The authors address how to make Social Foundations relevant to teacher education by using a framework of womanist caring. In this article, they focus on how they use womanist caring in their Social Foundations classes to help their students examine and reconceptualize their own views about caring to include social transformation.

High school teachers must not use that time devoted to the study of the mass media to "beat up" on the press or to "frighten" students with stories which exaggerate the power of the mass media industries. At the same time the potential enormous impact of the contemporary mass media must not be ignored. This means that teachers must not overstate…

The 1999 Revisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEIA), confirmed the legal role of foster parents in special education decision making on behalf of the youth in their care. The present study responded with a multiple case study of seven…

This article reports a project undertaken in a Caribbean high school among 17 students in a low stream Year 3 class of reluctant readers (mostly boys) who had been experiencing repeated failure. The project, aimed at promoting leisure reading among the adolescents, ran for 16 weeks. During this period, reading materials--mostly those in which the…

This paper represents a conversation between a high school science teacher and a university researcher as they found common ground in the theory and experiences of designing powerful learning experiences. The teacher describes an instructional unit in which students designed a complex, interactive display showing what life may have been like…

The following article examines the physical formation and ideological justification of alternative education for at-risk students. It then considers the implications for urban students, in particular Chicano and Chicana students, who already face a significant number of barriers to educational equity. The study is situated with an urban…

This emergent theory describes the relationships and factors within the context of home, school, and community that enabled six Hispanic students to participate in an advanced diploma program. The research is in keeping with the mandates from several federal initiatives to develop "asset-based" paradigms for educating Hispanic youth. Grounded…

This article explores the emergence of La Familia Initiative, a Latino parent-organizing project at a public middle school. Motivated by their urgency to improve their children's schooling and enhance their opportunities for a better high school experience in the future, the participants organize to establish a more inclusive partnership with the…

This paper explores the role teacher education can play in improving the education of Latino children and youth in the US. By first suggesting that preservice teachers cannot reasonably be prepared for each and every student population, it promotes reforms in three areas of teacher education policy and practice, each oriented towards improving the…

Despite increasing interest in the role of community involvement in school improvement, few studies have examined motivations for, or results of community partnership development in high schools. To fill this gap, the authors conducted case studies of three high schools with successful community partnerships. The authors found that case high…

This study examined ways that seven high school English teachers attempted to promote higher levels of self-regulation and students' responses to their efforts. Researchers met with teachers once a week for three months to design higher-order reasoning questions for assignments and quizzes, review student responses and plan instructional…

In recent years, the blocked class schedule has replaced the shorter traditional schedule in high schools throughout the United States. In order to study this change, these researchers examined physical education teacher perceptions of their experience teaching on a block schedule compared to the traditional schedule. The views of fifteen physical…

All successful organizations, including successful high schools, have employees who go beyond their formal job responsibilities and freely give of their time and energy to succeed. Organ was the first to use the phrase "organizational citizenship behavior" (OCB) to denote organizationally beneficial behavior of workers that was not prescribed but…

According to social norms theory, when high school students overestimate the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATOD) by their peers, they tend to use more themselves. The purpose of this study was to determine whether these over estimations (misperceptions) could be corrected through a similar age peer-to-peer interactive social norms…

Maine and Vermont have been national leaders in state-level coordination of high school reform. Both recently developed almost interchangeable, new, voluntary, statewide frameworks that describe multiple ways high schools should change. Both frameworks--Promising Futures (Maine Commission on Secondary Education 1998) and High Schools on the Move…