Why do certain students thrive when facing adversity while others languish? In the mindset theory, growth mindset is opposed to fixed mindset, and could explain why some people fulfil their potential and others do not. With the COVID pandemic dragging on, having a growth mindset may be even more critical. For students who are able to set their own…

In the United Kingdom, a "good" undergraduate degree is understood to be a "first class" or an "upper second class," which is achieved by three-quarters of students. The need to distinguish oneself from others is ever more important in an increasingly crowded graduate market, although a first-class degree is most…

Higher education in the United States has a unique opportunity to educate students to practice leadership to address complex problems. A limited number of universities bear the label "elite" as a result of highly selective admissions criteria, cost, age, and position in popular national rankings. Additional scrutiny of these institutions…

This article uses Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper as the core of a unit challenging students and teachers to confront and dismantle systems of oppression.

Exclusive boarding schools in social environments where the meritocratic norm is prevalent are faced with a tension between parents' desire to give their children a head start in the competition for educational qualifications, social prestige and jobs on the one hand and the powerful social norm of advancement by merit under conditions of…

Although the concept of allyship has been used in relation to multiple marginalized groups within higher education, it is rarely applied to social class. In this study, I used narrative inquiry to understand how working-class students define and perceive social class allyship. Findings revealed that working-class students identified social class…

Socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with social-emotional difficulties, including internalizing and externalizing problems, as early as toddlerhood. The aim of the current study was to understand whether economically disadvantaged children's beliefs about the consequences and correlates of poverty (poverty stereotypes) and their beliefs about…

This dissertation is a quantitative study which presents a conceptual framework which views schools as learning communities. The study focuses on relationships among professional learning communities, teacher self-efficacy, and collective efficacy. The researcher also explored teacher perceptions of these three constructs. The specific purpose of…

The lagging behind of underrepresented minority (URM) students in higher education, and particularly in the STEM fields, is well documented. In this paper we draw on critical race theory in education to frame and present counter-narratives of URM students in STEM fields, to explicate the function of the interactions that occur between these…

Chicago Public Schools (CPS), like most large urban school districts, has been confronted in recent years with challenges related to inequity. In May of 2018, CPS posted an open position for a chief equity officer with the goal to create an office that will address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for staff and students leading to…

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppressive will want to change them. This is a bleak outlook because it suggests that those in positions of power and influence are less likely to seek to…

The "beauty and truth" in the title reminds one of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." That is not only a great Romantic poem, but also a highly sophisticated rhetorical discourse. In it, the interwoven voices of the speaker, of the Urn, and of Keats himself as an implied author, exploit the ambivalence and ambiguity of the…

In this article we search for real utopias for higher education by first introducing and describing a vital counter-hegemonic students movement of the early 1960s--Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and their Port Huron Statement (1962). The movement maintained that universities are not communities of equals but served the elite. In the…

Sociologists of elite education have argued that understanding educational inequality requires looking beyond persistent class- or race-based gaps in academic achievement at the ways in which privileged youth and families construct their advantages. Meanwhile, scholars focused on summer learning have argued that understanding educational…

Privilege is one of the central constructs social work educators reference to increase self-awareness and concern about inequality, but it is often oversimplified. This article argues how the concept of privilege can be made more credible to learners by anchoring it to everyday business-as-usual decision making, stereotyping, and various…