Throughout my career as an elementary music educator, I constantly sought ways to decenter myself as the instructor and make space for student agency and independence to flourish. However, my efforts over 10 years were rooted in Western Eurocentric thought. Where I thought I was creating a more egalitarian environment, my Whiteness shielded me…

In this article, I examine intersectionally-minoritised immigrant children's transitions from community-based pre-kindergartens to elementary schools (kindergartens) in the most segregated school system in the US. Attending to issues of blockage and fragmentation inherent to transitions, I analyse transition supports, interpreting and critiquing…

This article extends upon Susan Dion's theory of the "perfect stranger" by exploring how this position is articulated and embodied by white teachers (N?=?67) involved in urban Indigenous education reform. On the lookout for deconstruction, we think with Derrida around the interrelated self/other and familiar/strange binaries that uphold…

Concerns about new teachers' capacity to address diversity in their classrooms are growing in many parts of the West, and there is some consensus that one aspect of the problem is the narrow range of cultural and social backgrounds from which teacher candidates are drawn. Yet a minority of socially aware teachers, from all backgrounds, continue to…

In this paper, the authors discuss two complementary life history research projects investigating prospective teachers' identities in relation to their race and social class. Drawing on the experiences of one student from each study, they show how both whites and students of color primarily thought about one another as "others"--people who…

Across Canada, many Aboriginal peoples and communities are actively resisting environmental destruction and communicating to settler-Canadians traditions of respect for the land. Moreover, some Indigenous scholars and educators are calling for a foregrounding of Indigenous ways of knowing in environmental education for all students. However,…

This article draws on a two-year study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of South Asian parents and their children's views on the school experience (Parents, Children and the School Experience: Asian Families' Perspectives--Grant Reference: R000239671). The article focuses on an aspect of the young people's school…

This article presents the authors' ongoing research into two different pedagogical projects within teacher credential courses: one in critical multicultural education and the other in foundations of education. The data were gathered in Northern California and in Colorado. Both projects were designed to help students-teachers become more aware of…