In the Academy, faculty and institutional leaders traditionally have been white, male, and heterosexual. Of the 173,395 Full Professors identified in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the U.S. Department of Education in 2007, women represented almost 46,000, and Latinas held only 1,254 of those positions (U.S.…

Research studies have found that an integral part of being a tenure-track faculty member is the relationship between the higher education institution and individual faculty members (Mawdsley, 1999). Tenure-track positions are competitive spaces that demand and expect assistant professors to excel in publishing, teaching, and scholarly activity.…

This article documents how the authors, two Chicana tenured professors from immigrant and working-class backgrounds, drew upon their graduate school experiences as resources for navigating the tenure track. They discuss lessons learned not in the official classroom but in other spaces inhabited by women of color. Such lessons included: networking…

In this article, the author focuses on a case study of an African-American teacher's perceptions about teaching and instructional practices in an urban middle school, Bridge Middle School. He provides a counter to some negative conceptions of Black teachers in general through a focus on this teacher: the way she thinks about her roles and…

Educational policy and practice has resided and continues to reside at the vortex of social and political strife in South Africa, as in the United States. Although school poverty and inequities among schools in the U.S. pale in comparison to conditions in South Africa, the two nations have much in common, including histories of state-sanctioned…

According to the national study conducted by Cochran-Smith & Fries (2005), the majority of teacher candidates in the U.S. are White middle-class women. While those from the U.S. who become TESOL teachers are also primarily White middle-class women, given the global demand for English, there is also a sizable number of TESOL teachers from…

Many diversity courses that prepare pre-service teachers do not address the significance or the impact of language barriers on linguistically diverse learners. Often time, new and veteran teachers construct their bilingual and/or bidialectical students as others and are unaware of how to use their students' social, cultural, and political…

In the fall of 2005 and as a second year doctoral student in an educational leadership program, the author was given the opportunity to participate in oral history research with three other White women, including one professor and two doctoral students. The oral history involved interviewing approximately twenty prior students of Frederick…

Critical educators, particularly Critical Race pedagogues, critique colorblind ideology as tantamount to racism because it serves to maintain racial inequality. King (1991), for example, refers to colorblindness as "dysconscious racism" since colorblind ideology sustains and justifies the culture of power. As an attempt to unpack the colorblind…

In today's school systems, students of color, particularly in urban settings, represent the majority student populations (Lewis, Hancock, James, & Larke, in press). Interestingly, the educators--teachers and administrators--that comprise these settings are predominately White, and, in turn, the students of color commonly face pressures that…

This study examined the extent to which ethnic-based differences exist in teacher ratings of African American students and White students on the language and literacy domain of a curriculum-embedded performance assessment for students in grade 1. It extended previous research on performance assessments to focus on issues related to equity in…

Verbal and non-verbal communication interactions have a strong influence on the social construction of gender. Therefore understanding the classroom interaction structures and the subsequent socio-cultural context is a vital commitment for any teacher. Furthermore, since gender is constructed in the day-to-day interactions of children's lives,…

Explores how deeply held cultural assumptions influenced one urban elementary school's efforts to implement a voluntarily- adopted arts-based initiative. While school staff members embraced the reform, there was little or no change in teaching practice. The article examines how staff constructed meaning around the program and its interaction with…

Demonstrates how social foundations and curriculum and instruction scholars collaborated on a professional development project for inservice teachers, describing a summer institute designed to facilitate teaching for diversity. The paper discusses themes resulting from an action research project that examined patterns of teacher talk, particularly…

Discusses teacher confession as a pedagogical tool that can prepare teachers for the reality of diversity, arguing that confession is a necessary precondition to preparing present and future teachers to attempt anything critical in their classroom. The paper summarizes literature on critical pedagogy, distinguishes between personal and…