues for teaching as professional, collaborative, political, and…

The ethnographer's embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls 'carnal sociology' and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have…

Seeking to meet Freire's (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back:…

This article, written by a research-active teacher of English with an academic partner, recounts the circumstances of forging a partnership way of working in an urban high school that is consistently targeted for closure in the north of England. This is connected to performance and achievement against Ofsted inspection criteria and school data…

Research conducted on youth exposure to violence has generally focused on documenting the prevalence of community violence and its emotional and behavioral implications. However, there is a dearth of information related to the impact of violence on the implementation and evaluation of community and school-based programs. This commentary examines…

This paper addresses Lincoln's [2010. "'What a long, strange trip it's been …': Twenty-five years of qualitative and new paradigm research." "Qualitative Inquiry" 16, no. 1: 3-9] call for greater attention to the question of rapport in qualitative research through a reflexive examination of researcher-participant relationships…

In schools where curricular constraints and testing pressures narrow the ways in which students can take up identities as writers, longterm enrichment programs offer opportunities for the meaningful design of compositions. This paper, which presents the work of four elementary student participants in a writing workshop, shows how qualitative…

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) offers the promise of increased success for underserved students in urban schools. This qualitative case study examines a middle school reading teacher's understandings and implementation of CRP and the researcher's supportive role over a three-semester collaboration. Two categories of results are described:…

Recently, educational researchers and practitioners have turned to value-added models to evaluate teacher performance. Although value-added estimates depend on the assessment used to measure student achievement, the importance of outcome selection has received scant attention in the literature. Using data from a large, urban school district, I…

Two university researchers who have considerable practitioner and research experience in urban schools conducted an interventionist action research project in collaboration with the professional staff of a diverse urban elementary school. The goal was to collaborate with the administration, faculty and staff in an average urban elementary school…

This teacher research inquiry is a critical discourse analysis of second grade classroom talk about racial identity and dialect difference within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy. Participants in the study, which took place in an urban public district in a Midwestern United States city, included ten African American students and a…

The aim of this paper is to explore the demand side of the market for educational research. That is, what types of educational research do teachers find useful for advancing their instructional practice and under what conditions do they access the research currently available? Although teachers have mixed opinions--both positive and negative--of…

This paper analyzes the ethically important moments that helped build, then break, and then negotiate the relationship between researchers and schools during an ethnographic-type study conducted by the team of researchers from a prominent private university. I posit that the researchers' unskilled approach culminated in producing written…

PCI Education sought scientifically based evidence on the effectiveness of the "PCI Reading Program--Level One" for students with severe disabilities. During the 2007-2008 academic year. Empirical Education conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) in two Florida districts, Brevard and Miami-Dade County Public Schools. For this…