To effectively help urban pre-service teachers to provide civic education opportunities in their future classrooms, teacher educators should know how urban pre-service teachers themselves conceptualize citizenship and civic engagement. Through the research question--how do urban K-6 pre-service teachers currently enrolled in an urban education…

This article reports on a teacher-research study that used multicultural texts as a context for teaching mathematics for cultural relevance during an elementary mathematics methods course. The results of the study reveal that 28% (5 out of 18) of the teacher candidates (TCs) chose books that were culturally contextual or culturally amenable.…

Several contemporary demographic trends suggest that school systems in America's central cities, typically characterized by high levels of racial and economic isolation, are being presented with new opportunities to create quality, diverse schools. Still, numerous obstacles linger. Using multiple sources of data and innovative mapping tools,…

The purpose of this research was to examine question asking practices in a youth participatory action research (yPAR) after school program housed at an elementary school. The research question was: In which ways did the adult question asking practices in a yPAR setting challenge and/or reproduce conventional models of power in educational…

This article, written by three research-active teachers and their academic partner, registers concerns with the ways the so-called "achievement gap" is portrayed in policy announcements in England. It charts a challenge to the current view that it is the task of urban nursery and primary schools to train children to be school-ready. It…

This article, written by a research-active teacher, reports on efforts to embed quality teaching in a local urban primary school in the north of England, under pressure from the Local Authority to raise standards because it is well below national expectations on SATs tests. The school has concentrated over recent years on embracing the Office for…

This article, co-authored by two research-active teachers with the support of their academic partner, reports on the resistance of an urban primary school in a northern city of England to the label "disadvantaged school" and various judgements that refuse to take into account its holistic work with students and families from different…

Although it is well established that Black male students are underrepresented in gifted educational programs in the United States, due to a scarcity of longitudinal prospective research, little is known about the protective factors at the child, family, and school level that increase the probability of Black male students being identified as…

This study describes preservice teachers' (PTs) dispositions toward diversity education in a remote small town university. The purpose of the study is to find out whether PTs in an undergraduate elementary literacy methods class in this locale are willing to accept and adopt multicultural children's and youth literature as pedagogical tools and…

This phenomenological study was designed to investigate the experience of Jamaican teachers recruited to serve in elementary and high schools in New York City. The study explored three broad questions: (1) What was teaching like for the participants before they assumed their assignments in the US? (2) What is teaching in the US like for them? and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Hispanic ESL/literacy learners used their socio-historical experiences and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of "Cinderella". Eighteen third-grade pupils "read" the video and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The findings suggest that (a)…

This article documents what happened when a teacher in an urban school shifted classroom practice through changing participation structures to incorporate digital technology and multiple modalities into a fifth grade literacy curriculum. This shift in teacher practice provided opportunities for immigrant students to become more visible in the…

Although scholarship and research have demonstrated the positive impact of professional learning on academic teaching and learning, an inadequate amount of research has examined how professional learning is associated with transformative teaching for equity, diversity and social justice. This survey study explored the relationship between…

Disney videos are used across the US as important materials for teaching language arts and literacy in elementary schools. However, how pupils make meaning of the videos has not been sufficiently investigated in educational research. Twenty-five third-grade pupils were taught comprehension skills using "Sleeping Beauty." The students created their…

This paper reports on a study of elementary preservice teachers' inquiry-based practices, their efficacy beliefs, and the role beliefs had on two preservice teachers' practices in urban classrooms. Results show inquiry-based practices can be cultivated through field-based experiences and preservice teachers' efficacy beliefs, as it relates to…