This article traces how multiple equity-focused goals were negotiated in collectively designing a classroom that centered joyful fandom literacy practices, considering how teacher-researchers and youth use expanded conceptions of equity trails in a social design experiment to reset harmful but normalized classroom, disciplinary, and fandom…

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs), where researchers and practitioners work in concert to address persistent problems of practice, provide promising mutualistic benefits in urban school settings. Drawing on an integrated framework, this case study explores the initial development of an RPP between six small and rural school districts and two…

Educational scholars have argued that poverty can hamper student achievement. In this critical discussion paper, we provide a historiography of how urban poverty increased in America over the last 30 years of the 20th century. We contend that educators and educational researchers working in P-12 urban schools should understand how federal urban…

Research-engaged teachers (RET) are those who participate in three research activities: reading research, conducting research, and data collection, analysis, and use. In this study, I describe the perceptions and attitudes of this often-overlooked teacher population by highlighting the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to become and remain…

A growing body of research investigates how intermediary organizations (IOs) and their networks navigate, promote, and produce evidence on social media. To date, scholars have underexplored blogs, an important milieu in which IOs produce and disseminate information. In this analysis, we broaden the emerging scholarship on evidence brokering by…

In the past decade, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have grown in number and reputation. Stephanie Brown and Annie Allen describe the varied ways partnerships facilitate more sustained and productive relationships between researchers and practitioners. They share key findings from a comparative case study of three different types of RPPs…

This article explores a research partnership between a university-based researcher and a middle school science teacher. Our partnership began with project-based inquiry and continued with unstructured thought-partner spaces: meetings with no agenda where we wrestled with problems of practice. Framed as incubation periods, these meetings allowed us…

This article speaks conceptually and methodologically about the ethics and politics of doing research with newcomer refugee youth and issues of representation. Feminist poststructuralist paradigms across a variety of fields have critically examined notions of experience, agency, and identity to in order to encompass more fluid understandings of…

Research conducted on youth exposure to violence has generally focused on documenting the prevalence of community violence and its emotional and behavioral implications. However, there is a dearth of information related to the impact of violence on the implementation and evaluation of community and school-based programs. This commentary examines…

Action research, particularly done by teachers, has had a contentious, decades-long history. As a form of social inquiry, action research has been designed to make it easier for members of social groups to create social change within their communities. Rather than conducting research that focuses on an outcome, action researchers focus on the…

"Urban Teaching in America: Theory, Research, and Practice in K-12 Classrooms" is a brief yet comprehensive overview of urban teaching. Undergraduate and graduate students who are new to the urban context will develop a deeper understanding of the urban teaching environment and the challenges and opportunities they can expect to face while…

Based on two studies that we conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area in 2009 and 2010, we found that teachers do, in fact, use research, although they tend to seek it out under very specific conditions and circumstances. Namely, teachers tend to look for research in response to an immediate, pressing concern, such as how to best teach fractions…

As public servants who work most closely with children, teachers have first-hand knowledge of the needs of the changing demographics of urban public schools in the United States. Teachers who engage in research, and researchers who are former teachers, enjoy unique positions in conducting investigations and sharing and implementing findings.…

In this reflective essay, five members of a research team involving graduate students and a faculty member offer individual "studies" of specific moments in the field in which lessons about methodology, the research context, and the researcher herself/himself crystallized. The article highlights the pedagogical possibilities of…

This paper outlines the methodological issues I faced during my research as a "returning native" in an English secondary school. The empirical research took the form of a three-year case study and used some ethnographic methods, as it comprised interviews carried out over a period of three academic years in the school in which I was once…