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In spring 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic collided with a national reckoning on racial injustice and ruptured our country's core. The effects of this collision necessitated something other than business as usual in school leadership: it called for the kind of courageous leadership rooted in equity and justice we describe in this paper. In this qualitative case study, we draw on nine months of data collected at a Title I middle school in the southeast to describe how the administration leaned into vulnerability and courageous leadership by naming and acknowledging uncomfortable realities and inviting collaborative engagement with the school community about these realities.

In this article we explore how educational researchers report empirical qualitative research about young people's social media use. We frame the overall study with an understanding that social media sites contribute to the production of neoliberal subjects, and we draw on Foucauldian discourse theories and the understanding that how researchers explain topics and concepts produces particular ways of thinking about the world while excluding others. Findings include that: 1) there is an absence of attention to the structure and function of social media platforms; 2) adolescents are positioned in problematic, developmental ways; and 3) the over-representation of girls and young women in these studies contributes to the feminization of problems on social media. We conclude by calling for future research that can serve as a robust resource for exploring adolescents' social media use in more productive, nuanced ways.

This exploratory, embedded single study examined the experiences of middle grades teacher design teams over 10 months as they were immersed in the development of interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward design framework. The teachers were supported by a researcher-practitioner partnership and situated in a middle level school structure that valued teachers' engagement with curriculum design. Most notably, we found that the teachers experienced productive struggle throughout their design process and, as a result, shifted their pedagogical design capacity from adapting or offloading to improvising their curriculum. These findings are particularly significant to middle grades education because of the importance of curricular learning experiences for young adolescents that are challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse. Teachers can better create these kinds of experiences for their middle grades students if they are the ones designing those experiences with their particular students in mind.

In this article we explore some of the challenges, constraints, and what we refer to as glimmers of revelation that occurred during an experiential, community-based teacher education course that we designed and co-taught in spring 2015. Trying to take seriously Kumashiro's (2009) notions that justice-oriented teacher education happens "only when "we ourselves" are still struggling with questions about the "what else," "how else," and "where else" that are involved" in this kind of teaching [emphasis added] (p. xxv), we explore moments where we grappled with the paradox, partiality, uncertainty, and discomfort (Kumashiro, 2009) that often accompany our commitments as middle grades teacher educators attempting to enact anti-oppressive teaching practices.

In middle grades teacher education, the literature regarding issues of diversity, equity, and social justice practices is exceptionally sparse. In keeping with recent arguments about the state of middle grades education, we contend that middle grades teacher education programs, including ours, are not where they need to be in preparing teachers to meet the needs of "every" young adolescent learner. In this paper, we explore our ongoing adventures reconceptualizing a middle grades teacher education program at a comprehensive, research-intensive public university in the southeast. We describe how our commitment to critical pedagogies, one of the signature commitments of our middle grades program, appeared within our teacher candidates' first course in the program. More specifically, the course we highlight introduces justice-oriented ways of knowing and being that we continue to reinforce throughout the two-year initial certification program. We conclude the article by describing our plans to strengthen the program's focus on the role of middle grades educators as change agents prepared and willing to push back against oppressive systems and practices to support social justice and equity for every young adolescent in their homes, schools, and communities.

Much of the extant literature regarding middle grades teachers centers on interventions to improve the quality or effectiveness of their teaching: studies that identify a particular instructional strategy, curricular support, or disposition, and conclude with recommendations that teachers improve their practice by adopting said thing. In contrast, the qualitative case study we present here contributes to the rising tide of research illustrating the powerful, transformative work that middle grades teachers oriented toward justice and equity are already doing in the classroom. Specifically, we draw on eight months of data to illuminate how teachers in a Title I middle school located in the southeastern United States enacted what bell hooks (1994) refers to as engaged pedagogy. By this, we mean educators who believe we learn best when there is an interactive relationship between teachers and students; are continuously engaging in self-actualization by working to identify and unlearn harmful, dominant narratives about race/ethnicity, social class, dis/ability, and gender; and who attend to their own well-being so they can better attend to their students' overall academic and social-emotional well-being. Rather than a blueprint assumed to be generalizable, we offer these illustrations to underscore the importance of developing and supporting justice-oriented middle grades teachers who are and/or will become engaged pedagogical practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this cross-institutional, qualitative case study, two teacher educators in urban teacher education programs identify and analyze the components of our teacher education practice in relation to a vision of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Using Grossman et al.'s concepts of preparation for professional practice as an analytic tool, we illuminate some of our teacher education practices that (a) facilitated the development of relationships and community within our classes, (b) honored preservice teachers' lived experiences and existing attitudes, (c) introduced preservice teachers to multiple perspectives of viewing the world, and (d) provided a vision of equitable, intellectually challenging teaching and learning. Drawing on our data, we offer a pedagogical framework that identifies key features of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education to inform research and practice. We highlight the contributions of this framework for justice-oriented teacher education and the inherent complexity of attempts to parse such fundamentally messy relational practice.

A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher. In this paper, we use what we call "methodological data" as a tool to complicate the possibility and desirability of such transparency. Specifically, we draw on our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes in our respective dissertation studies in order to examine how novice researchers can explore transparency as a situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work. This work contributes to conversations about how qualitative researchers in education can understand, discuss, and teach qualitative inquiry while continuing to push the boundaries of the field.

In this article, Stephanie Jones and Hilary E. Hughes suggest that particular discursive lessons are readily available in justice-oriented teacher education which might influence a pedagogy that crowds out responsiveness, the experience of the student, and the role of gender and feminism in teacher education. They contend that changing the place of teacher education to include unpredictable community settings requires pedagogical responses that defy predictable storylines and ready-made discursive lessons common in teacher education. The lessons learned contribute to justice-oriented teacher education and an emerging trend for including community-based experiences in teacher education, and highlight the importance of feminist storylines for the incommensurability of misogyny and racism for teacher education.

The article discusses the need to prioritize the preparation of middle level educators and diversify the education workforce. It highlights the historical marginalization of middle grades education and the lack of federal funding compared to other levels of education. The authors argue that in order to address these issues, it is necessary to also address institutional barriers rooted in white supremacy and classism that prevent students of color and first-generation students from entering teacher education programs. They propose the design of a middle-grades-focused teacher residency program as one way to create more equitable pathways for underrepresented students. The authors emphasize the importance of federal funding to support sustainable models and promote the recognition and support of middle grades education. [Extracted from the article]

In this cross-institutional, qualitative case study, two teacher educators in urban teacher education programs identify and analyze the components of our teacher education practice in relation to a vision of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Using Grossman et al.'s concepts of preparation for professional practice as an analytic tool, we illuminate some of our teacher education practices that (a) facilitated the development of relationships and community within our classes, (b) honored preservice teachers' lived experiences and existing attitudes, (c) introduced preservice teachers to multiple perspectives of viewing the world, and (d) provided a vision of equitable, intellectually challenging teaching and learning. Drawing on our data, we offer a pedagogical framework that identifies key features of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education to inform research and practice. We highlight the contributions of this framework for justice-oriented teacher education and the inherent complexity of attempts to parse such fundamentally messy relational practice. Keywords preservice teacher education, social justice, urban teacher education, social studies teacher education, secondary teacher education, For the past few decades scholars oriented toward social justice teacher education (SJTE) have proposed a range of emphases to address the convergent challenges of an increasingly diverse student population, [...]

Teachers and students share a close bond of being mentors and lifelong friends. This kind of a bond does not end with the loss of a loved one but instead continues to grow amidst various circumstances in life.

In this article, we introduce the special issue on work/think/play in qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. Our aim for the issue is to open up conversations about what does happen, what can happen, and/or what should happen in the name of qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. We hope that the issue raises methodological questions in qualitative and postqualitative inquiry about ways of being in the world as researchers—and most specifically, the need to keep raising questions rather than finding answers as we make and remake the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher. In this paper, we use what we callmethodological dataas a tool to complicate the possibility and desirability of such transparency. Specifically, we draw on our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes in our respective dissertation studies in order to examine how novice researchers can explore transparency as a situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work. This work contributes to conversations about how qualitative researchers in education can understand, discuss, and teach qualitative inquiry while continuing to push the boundaries of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The story presented here is adapted from my phenomenological dissertation project, which I wrote as a multigenre dissertation in a format similar to a teen magazine. It is a story of bodies and girls and resistance. It is a story of an incredible group of seventh grade girls of color who embodied some kind of agency in resistance-to a phenomenon I named bodily-not-enoughness: those moments in American culture when someone or something tells girls and women we are not enough of something in our lived or physical bodies. Because this story is about lives that are not yet over, I present it in the way that stories are lived: fragmented, selectively, contextually constructed (Richardson, 1997), and with plenty of interruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]