This chapter examines the experience of aspiring teachers in a course on the foundations of learning taught inside a juvenile hall. The author describes what happens when he brings together incarcerated youth and college students across profound social boundaries to study educational inequalities and develop proposals to promote educational justice. Exploring the challenges of teaching toward more justice and more equity, while working with students inside the juvenile justice system, the author describes the potential of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program to transform preservice teachers as they learn to put ideas about critical pedagogy into practice. The chapter pays particular attention to how the experience of taking a course inside a juvenile hall challenges aspiring teachers to reimagine the connections between communities and schools.

This article examines how graduate students in a semester-long research course, a capstone experience in a master’s program in teaching and learning, came to redefine what counts as educational research. The students were challenged to conduct a research project, while also exploring how their ideas about teaching and research delimited their work. This inquiry revealed a central paradox in education research—that by calling for more teacher voice in research we may liberate teachers and students to do their work differently, while also perpetuating narrow colonial conceptions of what it means to be a teacher and conduct teacher research. The author argues that in order to decolonize teaching and research, students need opportunities to develop a political analysis that will help expose the contradictions that abound in schools, universities, and society.

This chapter discusses the notions of equity, hope and sense of belonging and their vital roles in enhancing student engagement. The main focus is to present how hope, sense of belonging and engagement can be nurtured by putting equity in the centre of what we do in facilitating student learning. In paying careful attention to these concepts, especially in implementing equity as a transformative solution to various educational challenges, educators are warned to be prepared to recognize student diversity and redistribute resources and services to all students who need them, experience anxiety and discomfort as they engage in difficult conversations, value and honour the unique backgrounds of each student, expect cultural mismatches in working with diverse students, use data consistently to inform and differentiate instruction and expect that the work in promoting equity is an ongoing and long-lasting advocacy.

In this chapter the author argues that those concerned with the "the way it's going" in public education can learn much from post-colonial theory about the relationship between education research and assessment technologies and education reform policy, curriculum development, and knowledge formation. The author argues that current neoliberal education reform in the US can best be understood through the frame of neocolonialism, where schools and communities take the shape of internal colonies, where teachers, students, and parents have little or no say about the technologies, curricula, and standardized examinations foisted upon them. Education research that supports the current policy paradigm largely benefits researchers, corporations, and policy makers, while ignoring the effects of such policies on students, teachers, and local communities. Such practices, the author suggests, are rooted in a type of colonial thinking and acting that have been rearticulated through the prevailing logic of neoliberalism.

In this paper we tell a story about how we partnered with a Chicago high school in order to turn the school inside out by displaying larger-than-life teacher portraits and statements at street level throughout the community. This paper explores how public art and activism can help teachers and students develop notions of civic literacy and engagement in order to change prevailing ideas about the role that teachers and schools play in our communities. Can teachers learn to relate effectively in communities outside of schools? Is this a desirable or even useful goal for educators? This paper examines notions of partnership, community, civic literacy and engagement, and the role that teachers and students might play in shaping their communities.