The arts generally and theater specifically offer effective strategies to help educators recognize and make visible the multiple student and teacher identities within classrooms. Without student and teacher agency in schools, there cannot be equitable and liberatory learning environments. Noted Brazilian theater artist and activist Augusto Boal's…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or "the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations" (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971). Design/methodology/approach:…

The academic study of "race" varies from discipline to discipline. "Race" is placed in quotes in this instance because historically race was considered a biological category that denoted unalterable biological characteristics between races. There is a long intellectual history of documenting phenotypic differences between…

The study of elites is enjoying a revival at a time of increasing economic inequality. Sociologists of education have been leaders in this area, researching how affluent families position their children to compete favorably in a highly stratified higher education system. However, scholars have done less research on how students do symbolic work of…

A considerable amount of research across the past several decades has documented the emergence of a new racial ideology of "color-blindness" as well as evidence that white college students have difficulty recognizing the racial privileges that are obscured by this color-blindness. To address this, we developed a cooperative group White…

The central purpose of this paper is to examine validity problems arising from the multiple-choice items and technical passages in the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test (TOEFL iBT) reading section, primarily concentrating on construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1989). My personal TOEFL iBT experience, along with my…

In this article, Kirsten Hextrum considers institutional avenues that limit upward mobility opportunities by revealing a hidden curriculum of athletic recruiting that favors students from privileged backgrounds. The study's data center on forty-seven life history interviews with National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletes from an…

To increase students' engagement and achievement in introductory sociology courses, teachers should make them relevant to students' lives. Students' relevance perceptions may vary within the classroom, depending on the degree of fit between their sociocultural position and the teaching methods. To test this prospect, an experiment among 1,325…

Debates on gentrification's effects on public education motivated two independently conducted literature reviews about (a) how the increasing presence of middle- and upper-class residents affected public schools in gentrifying communities, and (b) what were gentrification's effects on the schooling experiences of students who resided in the…

In this paper, I, an Asian-Indian, transnational, woman faculty, working in a Hispanic serving institution (HSI), at the USA-Mexico border present my testimonio, and write to share how I found the troubled center of my privileged life and views and the subtle ways my students transformed me, as an educator and a parent.

This paper uses the National Pupil Database to explore how grammar school opportunities vary among pupil groups, and how grammar school opportunities correlate with the Local Authorities (LAs), pupil backgrounds and attainment. The results show that grammar school admission is relatively fair, based on its selection criterion, but there is no…

At a time when voters are keenly focused on the cost of living, housing affordability has become a hot political issue in many parts of the country, including New York State. Policymakers, grappling with what they can do to make housing more affordable, are actively seeking to reform longstanding local exclusionary zoning laws, policies that…

This paper presents an ethnographic study analyzing the influence of students' social backgrounds on students' entitlement and agency in relation to floor rights. Classroom interactions were video-recorded, and interviews were conducted in a socially diverse fifth-grade in Israel. Descriptive statistics and micro-analyses of participation patterns…

ACT is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help people achieve education and workplace success. To help fulfill that mission, ACT offers school-day testing programs that provide all students with state- or district-funded access to its college readiness and admissions assessment, removing barriers to testing and opening doors to…

Building on recommendations from several of the articles in the special section on conscientiousness in the June 2014 issue of "Developmental Psychology," the present study tested predictions from the interactionist model (IM) of socioeconomic influences on individual development. In an approach consistent with the idea of cumulative…