Traditional notions of learning, teaching, schooling, and leading, contribute to the inequity and injustice found in schools. In this study, autoethnography was used as a process and product to explore one leader's journey opening and leading a new "alternative" school as the school's principal. These experiences create the backdrop of a…

While little research has been conducted on Asian undocumented students in higher education, it was the powerful story of an Asian undocumented high school student, Tereza Lee, that inspired Senator Richard Durbin to co-author immigration legislation known as the 2001 DREAM Act. Tereza's story represents an important counter-story to what many…

Youth live storied lives (made up of intersecting stories of school, home, peers, and other aspects of lived experience). Therefore, the ways in which youth construct and tell their high school stories are vital for understanding their experiences as first authors (primary creators, constructors, and tellers of their own stories) and protagonists…

This article serves as an invitation to see the way the teaching of biography-driven writing has been increasingly pushed out of the secondary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum in favor of highly structured, formulaic, and impersonal writing, and how this is a setback for students in their preparation for college and career writing. The…

This narrative study examined how the life experiences of high school administrators impact how they conceptualize and understand school discipline. These experiences were then positioned within the current context of COVID-19 pandemic related school closures and protests associated with George Floyd's death which brought light to systemic racism…

Understanding identity labels as "jaulas" [cages] and testimonios as theory and method, this article centers bi/multilingual Latinx students' experiences in high school English Language Development (ELD) classes. We present how two teachers, now researchers, built long-term relationships with former elementary school students, affording…

More than 100,000 Central American youth have migrated alone to the United States across the Mexico-U.S. border. Referred to as "unaccompanied minors," many of the youth are faced with boundary producing processes within the struggling U.S. school systems they attend, including linguistic and political boundaries. Part of a larger…

This narrative analysis case study challenges the education reform movement's fascination with "grit," the notion that a non-cognitive trait like persistence is at the core of disparate educational outcomes and the answer to our inequitable education system. Through analysis of the narratives and meaning-making processes of Elijah, a…

Youth voices, experiences, and perspectives are sometimes overlooked because debates regarding "best practices" in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment often distract educators from centering youth. Also, while the theory and practice of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies have been increasingly well received by educators and…

This study explored complicated personal narratives of school reform generated by participants in response to a particular small schools reform initiative. Narrative data was dialogically generated in interviews with nine past participants of an urban high school conversion project planned and implemented over a span of five years toward the goal…

This article is not intended to be an autobiography. It relates to the experiences of the author as a pupil in a secondary modern school in Wiltshire during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He suffered the experience of being an 11-plus failure and a secondary modern graduate at the age of 15 years. Later in life he had a much more rewarding career…

The research aimed to understand the way in which high school principals' perceptions of social justice (SJ) are implemented in their daily educational work. A qualitative study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews to collect the narratives of two high school principals in Israel--one Arab-Muslim and one Jewish. The interview transcripts…

This qualitative study explores the perceived impact of college-going capital gained during participation in a college access program. In three, semistructured interviews spanning the first-year college experience, 10 first-year college students who participated in a college access program articulate the value of access programming and also raise…

By exploring "the trumpet" as a metaphor, a successful mid-career instrumental teacher and a teacher educator jointly conducted a narrative inquiry into pedagogy used with a high school composition class. In particular, they focused on the dilemmas that arose when, within this class setting, the instrumental teacher implemented informal…

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students--Jorge, Adriana, and Jason--over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a…