The idea of freedom in education has its roots in the social justice movements of the 1950s and 60s. Civil rights groups coalesced independently of other marginalized groups and movements of its time. While similar in nature, environmentalism and civil rights issues rarely crossed paths. As environmentalism made its way into science education and…

The authors describe a collaboration to create a series of social justice-oriented curriculum maps for a predominantly White preschool. The researchers explore their own identities and biases, how racism disadvantages individuals and groups, and the resulting curriculum design.

"Theories Bridging Ethnography and Evaluation" is the first of two volumes examining the connections between ethnography and evaluation in educational spaces. These volumes wrestle with pressing justice issues in today's societies while elucidating three themes--transformative, intersectional, and comparative--for guiding contemporary…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the means, rationale, challenges and opportunities of shifting focus from anti-racist to pro-Black educational practice. The authors argue that while anti-racism is necessary, it is insufficient in addressing the deeply entrenched anti-Blackness in US society. The instructor and three student…

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the vast social-psychological, economic, and political inequities in our society. Education has become even more important than before to counter systemic oppression and institute justice. Parents, students, and educators are thrown into chaos where opportunity and access are diminished and dissipated. This…

Purpose: Aided with critical-race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998), culturally responsive pedagogy tenets (Gay, 2002), and culturally sustaining pedagogy philosophy (Paris, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to make a two-pronged argument that: the killing of blacks has taken many forms, physical, moral, intellectual, cultural, and financial; and…

Music teacher educators are not alone when grappling with the challenge of preparing students to navigate diversity and confront inequity and injustice. Educators and researchers from multiple disciplines face similar challenges and have responded with various approaches related to cultural multiplicity. The concept of "cultural…

Teacher identity has emerged as a topic amongst contemporary researchers to inform, impact, and reform professional practice in light of the unique challenges presented within education in the United States. A homogeneous teaching population, which remains overwhelmingly White and middle class, must address a demographic and cultural divide…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a culturally responsive professional development intervention for teachers and school leaders in a K-5 school setting. This qualitative case study involved a five-month long professional development intervention called the Culturally Responsive Professional Development (CRPD) series, largely…

Although recent attention to homophobic bullying in American K-12 schools has increased public concern over the plight of queer students, it has also fallen short of addressing a range of dilemmas facing urban queer youth of color, whose needs extend beyond protection from homophobic victimization. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of an HIV/AIDS…

We investigated how community ethnography as a pedagogy approach to STEM-rich making supported youth makers from two low-income urban communities engaged in sustained STEM-rich making towards making a difference in their communities. Data is drawn from two-year long ethnographic data across two community-based, youth making programs. We highlight…

Dual language (DL) is an increasingly popular bilingual education model, touted for its promise to mitigate the historical achievement gap of the growing Latinx population while also teaching Spanish to English speakers. While DL programs may alleviate Latinxs' educational disparities in some cases, recent scholarship has noted a paradox: in other…

The article examines the enactment of culturally relevant progressivism on the part of the principal of the Social Justice School, a small urban public high school explicitly committed to democratic education. Drawing upon extensive interviews and field observations conducted over the course of an academic year by a teacher-researcher within the…

Confirmation of the current enthusiasm for re-visioning progressive education arrived in inboxes this fall when the Bank Street College of Education received more submissions for this issue than for any other in the journal's 17-year history. From these the editors have selected a range of essays that reflect pre-kindergarten through high-school…

Social networks and communities are rapidly expanding and changing due to the accelerating pace of globalization. In this article, we examine new possibilities for the reform of curriculum and educational research in a way that is responsive to increasingly multicultural and global communities. Drawing on literatures in the areas of multicultural,…