Background or Context: A third space is characterized by the ongoing poststructural negotiation of being and the ongoing quest for liberation and revolutionary cultural change. Third spaces are possible when two people expressing difference from one another come together in a discursive, in-between space that rejects binarisms and essentialisms.…

This paper revisits and reassesses the intellectual and practical contribution of Caroline Benn (née DeCamp, 1926-2000) to politics, policymaking and practice at a crucial turning point in English education, which I call the 'long comprehensive moment' between 1950 and 1990. It articulates a strong sense that her involvement in significant public…

Educational assessments, from kindergarden to 12th grade (K-12) to licensure, have a long, well-documented history of oppression and marginalization. In this paper, we (the authors) ask the field of educational assessment/measurement to actively disrupt the White supremacist and racist logics that fuel this marginalization and re-orient itself…

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public…

In this article, we propose a justice-oriented, antiracist validity framework designed to disrupt assessment practices that continue to (re)produce racism through the uncritical promotion of white supremist hegemonic practices. Using anti-Blackness as illustration, we highlight the ways in which racism is introduced, or ignored, in current…

Feelings of empowerment among students are crucial prerequisites to their participation in change agency in both educational and non-educational settings. Educators notice a compelling correlation between student empowerment and academic achievement and other positive outcomes in K-12 educational environments. School counselors are optimally…

To emphasize to learners how factors outside individual control impact health, scholars introduced the concept of structural competency. Structural competency refers to the development of analytical skills that reveal the larger societal context beyond the patient-clinician interaction that shapes health outcomes. The growing adoption of…

Education systems are full of harmful violence of types often unrecognised or misunderstood by educators, education leaders, and bureaucrats. Educational violence harms a great number of innocent persons (those who, morally speaking, may not be justifiably harmed). Accordingly, this paper rejects educational violence used to achieve educational…

The war in Ukraine has opened a Pandora's Box of internationalization concerns that, heretofore, took a backseat to concerns with the effectiveness and sustainability of the field. In analyzing the impact of the war on international higher education, scholars offered various assessments of the conflict's effects, especially in the combatant…

School communities have been shut out of many of the more critical decision-making processes impacting local public schools. Decisions are mostly made as top-down actions from federal mandates, general assemblies, state departments, districts, and school level administration teams, isolating the school communities they are tasked to serve. To…

In this conceptual article, the authors advance the idea of critical whiteness pedagogies by arguing that an improvisational ethos offers an alternative to whiteness and might inspire more nuanced anti-racist pedagogies with white people. This framework is born out of years of collaboration between the authors that resulted in an approach to…

In the liberatory spirit of Black scholars and honoring the pioneering work of motivation theorists dedicated to a democratic vision of education, this article calls for a new paradigm of standards-based reform. Specifically, we maintain that current standards largely reflect the interests of White, male elites and elevates the economic agenda…

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists' demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of…

Educational reforms fail again and again. One reason for the failure is that educational reform stops just outside the classroom door. During the last 25 years, the dominant educational reform initiatives in the US have operated under the misguided conventional wisdom that the educational system is loosely coupled. With this model in mind, decades…

This article is based on the author's autoethnographical research on leading practices of Steiner school principals over a period of major change and crisis in a Steiner school's life. This research included the use of the theory of practice architectures to uncover unsustainable contradictions in Steiner schools which constrain the full promise…