Background: We build on participatory and critical understandings of democracy to analyze a two-and-a-half-year collaborative redesign of our teacher education program. Purpose: To theorize and design for the seemingly everyday, ordinary, and unremarkable work it takes for teacher education programs to embody democratic principles and…

Context: Rooted in the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this article explores how a team of youth community activists extended their coalition virtually to produce a bill of demands for structural social change in their city and its surrounding county. Focus of Study: Our inquiry focuses on how the youth's dialectic goal…

Background: Equity is invoked as a watchword in teacher education--a catch-all connected to an array of issues related to diversity, justice, or gaps in outcomes and opportunities for minoritized groups. This conceptual article argues that equity is often undefined and undertheorized in teacher education, and the complexities involved in…

Background: The historical literature on the civil rights movement has tended to underemphasize the movement's educational activities, while literature on the civil rights and Black Power movements has overemphasized ideological and tactical differences between these chapters in the struggle for Black liberation. A few studies have examined…

Background/Context: Youth activism, the broad-based leadership among young people who seek to challenge and build alternatives to oppressive social systems, has spread across the nation and globe. Yet youth activism is often hemmed in at school gates, particularly by school leaders charged with maintaining efficient school environments. Focus of…

Background: American students represent diverse life experiences, languages, cultures, and community memberships. Given the relatively unchanged demographics of U.S. teachers (primarily middle-class, white females), it is important that teachers engage in culturally proactive pedagogy and design curriculum that both reflects their students'…

Background/Context: Working towards social justice in education requires students' voices to be heard and understood (Mansfield, 2014). This is especially the case for students from marginalized populations. Prior research has shown the value and importance of students' voices for school retention, academic success, school inclusivity, and student…

Background/Context: Current historical understanding of Hawai'i's territorial period celebrates American education as a crucial influence on the islands' political development. In particular, the territory's public school system represents an essential institution for spreading democratic freedom, fostering social mobility, and, more importantly,…

Background/Context: Women's sexuality, and the ways they experience it, has been a major topic in feminist theories and movements throughout history. For the more than 20,000 working-class women who participated in the Free Women movement in Spain (the libertarian women's movement, which started in 1936), women's sexuality was also a key topic in…

This chapter provides a critique of the post-racial discourse that emerged after the election of President Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. Using personal narrative, I extend this critique of the post-racial within the context of a multicultural education graduate program.

Background/Context: Traditional adult education in Spain treated the learner as a mere object that could be shaped by the educator. Although current practices of the democratic adult education movement in Spain reveals a completely opposite standpoint on adult education, there has been little analysis of the several influences converging and…

In light of the current mainstream contention that the United States has entered a post-racial epoch with the election of the first African American president, this work posits that post-racial rhetoric obfuscates the continued racialized experiences of Black families regardless of class status.

This chapter details how slavery, segregation, and racism impacted the educational experiences of African Americans from the colonial era to the present. It argues that America has yet to be a truly post-slavery and post-segregation society, let alone a post-racial society.

Background/Context: Recently emerged with the implementation of the California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and the NCLB Act of 2001 is an increase in the number of education production function studies estimating the relationship between educational inputs and APIs. While the majority of past research on California school…

Background/Context: The central role of hope in teaching has long been acknowledged by authors such as Sonia Nieto and Larry Cuban, but hope has received little focused attention from scholars. While books such as David Halpin's Hope and Education and Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy's John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope each…