A hyper-standardized and alarmist educational climate in the U.S. propagates deficit discourses about students and creates a roadblock for teachers seeking to center their students' lives through critical and multicultural pedagogies. Scholars have called for attention to mapping as a pedagogical tool to unearth and push back against sociospatial…

This dissertation explores the development and implementation of a community-based educational program, iDREAM, aimed at teaching minoritized youth about Artificial Intelligence (AI) with an emphasis on ethics and social justice. Partnering with two NGOs, this study integrates Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) and Critical Computational…

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) has gained significant attention across diverse school environments in justice by supporting students from culturally underrepresented groups. However, how teachers develop their agency toward inclusive practices and what influences the agency developed have been undertheorized and underexplored. This study…

Culturally situated and cross-cultural approaches to instructional design and research have become increasingly important in higher education, particularly in online learning environments. As higher education becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, learning environments must be structured and facilitated to meet the learning needs of…

The disproportionate, over-representation of Black boys in special education continues to be a matter of social injustice and inequity in education. Many Black students are placed in special education due to subjective identification processes. This is especially true when it comes to classifications such as Emotional Behavior Disorders (EBD).…

While there's a significant body of literature written by researchers who delineate the shifting definitions of literacy in the 21st century and the ways students perform literacy events that are culturally relevant to their lives in school and in out-of-school contexts, much of this research is situated in urban contexts. There is a need for…

Can you imagine future learning environments devoid of the systemic inequities that stifle student learning opportunities and teacher decision-making in most classrooms today? This volume offers the necessary steps--playful, participatory, historically informed--that are required to forge a pathway from the present U.S. educational landscape to a…

Justice-centred science pedagogy has been suggested as an effective framework for supporting teachers in bringing in culturally relevant pedagogy to their science classrooms; however, limited instructional tools exist that introduce social dimensions of science in ways teachers feel confident navigating. In this article, we add to the…

Recent events reveal the impact of systemic inequities on marginalized communities and highlight the importance of critical frameworks in science teacher education. Education theorists and research suggest that lack of sociopolitical, or critical, consciousness among teachers limits their ability to engage students in culturally relevant teaching…

This article provides a practical agenda for educational leaders to address diversity in their organization. Firstly, loose definitions of the term diversity have led to its wide misuse; leaders need to agree with their community on its contextual definition. Secondly, the theoretical underpinnings of diversity have been limited to critical theory…

This timely collection provides an accessible discussion and analysis of some of the most urgent policy issues facing early childhood care and education in the United States: fragmented policy systems; broad disregard for early years professionals exemplified by low pay; standards that fail to increase equity; and overlooking the role community…

This article showcases an example of a large-scale open educational resource (OER) statistics course redesign at Guttman Community College from evaluation, creation, and development. It highlights ways I identified students' needs and responded to them, integrated equity into the OER design by describing how social justice principles were applied,…

The authors discuss how teachers can select picture books to fully recognize the lives and identities of refugee-background learners, counter harmful myths, and address forced displacement in their classrooms.

Prior to becoming a mathematics educator, I was a teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland. Because of the success I experienced with culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), it became part of my research agenda along with teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ). Databases like 23andme and Ancestry can be used as a context for CRP and TMfSJ.…

The Earth Charter has become a dated guiding document for the field of environmental education. When the document debuted in 2000 as the global "framework to guide the transition to a sustainable future" (Earth Charter Initiative, n.d.-a, para. 2), the writers promoted it as a solution to environmental problems that incorporated voices…