This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" can be combined to support…

The "achievement gap" for English learners and those of marginalized groups has been documented for well over a decade. It is widely recognized that socioeconomic status, language, and the fluid construct of culture play significant roles in school learning. However, despite the dismal academic progress of students learning English in…

The Will to Adorn is a project that began with the idea to work with scholars, educators, students, and cultural practitioners to document the arts of everyday dressing. Dress represents a multifaceted aesthetic tradition closely related to identity, but not often recognized as an art form. This article describes how the Will To Adorn initiative…

Supporting prospective teachers to enact high quality instruction requires transforming their methods preparation. This study follows three teachers through a practice-based elementary methods course. Weekly class sessions took place in an elementary school. The setting afforded opportunities for prospective teachers to engage in cycles of…

This paper considers the use of a simple assignment, the personal narrative, in teaching students the discursive issues involved in doing academic history. Focusing on autobiography, I present the results of a survey of Canadian university students into their experiences with writing personal histories. Specifically, the survey asked students to…

A persistent and troubling trend in teacher education programmes is how gender is constructed heteronormatively. Finding ways that challenge novice teacher thinking about gender and gender identities has proven to be difficult ([Grace, A. P., and K. Wells. 2006. "The Quest for a Queer Inclusive Cultural Ethics: Setting Directions for…

This article presents an autoethnographic and theoretical reflection on my justifications for the use of "neoliberal deconstruction" in the undergraduate social foundations classroom. I engage the reader in a discussion concerning the need to make neoliberal agendas, as they pertain to corporate reform in education, salient to students.…

In searching for a way of teaching American history as something that truly belongs to women, and men, to the powerful as well as to those who lack power in a formal sense, as something that is not the story of white people with an interesting person of color charitably thrown in for good measure, Boisseau writes that while many influential…

This one year study examines the journey of two preservice urban high-school teachers in Arizona as they enact Culturally Responsive Teaching in a year-long student teaching residency. Factors that influenced their Culturally Responsive Teaching practices are discussed along themes that emerged from interviews and classroom observations.…

A student with Asperger's Syndrome faces a complex myriad of learning disabilities and social difficulties. The co-morbid conditions of dyslexia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and anxiety further complicate Asperger's Syndrome. Asperger's Syndrome and these conditions, singularly…

Minority teacher candidates' capacity to connect with diverse students in preK-12 settings is a driving force behind the demographic imperative to diversify the teaching professions (Achinstein, Ogawa, Sexton, & Freitas, 2010; Banks et al., 2005). Teacher candidates of color have great confidence in their abilities to relate to students of…

In this research reflection, we develop a portrait of our engaged pedagogy for teaching educational foundations classes in teacher education. Our engaged pedagogy--based on autobiography and self-disclosure traditions-- emphasizes instructors and students' self-disclosure of lived experiences as being central to practical curriculum in teaching…

This text performs reading for teaching in an audit culture. Two teachers, myself and Steven, read the memoir "Hole in My Life" by Jack Gantos and, while reading, recorded our experiences as readers and planned to teach the book to Steven's English class. This study is an inquiry into the phenomenon of "reading to teach,"…

Positioned against the background of the Council of Europe's interest in developing intercultural competence through education, the study presented in this paper investigates the impact on intercultural visual literacy of the Council of Europe's "Images of Others--An Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media"…

This article presents the results of three comparative analyses on forty-seven student papers in order to examine the effectiveness of a basic writing course in developing students' academic writer identity. The course curriculum, grounded in social identity theory, focuses on the core writing concepts and dispositions that promote writer…