Teacher educators who seek to advance social justice perspectives and promote equity-oriented dispositions often engage with challenging and controversial issues relevant to schooling, the lives of students, and the work of teachers. Addressing equity issues and controversial topics can be challenging and fraught with tensions for both students…

Studies of effective Black educators describe the teacher's sense of urgency as the guiding perspective that manifests in their authoritative, insistent manner. Although the bulk of this work offers snapshots of insistence in practice, less is known about the perspectives that undergird Black educator urgency. Using collaborative inquiry…

In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, "Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that…

Cammarota and Romero describe how they utilized a framework they call "critically compassionate intellectualism" (CCI)--a trilogy of critical pedagogy, authentic caring, and social justice-oriented curriculum--to lift up previously disempowered Latinx youth. CCI can also serve as an appropriate framework for emancipatory pedagogy and…

Research shows culturally responsive teaching affects urban students positively. Current literature is an excellent resource for urban teacher preparation and provides definitions, models, and examples to help preservice teachers recognize the "how" and "what" of culturally responsive teaching. Missing, however, is an accessible, in-depth…

This one-year ethnographic case study focused on students of color from a West Coast High School who faced a variety of academic challenges. Collectively, they shared perspectives on school improvement, and among the recommendations was the importance of mentorship in the classroom to develop students' aspirational, navigational, and informational…