The Critical Literacy (CritLit) project promotes using critical texts to engage readers in examining their lived experiences and understanding of social justice issues. This study used a qualitative participatory approach with a narrative design to research the students' engagement in a book club using critical texts. Participants were fourth- and…

This article details how a team of fourth-grade teachers in Rockingham County, Virginia used the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to deepen student understanding of Barbara Johns and the Moton Student Strike's fight for racial justice in Virginia and to reframe their overall approach to Black history in general. Although Rockingham County Schools are…

Discussions about power have only recently begun to appear in the learning sciences literature. Most of this important work takes a critical perspective; the present work complements these efforts by examining power sharing as a catalyst for empowerment in teacher-researcher co-design. Even though teacher-researcher collaborations are discussed in…

This article combines interview data from a group of boys of color at an urban single-sex school and content analysis of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" to demonstrate the complexities of readers' responses to literature. Textual relevance, or the ability to construct personal…

What happens when standards, teaching for understanding, research based strategies for improving student achievement, and teacher inquiry become a whole? Power Teaching results. A prototype in development at an urban, elementary school in the South, power teaching connects the dots of state standards, Harvard Project Zero's teaching for…

Our action research project report provided students with social skills training to effectively handle bullying situations in the fourth grade. Our study involved 70 fourth-grade students and began Monday, January 14, 2008 and concluded Friday, May 2, 2008. The behaviors documented from the fourth grade students were name calling, exclusion,…

This article describes an afterschool program called "Poetic High" in which the author shares insights on the transformation of oneself as a teacher into more of a guide and a mentor. It outlines the process of transforming the attitudes of students from being passive learners into being poets of learning and life. The Poetic High created by this…