In this article, the authors use their personal narratives and collaborative portraits as methods to shed light on the complexities of developing a research identity while journeying through a doctoral program. Using the metaphors of a wanderer, a chameleon, and a warrior, their narratives represent portraits of experiences faced by doctoral…

Background: School leaders must make sense of the messages they receive from multiple, overlapping contexts of their school environments. Equally important, they must shape meaning of school issues and events with and for other school members. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which school leaders defined and made sense…

This article explores the figured world of learning at urban Oakcity High School, describing the learner identities that were available to students amid the practices, categories, discourses and interactions of this world. My aims are 2-fold and interconnected: (1) to reframe a taken-for-granted phenomenon--that students tend to do poorly at urban…

The purpose of this study was to critically examine the perceptions that African-American high school students have towards engineering. A qualitative research design using criterion sampling and snowballing was used to select seven African-American students from urban high schools to participate in the research. Semi-structured interviews were…

Schools in America are facing rapidly changing demographics, and because of those changing demographics, this article makes the following propositions. First, the increasing demographic changes in urban schools demand new leadership approaches. Second, because many of the urban educational demands are shaped by ongoing social and cultural issues…

For several years now, an achievement gap has been in existence between African American students and white students in mathematics. The purpose of this study is to (1) report on an in-depth case study of a former state mathematics consultant to describe his experiences of the mathematics education of African Americans in public high schools in…

This article reports on the results of a qualitative study that focused on the use of critical pedagogy with African American males with labels of "emotional or behavioral disorders." The teachers in this study worked with students to examine and counter the ways that their status as a special education student affected their identities.…

Recent research on "Brown v. Board of Education" has emphasized continuing disparities in the education of White and African American students. This research has used the failure of desegregation to account for persisting gaps in White and Black school funding, teacher qualifications, and student achievement. But the current focus on the…

Using critical race theory as a framework, this article examines the access and availability of Advanced Placement (AP) courses and how they impact educational outcomes for Latina/o and African American students. To begin thinking critically about enrollment patterns of AP courses, we ask the following questions: How do school structures,…

Most pragmatic responses to school violence seek to assign individual blame and to instill individual responsibility in students. The authors of this article argue that school violence is the result of the structural violence of oppressive social conditions that force students (especially low-income, male African American and Latino students) to…

This article seeks to locate hip-hop in the realm of popular culture in education. Through the use of song lyrics, the author suggests the use of rap music to provide context for the humanities and social sciences in secondary curriculum. Using a theoretical and practical lens, the article argues for the use of hip-hop and other elements of…

As African American mothers and teacher educators, the authors' investment in teacher education is both personal and professional. The authors build upon these personal and professional investments in their teaching practices with primarily White pre-service teachers, in the hopes of better preparing them to teach African American children. This…

The essays in this collection address questions raised by a modernity that has become global with the victory of capitalism over its competitors in the late twentieth century. Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, capitalist modernity as it has gone global has empowered societies once condemned to…

Evaluation of high stakes testing regimes must consider not simply mean test scores, but their distribution among students. Taking high school graduation tests and black and white student populations to illustrate the argument, I identify two criteria of success: a larger proportion of black high school graduates and a narrower gap between the two…

This book is motivated by the authors' experiences in working with students and their families in urban communities. They are particularly concerned about the urgent imperative to address the endemic educational and societal challenges that pervade the lives of urban students, particularly those who live in poverty, are of minority and immigrant…