Background: Recent research has demonstrated that social justice teacher activist networks provide vital support to teachers of Color, reducing feelings of isolation and providing high-quality professional learning opportunities. Yet, there is a need for broader scaled research that looks across multiple activist organizations to add to our…

Background/Context: The United States invests in STEM education, but this investment is racialized and political. The country wants to maintain global economic domination, but there are also calls to diversify the STEM workforce (Baber, 2015; Basile & Lopez, 2015; Vakil & Ayers, 2019). This context leaves Black and Brown people to navigate…

Background/context: One of the most prominent educational social movements in the United States during the past two decades has been the opt-out movement, in which parents and caregivers refuse to have their school-aged children sit for federally mandated tests. Although early responses by government officials framed the movement in terms of race,…

Background/Context: Digital life raises dilemmas that elude straightforward courses of action. These dilemmas are consequential to civic life, where participatory practices intersect with digital affordances to lend new power, stakes, and public consequences (Kahne et al., 2015). It is essential that students be able to recognize digital dilemmas…

Background/Context: Opting out of high-stakes standardized tests, a phenomenon so widespread in the United States as to be regarded as a movement, is nevertheless a misunderstood and often maligned force in educational politics. Purpose: This article offers a counter-narrative of opt-out activism--a more thorough and vivid account of what we view…

Background: While journalists claim social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been central to the growth of the opt-out movement, there is a lack of empirical research that examines its use by participants. We address this gap by highlighting findings related to the usage of social media by opt-out participants in Ohio. Purpose: This…

Background and Purpose: Anger is implicated in nearly every social pathology, from war to bullying to child abuse. Yet, it is also the spark of reform for nearly every positive social movement, from civil rights to labor rights to handicapped rights. This article examines how anger has been understood and misunderstood across different discursive…

Context: Rooted in the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this article explores how a team of youth community activists extended their coalition virtually to produce a bill of demands for structural social change in their city and its surrounding county. Focus of Study: Our inquiry focuses on how the youth's dialectic goal…

Context: School-based student protests have received little scholarly attention, yet they have the potential to impact the school community, students' civic development, and larger social movements. Principals are key actors in responding to school-based student protests. As school leaders, principals' actions affect the outcome of student…

Context: College campuses in the United States are currently engaged in public and ongoing negotiation of the value and limits of free speech in educational contexts. Responses to invited campus speakers from students, faculty, and campus leaders point to diverging perspectives on the roles and responsibilities of higher education institutions and…

Background/context: In recent years, opposition to accountability policies and associated testing has manifested in widespread boycotts of annual tests--mobilized as the "opt-out movement." A central challenge facing any movement is the need to recruit and mobilize participants. Key to this process is framing--a discursive tactic in…

Background/Context: Leah Boveda, a sophomore at Brown University, collaborated with her mother--Mildred Boveda, an intersectional studies scholar situated in special education and teacher education--to make sense of her high school community activism in Arizona. They retrace how Leah's experiences eventually shaped her understandings of and…

Purpose: Over the last five years, approximately 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island and 20% across New York State have opted out of the yearly standardized tests for third through eighth grade. This article focuses on two grassroots organizations, New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) and Long Island…

Background/Context: In this article, we draw on Villegas's explanations of beliefs as precursors to social justice dispositions and Mills et al.'s Australian research about social justice dispositions as either affirmative or transformative. These conceptual positions assist us in understanding the beliefs that are derived from applicants'…

Background: Beginning in the 2013-2014 school year, students across colleges and universities in the United States created a series of campaigns similar to the original I, Too, Am Harvard photo campaign (which focused on highlighting the negative campus climate for black students at Harvard University). Purpose: This study illuminates some of the…