Despite the diversity of the American student population, the current teacher force and cohorts of future teachers are overwhelmingly white women from middle class backgrounds. In addition to the work around race, gender, and disability status, there is a clear need for us to help future teachers reconsider how they think about children…

The Impact of Teaching for Artistic Behavior in a Post-Pandemic Urban Art Classroom explores the effects of a choice-based art curriculum on students in an urban K-8 setting, with a focus on the post-pandemic context. The study examines the behavioral and academic outcomes of students in an underserved community and investigates how a TAB approach…

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of multilingual and multicultural students in U.S. schools. Because of high-stakes testing and English-only mandates, instructional practices and curricula in most urban school districts neglect the cultural and linguistic interests of their diverse student populations. In this interpretive study,…

Developing preservice and inservice teachers' sociopolitical consciousness remains an important part of supporting the success of P-12 student experiences. The authors recognize that one way to enhance the sociopolitical consciousness aspect of culturally responsive pedagogy/teaching is through experiential opportunities that support teacher…

This qualitative interpretive study explored how former newcomer English Language Learners (ELLs) in Boston Public Schools (BPS) made sense of their transmigration experiences through a digital storytelling project. The study fills a gap on transmigration experiences in the context of English-only learning environments, with a particular…

This article reports on the findings of a photography and literacy project the authors conducted with 117 diverse city students. Relying on a critical pedagogy framework, the foundations for this study include research on cultural relevance, literacy, and visual sociology. The authors used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and photo…

This study was presented at the American Educational Research Association 2012 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The study explored how action research of arts-based teaching (ABT) impacted at-risk students in three urban public schools in southern California, USA. ABT was defined as using arts, music, drama, and dance in teaching other subjects. A…

This study, situated in an inner-city school in Western Canada, involved 20 seventh graders producing photo essays about living with racism, classism, or sexism. Two questions guided the study: (1) How do students working with a critical pedagogue conceptualize their own experiences with race, class, and gender in ways that either interrupt or…

In this article, the author investigates the teaching and writing of poetry within public school spaces, illuminating how the work of poetry in an Academic Interventions classroom stirs new visions of who the students and the teacher can be. The study involves five teachers from a range of rural, urban, and suburban districts. These teachers…

There is little research in the field of physical education on whether technology can help decrease the level of childhood obesity in physical education classes or on why physical educators choose to use or not use technology in their programs. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine physical educators' beliefs and practices…

The high school dropout crisis in diverse urban communities in the United States is evidence of an endemic disengagement from formal education. The project on which this essay reports utilized visual sociology methods to explore city students' perceptions of schools' purposes, as well as the supports for and impediments to their school success.…

Kristien Marquez-Zenkov and James A. Harmon encouraged urban students to take photographs that illustrate the purposes of school, factors that support success in school, and barriers to success. The authors analyzed students' photos and written reflections on the photos to form recommendations regarding teaching approaches that encourage students'…

"Art and Social Justice Education" offers inspiration and tools for educators to craft critical, meaningful, and transformative arts education curriculum and arts integration projects. The images, descriptive texts, essays, and resources are grounded within a clear social justice framework and linked to ideas about culture as commons. Essays and a…

Research tells us we can learn complex tasks most easily if they are taught in "small sequential steps." This column is about the small sequential steps that unlocked the powers of digital photography, of portraiture, and of student creativity. The strategies and ideas described in this article came as a result of working with…

Photographs taken by urban students, along with the associated interview transcripts, were provided to their teachers partway through the subsequent school year. The teachers were prompted to describe their impressions of the photos relative to their knowledge of the students. In addition, the teachers were asked how these insights might shape…