This position paper argues that the Natural Hair Movement (NHM) serves as a refuge and form of resistance for Black women and girls facing racialized beauty standards. It highlights how school dress codes often reinforce systemic anti-Blackness by discriminating against Black hair, rooted in Eurocentric beauty ideals. The NHM challenges these norms by encouraging the embrace of natural hair textures and styles, fostering recognition and self-expression. The article stresses the need for safe, affirming school environments that promote self-love and belonging, aiming to break the generational cycle of identity erasure and support Black children's empowerment.
Teacher leadership research lacks criticality. Moreover, teacher leaders should be knowledgeable about culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy to serve a diverse student population and support their colleagues. The purpose of the current study was to attend to issues of diversity, equity, and racism in teacher leadership through QuantCrit. We report the results of a survey of 1,274 Nevada public school teachers’ perceptions of teacher leadership. We found a disconnect between teacher leader perceptions of equity work and their beliefs in their abilities to carry it out. We connect these findings to the QuantCrit principles.
Gentrifier parents who enroll their children in diverse neighborhood public schools out of civic commitment sometimes exit when difficulties arise—a decision they describe as impossible to reconcile with their values. We call these parents “reluctant leavers” and explore their experiences through narrative inquiry. Rather than simply abandoning collectivist values, these parents faced irreconcilable tension between caring for their own child and supporting their community. Many reported lasting moral injury, fractured relationships, and diminished civic engagement. We propose two interventions to help reluctant leavers persist in, return to, and advocate for neighborhood public schools.
The pathway to college is a fluid, multi-step process that begins with aspirations. As the environmental context for students shifts, so too might their aspirations. In this article, we examine how school personnel in one urban high school utilized community cultural wealth to nurture students’ college aspirations amid the significant uncertainty and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings reveal that the strategies enacted by stakeholders played a vital role in protecting students’ college plans, which enabled them to sustain and actualize their future goals. Implications offer an expanded approach to fostering college pathways for Black students.
In Florida and a growing number of Republican-led states, vitriolic movements have targeted diversity, equity, inclusion, and any semblance of so-called woke ideology. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, programs, and initiatives have been shuttered. Books and DEI-related terminology have been banned or narrowly restricted. This commentary was originally motivated by my conversations with colleagues across the country. My own reckoning now compels it. Given my long-standing teacher education career premised on social justice principles, the attacks, replete with vague and confusing anti-DEI legislative mandates, are disquieting. Since the term “woke” is neither new nor original, it is important to understand its origin and how it has been culturally appropriated and co-opted to further DEI attacks. Florida's House Bill 7 and Senate Bill 266 restrict classroom instruction, diversity-related workshop trainings, and professional development. Scholars have observed the ambiguity and lack of clarity inherent in legislation that opposes or bans DEI. The state of Florida requires the teaching of African American history, as codified in Florida Statute 1003.42 (2) (h). However, the Stop Woke Act restricts how African American history is taught. Subsequently, confusion and ambiguity about what is prohibited can impede the required teaching of African American history. Eroding academic freedom and freedom of speech is a frequently cited concern. Consequently, faculty and students have expressed anxiety and fear because of heavy-handed threats and sanctions that chill their teaching and research. Limited institutional support and clarity on the laws are equally unsettling. A call to action compels us to have open, productive conversations, critiques, and healthy debates within the bounds of the law in Florida and nationwide. We will then be able to have civil discourses about Bruno, DEI, CRT, and so-called woke ideology in Florida and nationally.
This qualitative study explored Black men teachers’ pedagogy and praxis in their work with Black boys at Mays Academy (pseudonym), a single-sex secondary school. Using Black pedagogical love as our guide, findings revealed these Black men teachers developed and deployed a pedagogy and praxis that was centered on loving Black boys through their lives and their present and future selves. These findings extend understandings of Black men's culturally relevant teaching and specifically identify love as pedagogy that helps connect educators to Black boys, serves as a foundation for relationships and learning, and enhances how Black boys experience the educational environment.
This study explores what tensions exist for a teacher who desires to incorporate storytelling into their classroom. This study uses a framing of storytelling as a theoretical concept and as classroom pedagogy to explore the research question: What tensions exist for a teacher who desires to incorporate storytelling into an urban, first-grade classroom? Data collection and analysis revealed that the teacher experienced three key tensions—structural, economic, and political/administrative—between her desires and what she was required to do given her school context and directives. This teacher's story emphasizes implications for policy, research, and practice.
This embedded qualitative case study examines how a teacher-led educator network in a diverse urban school district balanced district equity-focused instructional priorities while creating space for educators to address equity-focused problems of practice they identified within their own teaching contexts. Through analyzing observation, interview, and document data from six professional learning sites within the network, findings show that sites bridged district initiatives and educators’ classroom-situated needs through context-focused boundary practices guided by brokers with context expertise. Implications for how districts implementing new instructional or curricular reforms can create non-hierarchical spaces for district-wide teacher learning are discussed.
Violent extremism in the United States is not an aberration but a constitutive, historically rooted phenomenon. While often framed as a psychological or ideological pathology, extremism has long been socially, culturally, and politically embedded. Reactionary violence—from Indian removal, slavery, and lynching to the Ku Klux Klan, militia movements, and contemporary mass shootings—has dwarfed radical extremism in scope and impact. Extra-legal communal violence, weak state monopolies on force, and complicity of officials have sustained extremist traditions. For educators and psychologists, recognizing this historical legacy is essential for addressing the enduring psychological, emotional, and social consequences of extremist violence today.
A growing number of educators and social science researchers no longer see violent extremism and racialized history as exceptional, marginal, or insignificant. Instead, there is an increasing consensus that extremist violence and racialized history have been central to U.S. history and currently affect students, teachers, schools, and curricula. Extremist violence and how it is framed, remembered, or hidden are inseparable from how racial categories and domination are created and sustained in the United States—who is defined as American, who is protected by law, whose suffering and exploitation is minimized, and whose violence is normalized or viewed as heroic.
Drawing on critical sociocultural perspectives, the Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL) framework can improve the quality of general education environments for multilingual learners of English (MLLE). Using a quasi-experimental design (control groups, N = 36; 21 coached), elementary teachers participated in a 30-h EPL summer institute and seven coaching cycles. Correlational findings show how each EPL contributes to and predicts English Language Arts (ELA) achievement and English proficiency. ANCOVA results reveal that students of coached teachers significantly outperformed their peers in ELA achievement. The evidence improves pedagogical knowledge for teaching MLLE by adopting a transformative equity perspective.
Just as urban education scholars are beginning to challenge deficit-based with asset-based perspectives, historians in the Indiana Women's Prison History Project seek to overcome epistemic injustice by epistemically privileging the perspective of incarcerated women as we approach archives and prevailing historical narratives. This article constitutes an initial exploration of how a unique methodology, the embodied observer, can apply to STEM fields—which have a legacy of excluding, exploiting, and abusing marginalized populations—and humanities disciplines like history. The embodied observer is physically located in a captive setting and utilizes that purview of captivity as one lens to engage in archival research.
In this work, we examine the impact of the school calendar on suicides in adolescents (10-19 years) of urban areas. To achieve this, we employ a regression discontinuity design based on suicide administrative data, which enables us to leverage the temporal and geographical variability in the start date of the school calendar. The results confirm the existence of a negative impact of the school calendar on adolescent suicide in Argentina. In the days after the beginning of the school year, the number of deaths by suicide is reduced by 35% in relation to the previous days. The mechanism analysis, which exploits the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows that the presence of parents in the household operates as a protective factor that reduces the number of suicides. These results are robust against age placebos (i.e., there are no differences in the number of suicides between older cohorts who presumably have already finished their school years) and temporal placebos (i.e., there are no differences when considering dates other than the actual school start date). These findings suggest that remote work can generate positive externalities for children and have important implications for educational policy in urban areas, where parents spend most of their day outside the household.
Over half of the white school-aged population attends private schools in New York City, compared to less than 9% of Black and 7% of Hispanic students. We explore how between- and within-sector enrollment differences influence overall NYC school segregation. We find that nearly one-quarter of NYC's school segregation is attributable to segregation between the public and private sectors, 60% is due to within-public-sector segregation, and the remaining 16% is explained by within-private-sector segregation. While New York City is in some ways a unique case, these patterns likely extend to other major cities experiencing neighborhood gentrification and demographic change.
Teaching the history of systemic racial oppression during a time when racial hatred is explicit in policies and behaviors is traumatic. Learning about the links between enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration is emotionally draining and triggers helplessness in students and educators. Through Douglass' “Ernest Struggle,” we examine how students and educators often avoid addressing the stress that accompanies learning about hate. Racial literacy is a harm prevention strategy to prepare youth and educators to mindfully track the stressful impact of past racial violence on their thoughts, feelings, and bodies while confronting current proximal discrimination experiences in their daily lives.
