The Underground Railroad is the first racially integrated civil/human rights movement in the United States. The basic concepts of "escape" and "travel" that undergird the movement offer a way of envisioning the teaching/learning exchange as leaving behind unhealthy ideologies, and as journeying with students from one place of…

As literacy scholars, we continually engage with the ongoing politics of imagination in everyday life across silenced histories and uncertain futures. In this article, I draw on sociocultural theories and philosophies of imagination as well as narrative and global discourse theories to argue that literacy research, in the context of social…

The New Zealand early childhood curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1996) is presented as a bicultural curriculum, namely one honouring an equal relationship between Maori and non-Maori. This article examines definitions of biculturalism, drawing on research into the implementation of early childhood curriculum in mainstream centres in Aotearoa New…

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of…

This study used interview and observation data to investigate how school principals approached both the promotion and implementation of lesson study. Using distributed leadership and sensemaking, the study found that the principals received a lack of formal guidance and they used prior knowledge to adapt the model. To capture buy-in, the…

This edition of "Equity Dispatch" welcomes subscribers to the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP Center). This newsletter introduces readers to the characteristics and benefits of equity-focused technical assistance. It also provides a broad overview of the MAP Center and the center services.

In January 2014, I began working as an evaluator on an education reform project being implemented by faculty in science and engineering departments at my university. The core goals of the project were for participating faculty members to improve students' learning, engagement, and recruitment and retention in selected introductory-level courses…

This study examined power through social relations between entities in the implementation of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in an environment where English is spoken as a foreign language. The examination involved analysing the discourse of two foreign English teachers. Specifically, subject positioning of entities, made apparent…

This article juxtaposes the notion of "wuwei" in Daoism and philosophical principles of self-organization in systems theory to re-imagine classroom dynamics in which pedagogical relationships, students' interactions with texts, and peer interplay come together to enable an open system of education, learning, and growth. "Wuwei"…

From the assumed physical threat of a ceremonial Kirpan in an elementary school carried by a Sikh child, to the fictional possibility of rich, Arab, Muslim University students utilising their implicitly understood patriarchal power to subjugate all women from access to common swimming pools, Canada has become increasingly replete with examples of…

In this comparative ethnographic case study, Ethan Chang examines the politics of digital education reform. Drawing on new institutional theory and boundary work, he investigates how two digital technology nonprofit organizations in California drew boundaries to define themselves and ensure their survival in a competitive organizational field. He…

Since becoming a teacher is a highly emotional path, it is fundamental to understand teachers' emotional journeys while constructing their teacher professional identity. An ethnographic approach was employed to examine how the emotions experienced by physical education preservice teachers during formalised school placement contributed to the…

Children and adolescents with the genetic, tumor predisposition syndromeneurofibromatosis type I (NF1) have varying degrees of physical stigmata characteristic of the disease and experience high rates of social difficulties. The present study was the first to formally examine the rate (i.e., percentage of participants) and frequency of bullying…

This study examined the relationship between international and domestic students' demographic factors on acculturation and sociocultural adaptation. It also examined the extent to which cultural values, uncertainty avoidance (UA) and power distance (PD), might explain two types of sociocultural adaptation: social interaction and localizing. A…

Student participation at school is receiving heightened attention through international evidence connecting it to a range of benefits including student learning, engagement, citizenship and wellbeing, as well as to overall school improvement. Yet the notion of student participation remains an ambiguous concept, and one that challenges many deeply…