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…

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…

This critical race theory (CRT)-framed qualitative study (n = 9) examined racism within a context of urban teacher leadership development. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with three White principals, who each identified one White and one African American teacher as "most promising" leadership potential. These…

This study explored the meaning high school Urban Teaching Academy participants ascribed to the critical term of "diversity" and how that translated into shaping their philosophies on how to address the issue in their future classrooms. Findings indicated that perceptions of diversity and its place in the curriculum were most likely…

Many ideologies and cultural practices influence the way we think about Black women. Specifically, the Mammy trope permeates the walls of higher education in ways that leave Black female professors feeling disrespected, not acknowledged, and questioning their own intellectual ability. The ways in which students, faculty, and staff interact with…

This study examined how four principals in urban middle and senior high schools with a social justice orientation responded to hypothetical scenarios involving teacher prejudice. The principals in this study did not reference their leadership preparation programs in describing the evolution of their equity-focused leadership philosophies, nor did…

Although there is a great deal of theoretical and practical scholarship related to immigrant students, the extant literature most often conflates the needs of English language learners with the needs of immigrant students (Goodwin in "Educ Urb Soc" 34(2):156-172, 2002; Sox in "Theory Pract" 48:312-318, 2009; Yoon in "Am…

English Language Learners (ELLs) usually spend most of the school day with regular classroom teachers. The ability of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers to help these students, then, depends in part on their ability to influence how the classroom teachers think of ELL students and ESL itself. One way ESL teachers do this is through…

Teaching for social justice means understanding students and advocating for them. These dispositions are especially critical for those who teach in urban communities where low-resourced schools and deficit perspectives toward students prevail. While many teacher education programs claim to prepare teachers for social justice (Zeichner in…

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…

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…

In this paper, I employ a study of 25 sixth grade teachers of "regular" and "honors" language arts classes in a large urban district as a vehicle for discussing ability grouping. Despite not being asked any questions about grouping or differentiation, differences in students and instruction among the two class levels was a major focus of the…

In this study 18 Mexican teachers of English as a foreign language in Guanajuato, Mexico were asked for their professional opinion about the teaching of English to Mexican immigrant students in the U.S. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that asked about attitudes toward the U.S. educational system, ways to support Mexican immigrant students,…

This qualitative study examined the development of bilingual and bicultural preservice teachers' beliefs and attitudes about social justice and its role in the education of language minority children. Fraser's in Redistribution or recognition: a political-philosophical exchange. Verso, New York, (2003) perspectival dualist framework, which calls…

This article discusses urban educators' views of their teaching experiences. The article is based upon survey research conducted with teachers in two poor, urban districts during the 2005-2006 academic year. The teachers reported a variety of positive and negative views regarding their classrooms, their students, and the students' social worlds.…