Claiming to rely on "science," many well-intentioned "experts" offer advice on how to "close the gap"--word gap, language gap, achievement gap--between disadvantaged and advantaged children. Based on both research and personal experience, this advice promises magic solutions to apparently complex and intractable…

Drawing from Michel Foucault's notion of "useful" and "dangerous" discourse coupled with the theory of racial knowledge, this article examines how two common counter-discourses about African-American students operate and create racial knowledge in education practice. By "counter-discourse", the authors refer to knowledge, theories, and histories…

Family literacy programs promote certain ideas about literacy and parenting. This study examined how Mexican immigrant women in a family literacy program used mainstream ideas, or discourses, of mothering and parent involvement in education to pursue their own personal and academic goals. The findings revealed that women were at times faced with…

This article reports on a pilot study that investigated the beliefs, values, and pedagogies of experienced high school teachers who worked with student populations of non-English speaking and economically disadvantaged immigrants or refugees in Australia. Qualitative research methods, including focus groups and in-depth individual interviews with…