The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as…

Background/Context: School closure is becoming an increasingly common policy response to underperforming urban schools. Districts typically justify closure decisions by pointing to schools' low performance on measures required by No Child Left Behind. Closures disproportionately fall on schools with high percentages of poor and working-class…

This article explores youth participatory action research as a promising instructional practice with the potential to reverse the depoliticizing and "softening" of multicultural education. It demonstrates how, with its explicit commitment to action, youth participatory action research can help to improve the educational experiences and…