Recent efforts to opt out of assessments have focused attention on the role that testing plays in accountability reforms in the United States. While opt-out activists often invoke the disproportionate impact of these reforms on communities of color, opting out has been more widespread in mostly White, affluent, and suburban communities. This study…

Upward Bound (UB), created in 1965 to provide educational enrichment for low-income youths, had to be racially integrated. In 1966, I was among three White northern teens sent to integrate UB at Xavier University in New Orleans. My family had lived in North Carolina in the early 1960s, participating in civil rights actions, so I had had some…

This paper explores the social media literacies of Dakari, a 16-year-old Black teen reader, writer, and activist, within a broader 3-month multi-case study on diverse teens' online literacies. The focus is on Dakari's multimodal literacy practices related to social justice activism and civic engagement. The study highlights how social media…

Amid debates about CRT in education, this paper critically analyses laws that have reportedly sought to expand 'education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics' with the hypothesis that there would be little evidence of anti-racist ideology in policies pertaining to curriculum.…

This article explores ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) through a Freirean lens of critical consciousness, dialogue, and transformation. The purpose is to draw from where there have been processes of engagement of sociopolitical action in science and how these spaces can become meaningful entry points to take toward making a…

In the summer of 2020, powerful protests against police brutality took place throughout the United States in response to the unlawful deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Though the types of protests ranged from local grassroot organizations walking the streets to athletes using their platforms to…

Community College Reentry Programs (CCRPs) are campus-based programs that serve formerly incarcerated students by providing targeted services attuned to their needs. Currently, there are 62 community colleges in California that have CCRPs. While emerging research has begun to examine the experiences of students in these programs, little is known…

One model for engaging young people to be more civically minded and to help them develop a critically conscious sociopolitical identity is through youth organizing and participatory action research. Over the last 3 years, I have worked with Leaders Organizing 2 Unite and Decriminalize (LOUD) members--a majority of which we system-involved--who…

Institutional response to #BlackLivesMatter and anti-Asian hate are shaped by crisis response with strategic plans, rather than structural change and investment in care networks. In this article, we offer our personal narratives to illustrate the possibilities of embodying carework to support student activists and illuminate how we collectively…

Social media offers potential for educator professional learning, but platforms' for-profit nature complicates this practice, especially for professional learning around justice-oriented pedagogies. This exploratory study investigated 551 publicly available Instagram posts shared by 11 purposefully sampled, justice-oriented education influencers…

This article is written from a pro-choice perspective. Through a radical, inclusive feminist lens, I examine educational aspects of the Irish repeal movement; a 35 year long, grassroots movement that forced the hand of reluctant politicians into calling a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment. I draw from websites and media interviews, my own…

This essay details research into feminist digital activism in the Australian context through analysing the themes that emerged from the Teach Us Consent website. It provides a preliminary analysis of its contents as a means to continue and deepen the conversation around issues of gender, consent, and the education system. It also examines the…

The antagonism between "class" and "race" have plagued educational theory for decades. As a communist organizer seeking to move Marxist educational theory out of the stagnant waters of theoretical debates, I turn to recent CRT scholarship, which I find much more in line with the communist project. Yet, this literature omits…

In the midst of political attacks on public schools to prevent discussions on social injustice and Latinx youth culture, there are after-school programs that nurture Latinx youth critical consciousness and social justice activism. This study uses agencies of transformational resistance (ATR) as a framework to explore one after-school program's…

In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas revisits the tension between decolonization and other social justice projects in education scholarship, focusing in particular on the arguments for and against the notion of decolonization as land return. While different colonized communities are justifiably projecting their own political priorities in struggles…