In this issue of "Equity Dispatch," we rethink how the "achievement gap" is conceptualized. We can begin moving away from describing the achievement gap as a persistent disparity of educational measures between groups of students defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES) and gender (Hidden Curriculum, 2014), to…

Teacher preparation has been widely criticized for over 50 years. Scholars in the 1950s attacked programs for being too practical and non-intellectual (Popham & Greenberg, 1958), yet recent critiques claim that teacher preparation is overly academic, with insufficient attention to teaching practice (Carnegie Corp. of New York, N., 1986;…

Honors programs, like the institutions that host them, need to exercise constant re-examination to remain effective and to serve their students the best they can. As a private, liberal arts institution, in the tradition of the Irish Catholic Christian Brothers, Iona College provides many avenues to enhance student learning, and paramount to the…

Despite traditional notions of meritocracy, higher education has a long history of exclusionary practices. This chapter explores connections between such practices and racial ideology in the United States, including the recent concept of "post-racialism."

While there was a flurry of articles throughout the 1990s in philosophy of education on Lyotard, there are still several key concepts in his "oeuvre" that have import for but remain largely underdeveloped or absent in the field. One of the most interesting of these absent concepts is Lyotard's notion of the figural. In this paper, I…

The aim of this paper is to provide a way of teaching the factors that affect resistance using mechanical pencil leads and the brightness of the light given out by a light bulb connected to an electrical circuit. The resistance of a conductor is directly proportional to its length (L) and inversely proportional to its cross-sectional area (A).…

Teaching is hard. It's the most rewarding, fulfilling job in the world, but it's also frustrating, infuriating, and really, really hard. In this article, the author reflects on the importance of free play in early childhood classrooms. If teachers want to create happy children who love learning, forcing them to sit at desks or tables through early…

Developing abilities to create, inquire into, qualify, and choose among mathematical problems is an important educational goal. In this paper, we elucidate how mathematicians work with mathematical problems in order to understand this mathematical process. More specifically, we investigate how mathematicians select and pose problems and discuss to…

In this article, we argue for a study of educational administration centered on an "ontology of practices." This is an initial proposal for thinking about and conceptualizing practices in educational administration. To do this, first, we explore how practices are constituted and how they configure the social realities of practitioners.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the environmental education curriculum which has been utilized within Green Schools. The study defined Green Schools as educational facilities with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification or United States Education Department (USED) Green Ribbon recognition. Currently, there is no…

Educators can play a vital role in reclaiming education from its current status as a system dominated by increased standardization, surveillance, and other hegemonic practices. If there is any hope that schools can become sites of resistance, which promote greater democracy, humanity and justice, then it is essential that educators arrive on the…

This article describes the school personnel and leadership collaboration (SPLC) model, a shared-responsibility framework for faculty, staff, and administrators. Prior research consistently demonstrates the need for (a) administrative support for teachers and other school personnel and (b) collegial support among staff. The SPLC model represents an…

This short paper has two pronged purposes. The first is to reflect on policies and practices of inclusive education in Sweden and the second is to problematize the implications of the continuous proliferation of the specialized field of studies in Special Education postgraduate programs in Sweden. The current Swedish political and educational…

In this article, we share a study focused on engaging teacher candidates with multiple forms of diversity and inequity to study emerging patterns of dispositions. Our primary concern is in understanding the processes through which societal inequity becomes reconstituted through teacher education. Our study attempts to deepen discourses of…

Openness in education is an evolving concept which is shaped by the changing needs of societies, cultures, geographies, and economies, thus, it does not have a precise definition. By focusing on four sets of generic keywords -- open education, open learning, open educational resources (OERs), and open educational practices (OEPs) -- this paper…