Jean Kirshner holds a Ph.D. in Education and Human Resource Development from Colorado State University and specializes in literacy and teacher education. Jean started her career as the Early Childhood Director at Saint Ignatius Grammar School, Chicago in 1988. After two years she joined the Child Opportunity Program in Denver as a Head Start…

Our contribution depicts the emerging of a 'Deficit Perspectives' scale (Döll et al., 2021) by surveying prospective primary level teachers' deficit perspectives regarding migration-related multilingual pupils, based on the theoretical framework of Migration Pedagogy (Mecheril, 2015). We therefore collected and analysed qualitative and…

This report highlights the enduring importance of our Young Readers Programme by providing children with impactful positive reading experiences as well as opportunities to choose and, crucially, keep books. This is particularly important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, with over 1 in 4 children who receive free school meals telling us…

This study examines the feasibility of adding a proximal outcome survey to a book distribution program. We also examine access to books at home for Grade 3 to 5 students experiencing poverty and relations with reading motivation and reading amount. Finally, we describe students' book preferences by analyzing the difficulty and genres of texts they…

Family literacy programmes operate on the periphery of American education and often employ a deficit orientation toward minoritized families; still, parents view these programmes as language-learning resources. This ethnographic study explores the experiences of Latina mothers enrolled in a school-based family literacy programme in Nebraska to…

In this paper, I look at multiple layers of context to explore the "figured world" of mathematics teaching in primary schools in Chile. I collected data from 15 teachers during 18 months after their participation in professional development for collaborative problem-solving mathematics. I found constraints to impact on the teachers'…

Students who grow up in disadvantaged areas face more challenges and are less likely to complete their education than peers from non-disadvantaged areas. In response to this inequality, the Irish Department of Education and Skills implemented an intervention called Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) to address it. Before the…

The Self-Improvement School Project was funded by The Equitable Education Fund (EEF), Thailand. The purpose program was to improve the quality of 636 schools. Choafa Ubonratana School is one of the project schools for this case study. The research used mixed method research. Key informants were 30 school stakeholders and 3 school coaches. Data…

This paper explores Megan's -- a preservice teacher's -- learning around teaching literacy while enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program and student teaching in poverty-impacted schools. Megan had fewer opportunities to teach literacy in university-promoted ways when student teaching with an attentive cooperating teacher…

Research has shown educators' implicit biases to be a key factor in creating and perpetuating disparities in students' experiences of schooling, learning, and longer-term outcomes, including job opportunities, wealth, and health. Current school reform and transformation efforts are aimed at addressing institutionalized racism in school policies,…

This paper presents an overview of some of Michael Cole's work, starting with his pioneering research in Liberia with the Kpelle (and later, with Sylvia Scribner, studies of literacy with the Vai, 1981), which was formative of his version of a cultural-historical psychology, his translation and interpretations of the work of L. S. Vygotsky and…

The Wallace Foundation's Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative (PSELI) is a six-year initiative that The Wallace Foundation launched in 2017 to explore whether and how children benefit when schools and their out-of-school-time programs partner to improve social and emotional learning (SEL), as well as what it takes to do this…

The papers making up this Special Section reveal important findings and begin to fill gaps in existing literature about children's and young people's understanding and developing beliefs about socio-economic inequality and poverty. We draw on our research experience with children growing up in poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam (Young…

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected K-12 education worldwide, Peru has faced particularly unique challenges. A combination of quarantine requirements and unequal access to remote learning technology led to the creation of a series of multimodal programs by Peru's Ministry of Education under the umbrella title Aprendo en Casa [I…

Flexibility, creativity, and collaboration are required to successfully meet the needs of each school when scaling up family engagement programs across a diverse range of communities. Flexibility, creativity, and collaboration are required to successfully meet the needs of each school when scaling up family engagement programs across a diverse…