Through a critical cultural assets model, the authors use the methodological practices of collaboration, community site visits, document analysis, and interviews with cultural insiders to explore schools' continued rejection of academic belonging for people from "othered" communities. They explore the case of Samoan youth--a…

This study explores the impact of reading "Huckleberry Finn" through the lens of critical race theory for both teacher and students in a racially diverse urban high school environment. The teacher/researcher used narrative inquiry and creative non-fiction to examine student language usage, white privilege (including her own), and student…

Hope is positively correlated with educational attainment and health. Interventions based on project-based learning (PBL) may increase youth hope. This study examined how a PBL intervention affected hope among urban students of color. Students in health classes were invited to participate. A PBL health class was implemented in four classrooms. The…

The goal of this article is to examine the racially hostile environment of U.S. public schooling towards Black males. Drawing on the work of Foucault ("Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison," Penguin Books, London, 1977; "Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics," The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982)…

Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, in this research I examine how a group of newcomer Mexican immigrant high school students counteracted a hostile school climate, educational practices and adverse relationships with mainstream peers and adults. The purpose of this study is to help educators and policy makers understand how engaging in…

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) this study compares if and how neighborhood effects on the likelihood to drop out and be "disconnected" from school and work in young adulthood change when schools are taken into account. As widely documented, I find that neighborhood socioeconomic status…

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…

Using Holland et al.'s ("Identity and agency in cultural worlds," Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with…

Reform efforts like the urban, arts-based initiative Project ARTS are designed to provide intentional, equitable methods of improving students' learning, yet few urban educators have been sufficiently trained to recognize differences in habitus between themselves and their students. For equitable reform to occur teachers must understand their…

Educational borderlands are the physical and/or conceptual landscapes where one must negotiate notions of cultural difference as she or he lives and learns--landscapes that envelop an array of pedagogical and cultural spaces, yet are typically guarded by exclusionary tactics. In this article, we examine how US immigrant youth navigate three…

Considering the current structural challenges that exist for students of color (SOC) in accessing a higher education, an epistemology is needed that better represents the complex process SOC endure in this pursuit. College access literature either proposes stages (Hossler and Gallagher in "Coll Univ" 62(3):207-221, 1987), contextual…

The preponderance of the research on African American students has generally focused on issues of school failure and underperformance. While the literature on high achieving Black students is sparse, very little is known about these students' school experiences and the meanings that they assign to achievement. Using student-based inquiry…

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.…

In an era of school reform and high stakes accountability, the major challenge in education is to turnaround the nation's lowest-performing schools. National policy provides abundant resources with often restrictive prerequisites. Research indicates that quality principals and teachers are the most important factors for turning around the…

Educators face multiple forms of misbehavior in the classroom on a regular basis. This ethnographic research project addresses the difficulties encountered by teachers in a high school setting, giving consideration to the decision-making process in determining whether to admonish students for misbehavior and whether to issue a referral to an…