In 2005, a group of concerned parents who had arrived in the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia received approval from their local school district to establish the Iftin Charter School (ICS). The K-8 school continues to engender hope and intellectual strength in its students and parents. ICS finds itself uniquely equipped to meet the…

In this article, the authors present a case study of a preservice teacher who participated in a two-semester course sequence of elementary science and mathematics methods spanning one academic year. These two courses were taught by the first author and embedded a pedagogical approach grounded in inquiry methods. The purpose of this study was to…

A brief sketch, as provided by the 2010 Michigan Migrant Head Start Community Assessment, describes Michigan migrant students in the following terms: (1) approximately 17.5% are high school graduates; (2) 92.46% live in homes where Spanish is the preferred language; and (3) 93.3% live below the poverty line. These circumstances create a…

When professional development in diversity is provided to educators in the field, it usually targets classroom practice with the intent of closing the achievement gap. These efforts are critical. But work should not stop there because culture underlies every policy, practice, and procedure in the school and influences every thought, interaction,…

To learn productively and experience academic success, students need access to curricula and instructional approaches that are "culturally relevant" and "culturally responsive". Culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy uses "cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" and thus "empowers students…

In this article, the author discusses her research on children's perspectives of interracial and interethnic friendships in a multiethnic school and highlights children's voices on these intergroup friendships. Schools are important spaces in which social and cultural competencies necessary to the formation of intergroup friendships may be…

The current study is a replication of the author's unpublished dissertation conducted almost twenty years previously in a public school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Census 2000 indicated a growing cultural diversity in populations entering the Scranton area, however, it continued to show strong evidence of White Ethnic groups. As with the original…