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Preparing students enrolled in healthcare programs for industry is paramount. While providing administrative and clinical education is essential, students must understand the health literacy levels of the population they serve and work diligently to ensure the population understands and comprehends the health information. Adults with low or limited health literacy levels need help understanding health information and making informed decisions. Research shows that improvements in health literacy result in decreased ER visits, medication errors, increased patient satisfaction, and better health outcomes. Health literacy is an issue throughout the world. This reflection seeks to provide a narrative comparing health literacy concerns in the United States and Spain. The objective is to shed light on the need for all colleges and universities to teach students about health literacy and how to determine patients' health literacy levels. Increasing students' understanding can improve the comprehension and awareness of patients and the population that they serve, thus leading to more appropriate health decisions and outcomes.

Many libraries and archives have recently released statements about harmful material in their collections and the descriptions of these collections. However, these types of statements are not required for any professional accreditation or membership, nor are there specific guidelines to follow. This study collected and analyzed statements from members of ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), measuring their prevalence and identifying common elements. The findings and discussion can be used as a resource by those hoping to create or amend a statement, and for the larger library community to take stock on this topic.

Children with neurodevelopmental diagnoses often experience discrimination from their peers at school. This may result from a lack of understanding, and intolerance of differences in their thinking, communication and social interactions. Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) is a teaching programme designed to educate primary school children about the concept of neurodiversity. The LEANS programme was created by a neurodiverse team, using participatory methods. In the current study, we evaluated whether the wider neurodiverse community endorsed the planned design generated by our participatory approach. Respondents (n = 111) rated their support for key elements of the planned LEANS content, via an online survey. Participants were majority neurodivergent (70%), 98% of whom reported moderate-to-high familiarity with neurodiversity concepts. Over 90% of respondents expressed support for the planned content presented, and 73% of respondents endorsed the draft neurodiversity definition provided. A small number of respondents provided open-ended comments giving further detail on their views. Overall, the LEANS programme plan received a high level of support from this independent, neurodiversity-aware sample -- demonstrating the potential of small-group participatory methods to generate wider community support. The completed resource is now available as a free online download.

This study investigated the impact of virtual exchange on disrupting dangerous narratives about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region among pre-service elementary teachers in the Midwestern region of the United States. The virtual exchange program provided direct interaction with teacher candidates in Morocco. Analysis of pre- and post-exchange memos revealed a significant shift from negative narratives to positive, generalized perceptions of the MENA region. While the shift towards positive generalizations represents progress, it also emphasizes the need for nuanced understanding and ongoing engagement. After participating in the exchange, pre-service teachers also communicated a strong desire to teach about the world and its people. This study highlights the possibilities of virtual exchange as a tool for preparing future educators who have been influenced by post-9/11 educational and media narratives. It advocates for the integration of virtual exchange as a mainstream approach to foster teaching for global understanding among teacher candidates.

Purpose: This program evaluation aimed to investigate the benefits and challenges of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience involving youth and higher education students. The authors sought to understand the meaning that participants would make of an international, intercultural, e-community-engagement experience. Design/methodology/approach: The program evaluation component of this project was qualitative, participatory and action-oriented. It was composed of online reflection sessions with small, international groups of higher education students from Iraq, India, Morocco, South Africa and the USA immediately following each of five interactive exchange sessions with youth from South Africa. It also included one culminating reflection session to which all of the higher education student participants were invited and a written questionnaire that was completed by the youth participants at the conclusion of the project. The reflection sessions were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts and survey data were reviewed for emergent themes. Findings: Cultural exposure emerged as the primary theme with participants valuing the opportunity to learn about different cultures and to connect with individuals from across the globe. Research limitations/implications: This program evaluation was not designed as a generalizable study. This pilot initiative provides evidence of the potential value and importance of international, intercultural e-community-engagement experiences for youth and higher education students. Practical implications: The potential value of technology to build exchange opportunities for young people is immense and largely untapped. International, intercultural e-community-engagement initiatives can be made available to students globally with relatively limited resources. A highly structured and focused plan provides clarity about expectations and requirements for students. A high level of commitment is required by all participants, including the faculty coordinators. Social implications: Although the project was brief, exposure to numerous countries and cultures allowed participants to challenge their assumptions about different peoples and places in the world. The potential benefits for greater compassion and understanding of communities and cultures in an international context are high. Originality/value: This program evaluation contributes to and extends the literature on the possibilities and challenges of international e-community-engagement; it demonstrates the potential for e-community-engagement across multiple countries to broaden students' exposure to and interest in global perspectives.

It is important to build preservice teachers' self-efficacy in working with diverse learners. During summer of 2021, faculty from a mid-sized public university in the southwest took a small group of preservice teachers into central Mexico to provide opportunities in working with diverse learners and/or emergent bilingual students. Although this foray into central Mexico was an exploratory trip to plan for future International Field-Experiences for preservice teachers, the trip involved a lot of service and a lot of learning. Jacoby (2015) defines service-learning as "a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs" (p.1). While this project to central Mexico was not tied to any coursework, preservice teachers and university faculty engaged in service-learning that was mutually beneficial to all stakeholders. At the same time, preservice teachers gained self-efficacy in their ability to support the needs of emergent bilingual students. Students and faculty from the university worked with approximately 22 children in a remote village in central Mexico, with support from translators. Through this experience, a unique bonding experience took place. For five consecutive days, faculty and preservice teachers worked with emergent bilingual students ranging in age from four to fourteen. Only a few translators assisted with communication, but they were able to support the faculty and preservice teachers during literacy and educational technology instruction. The second author received support for translations as she conducted vision and hearing screenings for students, parents, and community members. The experience was life changing. Faculty, through this experience, recognized their own bias towards another cultures' fundamental beliefs about education and medical needs, a humbling experience. However, it prepared students and faculty to learn and grow from others with differing views.

Educational immersions provide opportunities for students to experience a lot in a short time. How do instructors aid students in processing and meaningfully reflecting on their experiences? I describe the development of an immersion--and an accompanying pre- and post-trip class--to sites along the U.S.-Mexico border. Then, I analyze student reflective writing assignments to see if and how the students were able to communicate their learning.

This is the story of how the author came to understand race and racism in America. This story has everything to do with how he came to understand unconscious bias, white nationalism, and the fundamental threat to democracy we face today--and what each of us can do about it. The author shares a framework to help understand key concepts central to advocating for racial equity, including how to recognize and address implicit bias.

In this longitudinal case study, Catherine Compton-­Lilly and Margaret R. Hawkins explore one immigrant youth's engagement with transglobal activities and flows of information and his emerging awareness of the world. Contending that transglobal flows create learning opportunities that are rarely available to children raised in mononational and monocultural spaces, the authors add to scholarship that highlights the knowledge, awareness, understandings, and literacies that children in transglobal families bring to class rooms. Specifically, they exam ine twelve years of longitudinal data following the youth's development of a critical cosmopolitan stance and then apply a transliteracies framework to analyze complementary facets of emergence, uptake, resonance, and scale implicated in transglobal relations and comparisons. The article closes with recommendations for educational practice.

Schools reflect society and societies reflect the schooling of their citizens. Amidst the COVID Pandemic, the failures of many nations to respond effectively and in an equitable manner have been on display for the world. The authors highlight the failure of neoliberal educational policies to create compassionate societies and propose a radical overhaul of Western schooling. Using Leithwood's four paths model to frame their proposal, the authors offer guidance for principals to create schools modelled on care and compassion that may help to ameliorate the societal ills on display in nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. To accomplish this, a new understanding of community and conscience must emerge that draws from lessons learned prior to industrialisation, technological advances and a singular focus on self-interest.

Employing critical incident technique and the constructivist grounded approach, this study conducted individual in-depth interviews with 13 undergraduate students who had experiences studying abroad in China to find out how American college students perceived their new learning environment in China, and to examine the strategies students employed to adjust to the new culture. The results provided practical suggestions for the design and implementation of study abroad programs in China, including the compatibility between the program structure and individual student's learning needs and aspirations, the use of service-based community-building activities to foster the mutual engagement in interactions between American students and host nationals, and the inclusiveness of local perspectives in American students' reflection of their cultural immersion experiences.

This paper reports on a qualitative research study that examined how 10 literacy teacher educators (LTEs) utilized children's literature to invite teacher trainees to critically engage with social issues, challenge their assumptions about literacy, and begin to develop the knowledge and dispositions to work alongside diverse learners (e.g., culturally, linguistically, socio-economically). The LTEs recognized that teacher trainees often entered their literacy courses with restricted conceptions of literacy and deficit assumptions about children from economically marginalized and/or culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Within their courses, the LTEs positioned literacy as a multifaceted social practice, wherein access to a variety of representational resources facilitates the active construction of knowledge and identities. The LTEs modeled instructional strategies and designed assignments that encouraged teacher trainees to use children's literature as a means to connect with issues relevant to the lives of young learners within contemporary classrooms. This research will be of interest to LTEs who endeavor to use children's literature as a springboard to support teacher trainees to develop a self-reflective stance and a critical cultural consciousness.

This study presents evidence of the impact of an innovative pedagogical practice that cultivates and develops the intercultural competence of undergraduate college students. 15 U.S. undergraduate students enrolled in a business study abroad course and 12 Chinese undergraduate students participated in a virtual student exchange project in spring 2019. Using global distance learning technology, the students collaborated on the project to provide a joint comprehensive investment recommendation report. A comparison of U.S. students' Intercultural Effectiveness Scale scores at the beginning and end of the project revealed significant positive changes in their intercultural competence. Student self-evaluations and peer surveys confirmed improvement in students' global mindset. Being one of the first studies to demonstrate student intercultural competence and learning through a virtual exchange experience, this study provides implications for study abroad and virtual global learning.

The number of US students studying abroad has more than doubled since the turn of the twenty-first century, from 154,168 in 2000-2001 to 332,727 in 2016-2017 (Institute of International Education 2010, 2018). This exponential increase reflects the growing recognition by higher education institutions and the federal government on the importance of providing international experiences to cultivate skills for a global competitive economy (Whatley 2018). In the US, study abroad is often used to refer to credit-seeking international mobile students enrolled in a higher education institution outside of the US. Credits earned abroad are usually used towards their academic degree at their home institution. Duration varies in length and includes short-term study abroad (typically eight weeks or less), mid-length study abroad (one semester or one or two quarters), and long-term study abroad (academic or calendar year). As the overall percentage of US students studying abroad in Europe declined from 62.9% in 2001-2002 to 54.4% in 2016-2017, the percentage going to Asia increased from 6.8% to 11.6%. With the rise of US students studying abroad, it is important to understand the mechanisms of how study abroad experiences can create opportunities to integrate into the host society and develop intercultural understanding. This paper examines how the design of a study abroad program and historical organizational changes may assist or hinder integration into the host society, based on 25 qualitative in-depth interviews with one-year and one-semester participants from the 1960s to 2010s on a select US study abroad program in Japan.

This article explores the ways in which lived experiences informed literacy teacher educators' (LTEs) pedagogies and practices of social justice. In particular, three case studies were conducted to examine why the LTEs chose to address social justice, as well as how their life experiences influenced their views and pedagogies in their literacy courses to address social justice, race, and race related issues. Each of the LTEs recalled transformative experiences that shaped their views not only of literacy, but the interconnections between schooling, social justice, and race.

As political participation across the globe grows increasingly contentious and accusations of "fake news" and "post-truth" politics rise, the how, where, and why of civic learning in schools are called into question. In contrast, multimodal practices such as digital video production continue to promote youth engagement and deliberation of social issues through dialogue, crowd-sourcing, and relationships. Herein we examine the classroom-based approaches to digital video inquiry as a problem-posing antidote to traditional banking approaches to civic education. To forward this claim, we describe 2 classroom uses of digital video production for critical social inquiry. In both cases, digital video inquiry invited students to move beyond banked knowledge about issues into a critical relationship with their topics of study and the communities affected -- becoming a path of political participation not easily allowed in other pedagogical and social spaces.

The internationalisation of higher education through study abroad programmes is a pivotal strategy for cultivating knowledge of the host country and the world. This article explores the long-term impacts of study abroad through the lens of knowledge diplomacy, which emphasises the benefits of understanding the world through transformative international experiences for all involved actors. The article draws upon original data sources on US study abroad experiences in Japan from 1963 to 2012, including a quantitative online survey (n = 259) and 25 qualitative in-depth follow-up interviews. The findings shed light on how participants understand their personal development resulting from their study abroad experience and how their awareness and connectivity become more global, with a lifelong bond to the host country, raised consciousness of the host region and an expanded awareness of the world.

This article introduces the Collaborative Online Learning Across Borders (COLAB) teaching and research program. It outlines the development of the cross-national collaboration, and examines the learning in four teacher education programs in New Zealand and the United States of America. COLAB aims to support teacher candidates, in the US and abroad, to begin their teaching career with insights into the complexities of working with people from diverse social and cultural contexts. This article presents a research study that examined the online intercultural interactions and understandings among undergraduate and graduate preservice (and some inservice) teachers (n = 110) across four universities during a 4-week unit. It details the online teaching techniques involved in COLAB and highlights the development of intercultural understandings through an online learning experience among the preservice teachers. The preservice teachers' insights and sensitivities to the other, ethnocentrism, and the online learning space are theorized through a framework of cultural otherness and interculturality, which emphasizes the unique potential for cross-cultural experiences in this online format.

Given that postsecondary institutions are increasingly seen as sites to promote health, critical scholars are calling attention to how the contemporary Western weight-centred health paradigm reinforces a "size matters" message that is fueling harmful attitudes towards and judgments of bodies. As such, research that highlights strategies to promote safe teaching and learning environments for students and faculty, regardless of body shape and size, is of utmost importance. Through 26 participant interviews, this study examines the experiences of critical obesity scholars who teach courses that engage critical approaches to obesity, fatness, and body size. The findings of this study shed light on the developing field of critical obesity scholarship, the types of challenges faced by critical obesity scholars in higher education, and how these scholars are building community as a way of coping with challenges facing the emerging field.

Advocates for internationalisation of the undergraduate psychology curriculum anticipate a variety of beneficial outcomes strongly associated with forms of intellectual growth -- including critical thinking, appreciation for diversity, and global awareness -- that are the defining purpose of a university education. As a prelude to an intervention to internationalise an introductory psychology course, we examined relationships between measures of these anticipated benefits in an online survey of 107 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a public research university in the US. Results indicated moderately strong relationships among measures of anticipated benefits of internationalisation but little relationship with conventional measures of academic performance. These results raise doubts about any necessary connection between anticipated benefits of internationalisation and conventional understandings of educational success. Accordingly, results motivate greater reflection among both proponents of internationalisation and psychologists in general about the learning outcomes that inform conventional approaches to undergraduate education in psychology.

How do preservice teachers (PSTs) understand social justice within the context of education-focused study abroad programs? How might traveling across cultural borders facilitate PSTs'™ development of a social justice mindset? Drawing on previous studies and examples from an ongoing study of 6 annual, short-term study abroad programs, this article explores how PSTs reported experiences related to social justice and suggests implications for study abroad programs in teacher education. We propose that the context, curriculum, and co-curricular activities of a study abroad program have the potential to impact how PSTs conceptualize social justice and that an intentional focus on context-specific issues of social justice from a critical perspective has the potential to both broaden and deepen their conceptualizations. We suggest approaches from the programs that provided opportunities for PSTs to develop nuanced understandings of social justice in education and showed promise for preparing PSTs with global competency to serve diverse students.

Africa is a continent, not a country. Yet, a monolithic misunderstanding of Africa as a country is prevalent especially in the United States. Thus, Africans in the diaspora who speak heritage languages other than English are asked frequently if they speak African. This study countered existing misunderstandings through cultural immersion in Kenya, Africa. A comparison of pre- and post-visit data showed that participants (n = 140) developed critical cultural understanding, and became less ethnocentric. This was an essential transformation especially in the context of contemporary globalization.

The Diversity-Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets (St. John, Thomas, Noroña, & Irving Harris Foundation Professional Development Network Tenets Working Group, 2012) synthesized efforts to integrate principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the infant and early childhood mental health field. The Tenets were born of a recognition that social forces conspire to interfere with the capacity of some groups of children and families to thrive. The Tenets are a response to the persistent and urgent need to expand our professional capacity and deepen our work with families by increasing awareness and developing intentional action for individual, organizational, and systemic change. This article presents a revised and expanded edition of the Tenets. The authors introduce a new name--Diversity-Informed Tenets for Work with Infants, Children, and Families--and describe the productive struggles, deepened understandings, sustaining alliances, and critical insights that brought this edition into being.

Based on a two-year ethnographic study of global virtual teams (GVTs) (n = 323) in a technology-enhanced global course among six universities (i.e. U.S., China, South Korea, Germany, Israel, and India), this paper presents "how and in what ways" the participating students made sense of and constructed understandings about the interactive learning environment. Focusing on the student engagement, this study identified three pathways in which they negotiated and developed their respective understandings about technology, culture, and teamwork in GVTs. In each pathway, it was found that students engaged in the development process of reflecting upon problematic experiences, revolving unanticipated challenges, and establishing new ways of being, doing, and thinking. This study highlights the dynamic nature of understanding construction and provides important implications about how to implement GVTs and support students to succeed in GVTs.

Based on a cross-national study conducted in Northern Ireland, England, and the United States, this article expands current literature by examining 4 teacher educators' efforts to prepare preservice teachers to teach controversial issues. Teaching controversial issues, strongly advocated for decades, is both urgent and risky, especially in divided societies. The risks include emotional reactions that interfere with learning, inflammatory discourse threatening to students, and criticism from community members or school administrators. Using vignettes from class sessions and interview data, this article highlights strategies teacher educators taught their students to deal with these risks, as well as the approaches they used to teach them. Overall, the teacher educators prepared preservice teachers for "contained risk-taking" when teaching controversial issues, and they enacted this stance in their own practice. The findings raise important questions, such as what balance should be struck between an open classroom climate and safe space in politically turbulent times and divided societies.

Manal, an Arabyyah feminist and Judith, a Mexicana feminista share our experience co-teaching a course titled Revolutionary Women and Decolonizing Pláticas ~ Testimonios, at a university along the U.S.--Mexico borderlands. We employed pláticas~testimonios pedagogies and methodologies and read the testimonios of Chicanas/Latinas and revolutionary women from Palestine and Egypt. Our pedagogy was transformed, as we enacted feminista reflexión via pláticas and femtoring, illuminating the challenges and possibilities of an emerging decolonizing pedagogy of solidarity.

Global scholarship has documented gender discrepancies in power in higher education institutions (HEIs) for several decades. That research is now supported by wider gender equality movements such as those concerned with unequal pay and sexual harassment. Underlying these is the under-representation of women in senior management and full professorial positions. Thus, for example, in the US and the EU men make up the overwhelming majority of those in senior management (Rectors/Presidents/Vice Chancellors) and in full professorial positions. Variation within and across countries and types of institutions suggests that it is necessary to go beyond explanations for this at the individual level. Drawing on research in the sociology of education; higher education studies; management and leadership studies; gender studies; science and policy studies, and using quantitative data, experimental studies, individual case studies and comparative qualitative studies of HEIs, this article focuses on three discourses which legitimate the under-representation women in senior positions namely excellence, fit and national relevance. It evaluates interventions to deal with this including unconscious bias training, mentoring, gender mainstreaming interventions such as Athena SWAN and ADVANCE and 'nudging' leaders to end gender inequality. It concludes that a fundamental transformation of HEIs is required and suggests ways forward.

Using global citizenship as the framework and guided by a phenomenological approach, this paper examines the experiences of overseas education on Chinese students studying in American high schools, and the mechanisms through which potential growth takes place. The data were collected from interviews with 15 Chinese students studying at American high schools and seven teacher participants who work closely with them. Findings reveal that international sojourning could potentially serve as an effective pathway to global citizenship because it may help international students develop global competencies (knowledge, understanding and skills), and global consciousness (values and attitudes). The paper argues that the process of growing into a global citizen may be viewed as an advanced level of student development, and the mechanisms through which this kind of ideal transformation takes place which were identified in this study include: having non-vanity motives, developing self-authorship, exposure to different perspectives, and experiencing disadvantages and deprivation.

Many universities use a center-based model to deliver services to students with disabilities. A hybrid service delivery model utilizing a center-based disability resource and faculty mentors was recently implemented in a large, public university in the Northwestern United States. Noticeable improvements observed to date include increased administrative support, positive collaborations with teaching center staff, and increased faculty awareness of resources for instructing students with disabilities. (Contains 2 tables.)

Teachers--who are generally representatives of the cultural mainstream--are expected to use global experiences to become culturally enhanced and to bring these enhancements back to their classrooms. In this article, the authors discuss a cross-cultural exploration of investigations into the experiences of Canadian and U.S. educators with professional induction in foreign countries. As such, they display the impact of cross-cultural teaching practice for work with diverse learners. Moreover, they present their inquiries through the lens of cross-cultural dialogue in order to bring to light experiential facets and effects of teaching abroad that interweave global and national curriculum boundaries. Making use of each other's field texts and inquiry puzzles, the authors highlight contextualized interpretations of the experiences and possible relevance of cross-cultural teacher education, induction, and development.

In today's sociopolitical climate in the United States, nativist anti-immigrant movements drive the marginalization and disempowerment of Latino schoolchildren. Latino teachers need more than a shared ethnicity with their students to help them develop their full potential. Bilingual educators and proponents of dual language programs must understand the often camouflaged hegemonic ideological motives behind most organized opposition to bilingual education. It is essential that teachers of linguistic minorities develop a critical cultural and professional identity, and this development can and should begin in teacher education programs. For many Latino preservice teachers, such development begins as an evolutionary transformative process that requires assistance by knowledgeable others. This study describes how a knowledgeable other, an expert guest speaker, facilitated the awakening of a critical awareness of issues related to native language (L1) preservation and globalization among Latino preservice teachers in an online dialogue.

The purpose of this autophenomenography was to explore our lived experiences in three world music pedagogy programmes. We participated in three different world music pedagogy programmes in the United States and Ghana. We gathered data through field notes and researcher journals, and by collecting interviews of other participants and programorganizers. After emergent category coding with constant comparison and dialogue, we explored salient related literature in order to root our findings in music education discourse and to find points of agreement or tension between what has been examined and our own lived experiences. Our findings are presented as thematic strands of experiencing the dynamically sublime, struggling with p-prims, engaging in comparisons of spiritual and social mores, exploring the sense of identity and community, and bringing learning home.

The internet, smartphones, laptops, and social media offer exciting potential to democratize diplomacy, if coupled with well-designed citizen diplomacy programs. One new nonprofit initiative is engaging lower-income American families in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with lower-income families in other nations to nurture more caring and capable global citizens. This article discusses the initiative's approach and first international community project involving families in the United States, Senegal, and Jordan.

Through a pre-service teacher cultural exchange, the authors trace the development of a global perspective, working specifically within Hanvey's concept of "perspective consciousness". From qualitative observations, interviews and written reflections, the data of four education students who traveled to Macedonia from the United States and five education students who traveled to the U.S. from their country of Macedonia, the data demonstrate how perspective consciousness emerged across three themes: "resources", "religion", and "political" consciousness. Looking across these themes, the authors present conclusions about the conditions that may foster or hinder perspective consciousness, such as substantive knowledge about a place, seeking common ground (rather than differences), and at times putting one's own deepest beliefs aside. The data hold several implications for fostering a global perspective in colleges of education and especially within their global exchange programs, adding current findings to Hanvey's and Merry Merryfield's claims about attaining a global perspective. (Contains 32 notes.)

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to investigate the perceived state of civics education as viewed by practicing teachers in three large high schools (each with a student enrollment of at least 2,200) in the midwestern and southeastern United States, in an effort to discover what teachers in different geographical regions deem as critical to this area of study. While the answers of teachers at the schools are naturally not meant to represent the entire American teaching population, they nonetheless can suggest what educators in different parts of the country--and those working with similar populations and school environments--perceive as the characteristics of contemporary civics education, and what can be done to improve its quality. In viewing the data, it is apparent that a consensus of the high school teachers from all three locations coincided with the reviewed literature--a concern about the lack of knowledge, attitude, and participation of young people necessary for the future growth of the American representative republic. Among their suggestions include: (1) proper instruction in citizenship from the home; (2) integration of a mandatory service learning component into the curriculum; and (3) improvement of civic awareness among students included "teaching ethics in the early grades." A Survey is appended. (Contains 1 table.)

For decades, educators and researchers have observed practices of educational inequality in U.S. schools. In a multicultural democracy, schooling without educational equality constitutes injustice. This article explores the limitation of the current traditional teacher education in preparing highly competent and socially conscious teachers needed for today's urban school communities. Specifically, it explores traditional practices in teacher education and how they might contribute to the inadequate preparation of teachers for urban schools. It argues that unless teachers are prepared to develop a sense of consciousness of schooling as a sociopolitical context and a sense of social responsibility, the academic failure of urban students and the achievement gap will remain problematic and will continue to prepare teachers who will and cannot successfully teach in urban schools. It further argues that when teachers are prepared with a social justice perspective, they will be more able "to cultivate firmly established core beliefs and practices needed to act as change agents in their classrooms, [and] develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to engage in culturally responsive and responsible pedagogy." The promise of ending educational inequity and the achievement gap rests upon teacher educators who are committed to diversity, equity and social justice.

This article offers responses from Lois K. Draina, an associate professor, Ronald J. Nuzzi, a program director, and Rachel Sara Moreno, associate professional specialist to a United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) document "Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium" (2005). After several careful readings of the document, Draina was clear about one thing: Its goals are strikingly similar to "In Support of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools," published by the USCCB in 1990. Draina stresses that the challenges outlined in the document are real, but outlining the needs goes only so far. She asks where is the specificity regarding action and accountability. She sees that the document's tone suggests, however, that the bishops are looking for helpers to address the needs of the Catholic school system. Nuzzi, as a program director, knows firsthand of the joy and appreciation Catholic educators feel in response to this document. He adds that for this consciousness raising, publicity, and invitation to collaborate in the future success of schools, all Catholic educators are grateful. Meanwhile, Moreno wonders if some pastors read this document which states, "It is the responsibility of the entire Catholic community...to provide an exceptional education experience for young people." She cites that many of Catholic school colleagues are forced to leave the ministry because of financial constraints.

Many teachers teach undergraduate and graduate teacher education courses that include a cultural hodgepodge of future teachers who differ not only in ethnicity, but in age, sexual preference, religion, language, and a host of other microcultural areas. Occasionally it is clear within the first couple of class sessions that these groups are reluctant to interact with one another in any format. In these instances, those few cliques that could possibly develop do so early on and class discussions may be almost nonexistent at the outset of the courses. In later discussions teachers witness angry encampments of student groups lashing out at one another. In this article, the authors attempt at bringing diverse and segregated class groups together in some sense of understanding and respect for one another through a restructured, reconceptualized, multicultural curriculum. After all, these very groups of non-cooperative students will very soon be serving as teachers in schools across the United States and will need to develop the skills necessary to foster multicultural tolerance among their own students. (Contains 2 figures.)

This article examines the origin of ArtsBridge America, a K-12 school/university arts education partnership. It also summarizes findings from a research study on the effect that ArtsBridge participation had on a sample of university arts students. The study indicated that the transition from student to teaching artist required transformation of abstract procedural knowledge into a more flexible and fully assimilated performance capacity that could be adapted to a wide variety of situations. In addition, ArtsBridge helped university students move from a focus on the individual (self) and domain (arts) to a larger social/cultural sphere (field). Findings indicated that important interdisciplinary connections could be made, mentor relationships developed, and a nurturing environment for the development of creativity built through ArtsBridge program activities.

In an effort to better serve the school districts within its service area and the unique credential candidate population, California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) implemented an accelerated alternative certification program based upon the Professional Development School (PDS) model hereinafter referred to as SPED PDS. During the 2002?2003 academic year, 58 SPED inservice teachers from four local partnering school districts entered this program. The program differs from traditional PDS models in that (1) it was an accelerated (3 semesters) 44 unit post-baccalaureate degree; (2) candidates were uncertified, fully employed, in-service teachers; and (3) fieldwork was completed in candidates' own classrooms.