Contemporary African-American classical composers Cedric Adderley, John Lane, and Trevor Weston intertwine strands of culture and individual experience to produce musical works whose distinct designs offer cultural resources that music educators can use to integrate diversity into instructional settings. Of special interest is their ability to…

This article describes a project designed to explore how art educators can use "assemblage" to facilitate collaborative learning in their classrooms. It also explores how "assemblage thinking" facilitates collaboration by moving beyond static approaches to artmaking and encouraging students to draw on their own identities to…

This paper examines an "experimental" program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)--who…

The Black kitchen table has long served as a meeting place for Black families to discuss, debate, and critique issues related to the Black struggle. In particular, it was common for Black kitchen table conversations to talk about the nuances of navigating systems of legalized segregation and oppression, as well--and more recently--navigating the…

The author explores the racial and cultural ideologies that inform what it means to be Black in the United States and how this mainstream framing of Blackness intersects with teacher preparedness to engage Black textual expressions in the classroom.

In the 1930s there emerged an initiative to teach black history and culture to white students, which pre-dates more widespread efforts of the post-Second World War era. This article analyses student work--considering sight, sound and text--and investigates what white students learned about African-American history and culture. Curriculum history…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required states to set cutoffs to determine which schools were subject to accountability for their racial/ethnic subgroups. Using a regression discontinuity design and data from North Carolina, this study examines the effects of this policy on teacher turnover and attrition. Subgroup-specific accountability had…

This article discusses diversity issues evident in fairy tales and explores the pedagogical implications for adding counter-narratives in the school curriculum. Critical Race Theory is employed. In order to uncover contradictory discourses of race within Black cultures, four Africana (African, African American, and Caribbean) Cinderella tale types…

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that…

Using a pilot program in one Chicago elementary school as a case study, this article reports findings of an ethnographic investigation on the impact of Hiphop based music education at the elementary school level. The findings describe how this program facilitated a process by which the youth participants were empowered through (a) identity…

We describe the impact of an African American history centred collaborative teacher study group (CTSG) professional development experience on the cultural competence of 20 secondary Social Studies and English Language Arts educators. Using mixed methods, baseline data indicated slight movement from the colourblind to the cultural pre-competence…

In this essay, Joyce King attempts to interrupt the calculus of human (un)worthiness and to repair the collective cultural amnesia that are legacies of slavery and that make it easy--hegemonically and dysconsciously--for the public to accept myths and media reports, such as those about the depravity of survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans…

This article explores the ways in which females who identify with hip-hop often develop and construct their identities in relation to media representations of blackness and femininity in hip-hop music and culture. In order for educators to support female students in constructing identities of empowerment and agency, they should be willing and able…

Throughout this article, I argue that within the mainstream field of urban education, "the urban" is floating face down, lifeless, and devoid of significant meaning. "City" and "urban" function as taken-for-granted variables that stand in the rightful place of rich explanations, based in theory and evidence, of the…

This study sought to understand the perceptions of African American male students who are enrolled in developmental education programs. The researcher gathered information by interviewing students at 2 Mississippi community colleges and by reviewing information collected from the student's demographic profile. This qualitative research allowed the…