In an age where caring for others may seem like a relic of a bygone era, we all must be reminded of the importance of active caring in the classroom and beyond. This article explores the work of Nel Noddings, an educational scholar at the forefront of caring research, and her four dimensions for bringing active caring into the classroom. Modeling,…

Congregations are called to be communities of belonging. Yet, many churches struggle to meaningfully include children with disabilities and their families in all aspects of parish life. This article addresses 10 dimensions of belonging and their relevance to the inclusion of individuals with disabilities in their faith communities. To belong…

This paper presents two reflection activities that supported the creation of community and a sense of caring for students learning in an online environment in the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first activity, students indicated how they were feeling in terms of hope/despair, stress/calm and energy level in a "check-in" slide at the beginning…

In this self-study, we explore the benefits associated with developing inter-collegial friendships for sustaining our wellbeing in the academy. We have used anticipatory reflection to imagine what our idealised working situation might look like and then taken measured steps towards supporting one another to achieve our goals. Our research focus -…

Imagine Schools is a national family of 51 nonprofit public charter school campuses located in seven states and the District of Columbia. The schools serves approximately 29,000 students in K-12 classrooms. In the past few years, Imagine Schools began a move toward adopting a restorative mindset that emphasizes positive relationships and the…

Students who are admitted into social work graduate programs juggle multiple responsibilities: coursework, field practice, employment, and personal. Such competing responsibilities can increase stress levels. Integrating self-care strategies into daily practice routines may benefit students by improving well-being and decreasing the chances of…

The Covid-19 pandemic and the recent national civil and racial unrest provide a golden opportunity for teacher educators to reflect on our own culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995) as we adapt to alternate modes of instruction and respond to the needs of our teacher candidates who come from historically minoritized…

This article focuses on the development of the Altruism Scale for Children (ASC). Analyses revealed a one-factor model with internal consistency of 0.89 and test-retest reliability of 0.94. The authors also discuss the implications for using the instrument for assessing the need for interventions and measuring program outcomes.

In this edition of "Equity Dispatch," we will discuss the definition and characteristics of a caring classroom community, its benefits, and the practices that educators can leverage to create caring classroom communities.

Discipline is defined as the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. In public schools across the United States, disparate discipline outcomes continue to plague most educational settings, and methods of effectively addressing this concern remain elusive. White teachers comprise…

This study focused on the unseen, thus, unobservable rationalization process in the pre-fraud state. The purpose of this study was to examine whether a relationship was present between one's ability to rationalize and their traits of sympathy towards others with their intention to commit fraud. Fraud is costly and does not discriminate. The Fraud…

This research documented how elementary school teachers build, structure, and maintain classroom community in a full-inclusion district. Specifically, this study applied Invitational Theory to investigate the relationship between a full-inclusion school model and the construction of classroom community. The study focused on the teachers' behaviors…

This study assessed the influence of a 10-week teacher emotionally supportive quasi-experimental intervention on the perceived teacher emotional support (PTES), basic psychological needs (BPNs) satisfaction, emotions of anxiety and enjoyment, and emotional engagement of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Strategies targeting the…

Abolitionist dreamers have called for justice-oriented teachers to teach K-12 students with marginalized identities through methods of critical and culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies (Freire, 1970/2018; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 1995/2021; Paris & Alim, 2014); acts of love, care, hope, and healing (Ginwright, 2016; Love, 2019); and…

This article focuses on self-identified Spanish-speaking early childhood educators' experiences with and views of bilingualism as they learned about translanguaging--a dynamic, liberatory, and culturally and linguistically sustaining theory and practice of language. Artifacts and conversations with teachers showed that, counter to many of their…