At the request of a fifth-grade teacher and former student teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley spends two mornings in her classroom to help address a problem, a seemingly garden-variety scene where a boy is excluded from a playground ball game. As discussion unfolds, deeper issues of friendship and unfairness for the individuals (the one who did the…

The power of democracy is its adaptability to a changing world. We can envision and work toward a society that is more just than the present. History education is more relevant now than ever. We offer ideas and strategies that can transform the history classroom into a space for understanding the past with the explicit purpose of learning from the…

This study sought to revisit established definitions of critical visual literacy and determine how this concept could be re-envisioned specifically for picture books when informed by the approaches of teacher education students who had received limited prior formal instruction on critiquing visual texts. Seventeen sophomore elementary education…

This qualitative study examines how elementary students of Color develop and enact an abolitionist praxis as part of a "Freedom Dreaming" literacy unit. The analysis of focus-group interviews elucidates how, after learning about freedom dreaming and the abolition of prisons and police, students positioned historical anti-carceral…

School bullying is a pervasive global issue with profound implications for students' well-being and academic performance. While extensive research has examined the role of bystanders--individuals who witness bullying--in mitigating such behavior, the specific influence of classroom climate on the emergence of positive bystander behavior,…

The notion of inert benevolence has been written about in the context of primary school teachers working with "languages beyond English" (Cunningham and Little, 2022). However, the concept has a broader relevance for those working in education and this paper seeks to explore it more fully, through the use of the metaphor of a…

Since 2016, children's biography has undergone an extraordinary revival. Yet, despite biography's surge in popularity, little is known about children's engagement with the genre. Drawing on data from online interviews and reading sessions gathered in 2020, this article provides insight into how a group of children (N = 8, age 7-10) in the United…

This article describes a program which centered multilingualism and racial justice in higher education in an elementary teacher education program in the United States. By using the theory of ideological clarity, we sought to understand learning outcomes for teacher candidates (TCs) and their contexts, and make salient the racial and linguistic…

This interview-based study examines how justice-oriented K-12 administrators and teachers in Iowa make sense of the recent state-level education policy, H.F. 802. Synthesizing literature on Critical Policy Analysis and epistemic justice, we introduce Critical Epistemic Policy Analysis to understand the micro-level impact of divisive education…

This article explores the use of Project-Based Learning (PBL) to empower second-grade students to respond to the essential question: "How Can People Respond to Injustice?" Set in an independent school classroom, the investigation invites students to critically engage with historical and modern examples of injustice, using literacy as a…

Considering the increasing severity of environmental disasters and the scarcity of studies centered on children's perspectives, this article explores context-based learning to create spaces of hope. Constructing explanations fosters meaning creation and knowledge integration. Fourth graders' self-explanations about contamination in a degraded…

In this study we critically investigated English as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the Chivi district (Zimbabwe) and the implications of its use as the LoLT for social justice education. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus-group interviews, observation and document analysis. The results show that social…

Employing the three "trans" concepts -- translanguaging, transnationalism, and transculturalism -- as a theoretical framework, this qualitative study examines teachers' lesson plans, classroom fieldnotes, and journal writings that critically reflect on their teaching practices to explore how they provide transformative learning spaces in…

All schools possess a duty of care towards their students. However, this duty of care falls unevenly across schools, with those serving low-income communities often responding to the material and psychological effects of poverty as a priority. This duty of care for such schools was placed into stark relief during the period of COVID-19 school…

Race, poverty, and gender interplay with school discipline, to make schools ancillary to the juvenile justice system (Morris and Perry 2017). Exclusionary discipline contributes to the school-to-prison nexus, a metaphor that illuminates the complex, interconnected relationship between schools and prisons (Okilwa, Khalifa, and Briscoe 2017).…