High schools across the country are restructuring their curricular frameworks to meet the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which emphasize an understanding of cultural diversity in addition to critical thinking and literacy. Despite curricular variance among high schools, the significant roles non-white races have played in constructing a…

Using narrative from 6 high school American history textbooks published between 1956 and 2009, this study investigated changes in how textbook authors presented the topics of agricultural science, farming, and community. Although some critical discourse analyses have examined textbooks' treatment of different population groups (e.g., African…

Stan Metzenberg offers a critical analysis of the draft "Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Standards," which are for pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 and introductory high school courses. Metzenberg claims that the document reveals significant, unacceptable gaps in science content, as well as some notable errors and…

In this critical discourse analysis of six high-school world geography textbooks, we explore how constructions and representations of North Africa and Southwest Asia have served to reinforce Orientalist discourse in formal curriculum. Visual and written representations in these textbooks were overwhelmingly confounded by a traditional/modern…

Family, school, and community partnerships are a critical part of student achievement, but the successful establishment of meaningful partnerships with low-income and minority populations remains elusive. In 1994, legislators in the United States passed a version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that seeks to address this…

This critical instrumental case study examines a transformative world language learning approach to a unit on culture in an introductory Japanese class in a public high school. Couched in recent post-9/11 language "policy" debates, which strikingly lack mention of religion, spirituality, or environmental issues of climate change and…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

If young readers (adolescents) are introduced to a range of story structures and less structured texts (or "deviant narratives"), it may encourage the development of more diverse and accommodating schemata and the capacity to make inferences about the link between discourse units. It is, after all, a basic principle of recent narrative…