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This article brings forth the difficulties and possibilities of enacting the role of “Joker” from Boal’s (1979) Joker System—formerly called the poetics of the oppressed. The authors acknowledge jokering as an apprehensive performance of brokering, of bodies that matter and are matter, that can provoke anti-oppressive actions and reinscribe oppressions. As such, four backdrops are engaged to further the methodological, theoretical, and curricular/pedagogical force of jokering as a performance that unsettles the status quo: Latina/Chicana feminist theories used in mentoring, performance-based action research with middle-school students, professional leadership development for schools, and socio-technological analysis with theatre in online/distance education. Each example from our praxis illustrates how the roles of emerging researcher, mentor-researcher, and researcher-practitioner are performed and troubled (jokered) from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to foster social justice praxis and outcomes.

This study explored incidents in schools involving the controversial campaign slogan, Make America Great Again (MAGA). Using a cartography of controversies approach, we located news reports to unde...

This article takes an arts-based approach to unmasking the (wounded) naming histories of public schools within a 20-miles radius of a university in central Florida. It applies an artistic methodolo...

We center three publicly accessible images: (1) Am I not a Man and a Brother? (1787), (2) Colin Kaepernick (2017) “Taking a Knee”, (3) Mother McDowell of the Black Student in Florida Admonished for “Taking a Knee” in school (2017). The photograph of mother McDowell is included, rather than her son, who she wanted to remain anonymous across media outlets. We draw primarily from publicly accessible media and scholarship available via the Internet (museums, newscasts, scholarly repositories) to provide a composite of kneeling discourse and counter-narratives related to race (i.e., anti-slavery, abolition, anti-racism protests) and proper behavior. Each image is situated within literature supporting analysis through concepts (time, race) visual, and textual information. Rather than detailing the images, we focus on the surrounding narratives, contemporary readings, redactions, and annotations (we create or relate to) to consider emotions as part of the context, impetus, and force behind the actions captured in them. We juxtapose, redact, and critique images and texts associated with kneeling/taking a knee by men and boys racialized as Black, but not exclusively., as the practices we illustrate in response to structural racism (i.e., discipline in schools) also bring attention to events involving other students: a Black girl and an Indigenous (Inuit) boy.

In this review of research, we explore intersectionality in the literature on K–12 educational leadership. We seek to understand how researchers have used intersectionality and what their findings or arguments reveal about the work of leading to reduce inequities in education. We ask, What traditions and trends associated with intersectionality have been brought into educational leadership research to inform the development of transformative leadership? The sample includes 15 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2005 and 2017. We identify the themes individualism and knowledge relations, which leads us to three interrelated findings concerning conceptions of leadership and intersectionality. We find that intersectionality primarily (1) is used to support micro-level analysis rather than both micro-level and macro-level analysis of the inequities being confronted by leadership practice, (2) is used to focus on individuals’ experiences as “leaders” and “leadership” capacity rather than “leading” practices, and (3) serves as an emergent knowledge project in its support of agendas related to transformative educational leadership. We discuss how the use of intersectionality, conceptions of leadership, and leadership and research practices coincide, pointing to the implications for the continued use of intersectionality in educational leadership, and provide recommendations to support the use of intersectionality in future research.

This article reports on a phenomenographic study of Black women undergraduates who were resident assistants in a predominantly White institution (PWI) of higher education. Critical race feminism, namely intersectionality, was used to explore how they navigated the responsibilities of their position and social identities. Findings are that participants navigated the resident assistant leadership role and their social identities by (a) engaging in relational service, (b) tentatively negotiating the expression of their social identities and related oppressions, and (c) seeking support responsive to their multiply intersecting social identities. How they navigated their status identities and social identities varied according to their sense of obligation to serve residents and sense of risk in expressing (some) social identities and related experiences. Recommendations for continued professional leadership development of resident assistants are provided.

Research syntheses in education, particularly meta-analyses and best-evidence syntheses, identify evidence-based practices by combining findings across studies whose constructs are similar enough to warrant comparison. Yet constructs come preloaded with social, historical, political, and cultural assumptions that anticipate how research problems are framed and solutions formulated. The information research syntheses provide is therefore incomplete when the assumptions underlying constructs are not critically understood. We describe and demonstrate a new systematic review method, critical construct synthesis (CCS), to unpack assumptions in research synthesis and to show how other framings of educational problems are made possible when the constructs excluded through methodological elimination decisions are taken into consideration.

Geographic place and socio-political space are salient in struggles for justice in education. Social geography provides a frame for discussing the relationship between names of schools and narratives of race, place, and justice (racial and spatial) in the US South. Featured herein is an illustrative case of how a school named after an African American man is implicated in the construction and preservation of cultural memory through its namesake status and the curriculum. In the literature, commemoration policies are often ignored as little points of support that codify the processes of deliberation and decision-making that guide how school buildings are named. Commemoration policies from two school districts are juxtaposed to show the varying levels of attention each gives to diversity and culture. The notion of curriculum leadership advanced is characterized by socio-political consciousness about how racial justice is linked to spatial justice and how both are mediated by practices, policies, and...

This study intervenes in commonsensical ways of exploring and understanding educational assessment within an audit culture of measurement. Drawing on sociomateriality and methodological approaches associated with material culture and narrative inquiry, we curated an exhibition based on interviews with 13 informants and the things they brought to convey their assessment experiences. Based on analysis of their narratives, we clustered our findings and organised them into a gallery of two thing-centred installations: "Assessment and Tools," and "Assessment and Arts/Crafts." Curating the gallery led us to a creative way of articulating concerns about excessive assessment into a thing-interview protocol to be used in future inquiry, involving interviews with people and things. We showcase these installations, along with interview prompts, as an online exhibition. The aim is to continue the conversation on the future of assessment in connection to purposeful, equity-oriented education.

We explored how academic literature constructs the ‘worker with autism.’ Drawing on a systematic review of transition to work for youth with disabilities, we analyzed how 17 articles constructed ‘autism,’ ‘work,’ and the ‘worker with autism.’ We identified two argumentative approaches: the intervention story and the complex story. Intervention stories centered autism as a problem in need of treatment and work as a simple, positive endeavor. Complex stories offered various and more positive accounts of autism alongside broader notions of work. We recommend that academics experiment with writing which expands work (and career) possibilities for youth situated on the autism spectrum.

This article is based on the authors’ experiences as women academics who engage in informal peer mentoring to persist in the cultural milieus of their respective institutions. The authors draw on poststructural perspectives and the metaphor of the rhizome “running bamboo” to illustrate the connections they forged in a mentoring network that folds across multiethnic, multilingual, and multi-geographic spaces. The analysis of personal narratives surfaced the significance of context for understanding each other’s persistence in the academy. By rhizomatically constructing personal and professional narratives, the authors identified how shared experiences in academia, the contextual variations among them, and a process of becoming peers in a mentoring network supports their negotiation of the academy.

Send this e-mail to Rica and Travis: Rica and Travis, I wish you could have been at the duoethnography panel. The first presentation had some uneasy conversations. The second, Dr. Colomer's presentation, was cool: A performance with guest actors had some sad moments with death, health issues, and attrition. The next presentation was about miscarriage and grief counseling. I wondered if our paper is frivolous in comparison to the others. I think not. Our episodes of cultural starvation and indifference are there and painful, but our comebacks are so quick (nourishment as resistance), and therefore so is the celebration. Written by Agosto while flying home after presenting at the 2014 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

A growing body of researchers documents the unique barriers women face in their academic career progression and the significance of mentoring networks for advancement of their academic trajectories as faculty. However, few researchers explore the embedded tensions and conflicts in the social processes and relations of mentoring networks, and the implications this has for social capital. Using this as our starting point, our narrative reflections suggest that while productive orientations and shared experiences as women faculty of color promote supportive professional roles; the structural, relational, and cultural dynamics subtly frame the basis of our tensions. In moving beyond these, we advance the need for structured and constructive engagement of our differences in building the social capital of peer mentoring networks. While this is not an easy task, we hold that it requires fluid and ongoing negotiations of these relationships if collective goals are to be realized.

This case involves dilemmas for educational leaders who may face the process of school consolidation brought on by decreased funding and demands for accountability. We highlight the challenges and opportunities to collaborate within and across diverse communities and schools with varying expressions of cultural, political, ethical, and organizational power and interests. The teaching notes coincide with aspects of the case that involve principal responsibilities, equity concerns, and negotiations amid the demands of multiple constituencies. Theoretical frameworks highlighting asset-based approaches, leadership for social justice, and micropolitics are emphasized.

The authors describe a process of self-assessment attuned to equity and justice in the policies and practices that affect student diversity, namely, those associated with the selection of candidates. The disproportionate rate of rejection for applicants from underrepresented groups and the unsystematic process of applicant selection operated as hidden curriculum affecting the opportunities for the program to enhance meaningful relationships among diverse groups of students. The authors describe institutional and sociopolitical conditions, and individual actions reflecting a faculty’s will to policy. Faculty efforts supported and challenged systemic change to increase racial and ethnic diversity among aspiring educational administrators.

We conducted a content analysis of 34 statements of interest submitted by applicants applying for admission to an education leadership preparation program. The purpose of the analysis was to understand their orientations toward social justice. Using Kumashiro's (2000) and Apple's (2001) discussions of antioppressive education, we identified three practices in the candidates’ treatment of the writing prompt concerning leadership related to Othering: ignoring, marginalizing, and mentioning. The fourth practice—embodying, or evidencing through practice, a social justice orientation—we identified in statements submitted by a few applicants ( n = 7). This article centers on the analysis of the applications of these seven candidates through the metaphor needle in a haystack. Through conducting a secondary-level analysis to extrapolate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of critical literacy and elicit our collective perceptions of what constitutes social justice leadership, we found the social justice orientations—“or needles”—for which we searched. This self-reflexive approach to research reflects the model of program evaluation that we are developing called self-assessment for equity. We provide recommendations for faculty interested in improving their program's capacity to identify, prepare, and sustain social justice leadership.

In this article, the authors draw on life‐history methods to investigate the family, school, university, and teacher education experiences of three Latino teacher candidates in a large, midwestern, research‐oriented university in the United States. They show how in university social experiences and in teacher education classes and field experiences, these young men often felt misinterpreted in interactions with white females in particular. Also evident is their strong desire to make personal connections with youth and families they teach. The authors offer suggestions for how teacher educators can be more responsive to prospective male elementary teachers and teacher candidates of color.

Background/Context In this article, we explore the life histories of two Latino/a prospective elementary teachers in a large Midwestern university; examine their knowledge, strengths, and needs as teachers; and consider how teacher educators might capitalize on these. We explore how these prospective teachers’ prior family, home, K–12 schooling, and university experiences have forged their identities and affected how they think about campus peers and classroom colleagues, and their obligations to their students. Research Questions In analyzing these life histories, we ask: What knowledge, strengths, and needs do Latino/a teacher candidates bring to campus when enrolling in teacher education, and how do prospective teachers negotiate these? What implications do Latino/a teacher candidates’ experiences have for teacher educators? Conclusions and Recommendations Our findings suggest that teacher educators turn their attention to five dimensions of teacher education: whom we hire as teacher educators, how we model classroom pedagogy for students, how we help all prospective teachers excavate their identities, how prospective teachers’ language skills and cultural backgrounds are taken into account on campus and in school experiences, and how we deploy experiences with various cultural communities for prospective teachers. Whom we hire as teacher educators is significant because the course content, assignments presented to students, and ways that they take into account the concerns of all students are related to the identity and experiences of the teacher educator. Modeling classroom practices that honor prospective teachers’ prior knowledge, experiences, and questions is significant because how they are taught paves the way for what possibilities they see for including all students in their future classrooms. Our analyses also suggest that all teacher candidates require careful reflection on their identities and standpoints, and what these mean for their interactions with and understandings of the viewpoints of peers, colleagues, families, and students. We also encourage teacher education programs to take into account prospective teachers’ language and cultural knowledge when placing students in classrooms and devising assignments for their teaching. Further, we encourage community experiences for all teachers that include interactions with families of different heritage and social class backgrounds so that they might develop more and deeper understandings of various families and communities.

As a diverse group of educationalists, we worry about the role of assessment in K-12 schools and current neoliberal education policies. In this paper, we aim to highlight some of the unintended or often overlooked consequences of these policies by taking an arts-based approach to our research. We interviewed various educational stakeholders about their past and present experiences with assessment, as well as their imagined futures. By creating poetic representations to present the results, we aim to shed a new light on the otherwise familiar contexts of assessment in the schools. Many are afraid of a future where neoliberal policies continue to determine the nature and role of assessment in schools, but want to believe that things will get better. Keywords: Assessment, Narrative, Qualitative Research.We are a group of educationalists in Florida who worry about the current role and politics of assessment in the schools. Some of us worry that a focus on assessment narrows the curriculum, producing students who are technically good at schooling, but less adept at thinking outside received wisdom. Others of us worry about the governmentality of assessments and the kinds of student-subjects assessment delineates - the gifted, disabled, and mediocre students. We struggle with the implications of government-mandated testing on the practice of teaching, concerned that the artistic elements of teachers' craft, the aspects of teaching that keep students connected and engaged in classrooms, are being cast aside in favor of mechanistic delivery. Those of us in measurement and research are concerned about our complicity in the production of technically savvy assessment specialists whose statistical skill is used to develop increasingly sophisticated value-added models to evaluate teacher quality. At the same time we recognize that assessment motivates, provides valuable academic information, and aligns with pragmatic material economic and social realities in western society.The purpose of our research was to gather educational stakeholders' stories of assessment, including their worries and hopes for the future of assessment in K-12 education. We analyzed these stories for their commonalities and divergences through an arts-based approach to inform an ongoing dialogue about the role and purpose of assessment in schools. Our research is guided by the following questions:1. What are educational stakeholders' understandings of assessment in schools?2. What are educational stakeholders' experiences with assessment in schools?3. What do educational stakeholders' accounts of assessment in schools suggest about the future of assessment?Literature ReviewAssessment can have as many definitions as people that you ask "what is assessment?" For the purposes of our study, we followed Stobart's (2008) multi-faceted definition of assessment in that it is a "value-laden social activity" that "does not objectively measure what is already there, but rather creates and shapes what is measured" (p. 1). This definition of assessment also states that it has the power to undermine or encourage learning, leading to either constructive or destructive consequence. Although our study simply asked participants about the generic term "assessments," most discourse focused on high-stakes assessments. Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, and Ness (2008) make the distinction between "normal" and "high-stakes" assessments on their utility. They state that assessments qualify as high-stakes when "student performance is used to deny promotion to the next grade, withhold a high school diploma, label schools failures, determine if teachers and administrators keep their jobs, or decide if schools get more funding" (p. 2).High-stakes testing originated in the late 1980s, born out of a neoliberal movement to address the perceived challenge to American corporations by foreign markets (Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, & Ness, 2008). In order to keep up internationally, schools had to "return to the basics, meet higher standards, and be held accountable" (p. …

This chapter illustrates how indigenous concepts, philosophies, and traditions were introduced into a doctoral course on Curriculum Theory and undertaken by students to inform their development of cultural and curriculum leadership. A central activity in the course was clay-molding. Qualitative data in the form of personal reflections and student work samples (pottery, book review, essay) are accompanied by academic literature to provide insight into the question of how indigenous concepts support sensemaking in the development of curriculum leadership that is culturally emancipatory. Personal reflections on the course from the professor and the students are extended by a critical friend who contributes through the concept of culturally competent leadership.

In this chapter we present a model of self-assessment for equity (SAFE) to guide faculty in leadership preparation programs concerned with equity and justice. The conceptual framework for this model derives from a review of the literature on social justice in educational leadership preparation and addresses the gap in the literature on the evaluation of educational leadership programs. We discuss how we conceptualize and implement SAFE in the context of the mission statement guiding the educational leadership program in which we work.

In education the concept culture is oft en invoked in reference to the cultural and linguistic diversity among K-12 students rather than teachers and administrators. Th is cultural divide is recognized as both a demographic and democratic discrepancy as educators and administrators comprise a more monolingual and monocultural population nationally (Achinstein, Ogawa, Sexton, & Freitas, 2010). Furthermore, the lack of cultural preparedness among educators and administrators to engage crossculturally in the promotion of equitably excellent education for those representing a broad range of global diversity is oft en associated with the consistent failures of schools to educate well more than a narrow range of students (Nevarez & Wood, 2007; Smith, 2005). More specifi cally, students experience biased curriculum and pedagogy and suff er from discriminatory practices related to their diverse cultural values (Rusch, 2004). Schools, accordingly, operate as sites of cultural confl ict when the cultural wealth of students from racial and ethnic groups and enclaves is marginalized or perceived or treated as culturally defi cient (Delpit, 1995).

Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge (Bates, 2005). As a social product, curriculum and its construction and dissemination (i.e., textbook selection) are strongly influenced by systems of social and cultural control. It is a key vehicle for forming individual attitudes about other groups, and helps shape a student’s fundamental attitudes toward society (Greaney, 2006). As major staples in the curriculum of K-12 schools since the 1900s, textbooks contribute to the production of knowledge. In the U.S., the time students spend using textbooks is estimated at 75 to 90 percent (Ajayi, 2005; Watts-Taffe, 2005; Wiley & Barr, 2007). U.S. secondary school teachers, according to Apple (1991), have been found to devote three-quarters of their classroom time to textbooks, which also make up approximately 90 percent of homework time (Greaney, 2006). As noted in the report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983), individual teachers have little influence in critical professional decisions such as textbook selection. However, teachers can exercise some authority over the curriculum and autonomy by using textbooks and other instructional materials selectively (Doyle, 1992).

Este manual se inicio para fermentar el cambio en la educacion sobre la base de pruebas solidas. La publicacion de la primera edicion fue un acontecimiento destacado en 1990. Si bien la preparacion de los educadores era entonces, y sigue siendo, un tema de discusion sustancial, no existia una codificacion de lo mejor que se conocia en ese momento sobre la formacion de maestros. .Reflejando las necesidades de los educadores de hoy, la Tercera Edicion adopta un nuevo enfoque para lograr el mismo proposito. Mas alla de simplemente conceptualizar el amplio panorama de la formacion del profesorado y proporcionar revisiones integrales de las ultimas investigaciones para los principales dominios de la practica, esta edicion: Estimula una amplia conversacion sobre temas fundamentales - Aporta multiples perspectivas para asumir - Proporciona nueva especificidad a temas que no han sido diferenciados en el pasado - Incluye diversas voces en la conversacion.

The Multicultural Learning Community (MLC) Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison operates under the direction of the authors as faculty director and teaching assistant. The seminar offers the students and faculty the opportunity to act on Freire’s and Leistyna’s conceptions of praxis. A culturally relevant approach to assessment is employed to discuss the progress of the students and the seminar as a site of praxis. Praxis is the relationship between theoretical understanding and critique of society (that is, its historical, ideological, sociopolitical, and economic influences and structures) and action that seeks to transform individuals and their environment (Leistyna, 1999, p. 224). Praxis: Reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it (Freire, 1970, p. 36).