Guided by a critical race praxis for educational research lens, the authors worked individually alongside their students in a K-12 or higher education classroom, embracing spaces of tension derived from the push and pull between oppression and liberation. The authors explain how these tensions troubled the ways in which humanizing practices are…

Data can serve as a powerful tool to ensure equity for students: if educators examine data through the lens of social justice, they will reveal success stories and wounds. At the author's former school, Nipher Middle School in Saint Louis, Missouri, the wounds of previous data-driven decisions were real. Using a social justice lens to examine…

A key component to eliminating the achievement gap is building relationships between educators and students of color. In working toward social justice in schools, the authors encounter people at different places on the continuum. Educators in the large, primarily white, suburban Parkway School District in St. Louis, Missouri, range from the…

Strains on the global economy and an imminent recession in the U.S. offer a particularly ripe moment for educators to raise questions about educational reform, the world of schooling, and the kinds of literacy practices that will prepare students for their lives as citizens in a world structured through the social and economic relations of…